Revanchism as American culture: The rise of a police surveillance state

Abstract

An era of revanchist policing that vastly expanded law enforcement budgets and activities was just beginning when Smith first published on the topic. Today, budgets continue to increase, but policing has met with a crisis of legitimacy that has brought on a lack of staffing to support an expanding revanchist policing apparatus. In this essay, I describe how these conditions have proved to be a friendly environment for the development of a police surveillance technology sector. In this market, police technology serves as an answer to the current staffing shortage, but ultimately intensifies and normalizes revanchist tactics of control on racially and economically marginalized populations in cities. Through this process, instances of revanchism are difficult to pinpoint, as the surveillance state is now bedrock to American life and culture, and is consistently validated as integral to capitalist development in its support of familiar patterns of displacement and accumulation.