Policing protest: the post-democratic state and the figure of black insurrection, by Paul A. Passavant, Duke University Press, 2021, 358 pp., $28.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-4780-1143-9

Passavant’s Policing Protest is a book that eerily puts recent events into a new perspective and adds to our understanding of how the police are engaging with our right to protest. It explores how we arrived at what he names the security model of policing protests, a more aggressive and violent form of protest policing. Throughout the five main chapters, he identifies and discusses three interrelated crises; the crisis of democracy; the urban fiscal crisis, and the crime crisis, and how the reaction to these crises has led to the breakdown of the negotiated management model of policing protest since this the 1990s. Towards the end of the book, Passavant also identifies two other factors that play a role in the shift of approach to protest policing: control technologies, communicative production, and the haunting figure of black insurrection. Each chapter of this book addresses one of these five main points, yet Passavant cleverly uses each new chapter to seamlessly flow onto the next one. This brings together just how interwoven these five points are and how each one plays its part in the arrival of the security model of policing protest that Passavant argues we see today. The story of each point is told using recent examples that offer the reader to see how the theories that they are reading apply to everyday lives.