The Center on Transnational Policing (CTP) brings together scholars at different levels (undergraduate, graduate, and members of the professoriate) to understand policing in the U.S. and internationally. Through a complex social scientific research network, the Center’s mission is to explore policing from a transnational approach.
Current Initiatives
This project renders ethnographic interviews into an animated series. The film series centers on focus groups and interviews conducted with teenagers in Chicago, and illustrates the power of research in the humanities by portraying a candid reflection of these teenagers’ thoughts, ideas and vulnerabilities. It will also offer a tool to visualize some of the latest data and scholarship on police violence. The film serves as a pedagogical material in Princeton courses and new initiatives within several Public-School systems across the United States, aimed at teaching the history of police violence to middle and high school students. Production of The Torture Letters was supported by the Magic Innovation Grant from the Princeton University’s Humanities Council, and the film was released as part of the New York Times Op-Docs series in June 2020. The Torture Letters received the Best In Show award at the Spark Animation Festival and WIA Diversity Award Individual Achievement. It has also been official selections for numerous film festivals including AFI Fest, St. Louis International Film Festival, Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, Foyle Film Festival, Africa Rising International Film Festival, and Atlanta Film Festival.
See the film here
See trailer here
This project seeks to explore how different stakeholders grapple with national debates about community policing and enforcement by examining the problems articulated and the solutions proposed in New Orleans, Louisiana. Current climate of heightened awareness around policing demands a comprehensive study of policing, rooted in rigorous, historical, ethnographic analysis. As the city with the highest rate of incarceration in the world, New Orleans is an ideal site to understand policing. The project began in September 2017 with funding from the National Science Foundation. Led by Professors Laurence Ralph and Aisha Beliso-De Jesús, the research team (including doctoral students and postdoctoral fellow) has conducted a mixed-method research including survey, participant observation, focus groups, in-depth interviews, and collaborative data sharing and coding.
"Yasuda Auditorium @ The University of Tokyo" by Hyougushi
The Center for Transnational Policing (CTP) and The Center for Architecture, Urbanism, and Infrastructure (CAUI) at Princeton, in conjunction with The Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies (III) and The Department of Urban Engineering (DUE) at the University of Tokyo, have begun a joint project on law enforcement, public space, and democracy, supported by the University of Tokyo/Princeton University Strategic Partnership funds. This intellectual exchange will analyze policing as a component of democracy in both Japan and the United States in order to contemplate new approaches to public security, safety and crime prevention (or bōhan in Japanese) that minimize the use of force in everyday life. Students and faculty at Princeton and the University of Tokyo will engage in interdisciplinary workshops and conduct research projects in Japan and the US. Photograph credit: "Yasuda Auditorium @ The University of Tokyo" by Hyougushi.
Chicago Police Violence Project
Building on his research on police torture in Chicago (which culminated in his forthcoming book, The Torture Letters), Laurence Ralph has conducted focus groups and in-depth interviews on the topic of police violence with residents, students, and victims of police torture in Chicago. Materials from the focus groups and interviews will be used in coursework on policing at Princeton University, as well as in educational programs in Chicago public schools. (See Animation Project below.) Findings from this project will also be disseminated through academic papers and a forthcoming monograph. His new book project, “Black Cargo,” explores the ways in which descendants of enslaved people now feel their fate is bound up in a system of domination in which they carry with them the memory of the violence that has been inflicted on their race. Arguing that the conundrum of being unable to bear to think about something which is always present to the mind is precisely the legacy wrought by police violence, Ralph examines how incidents of police violence form the basis of group identification through and by the ways in which Black people in Chicago embody and then carry with them, stories of victimization.
Policing African Diaspora Religions Project
This project, carried out by professor Aisha Beliso-De Jesús, examines how policing of Afro-Latinx and Diaspora religions emerges from both historic and contemporary criminalization and laws. Examining practices such as Santería, Palo Monte, Vodou, Candomblé, and Islam, this project looks at how Black and immigrant religions are treated unfairly out of fear stoked historically in popular media and politics. Practitioners have been harassed, their rituals halted by police, demonized as evil, falsely accused of child endangerment or animal cruelty, and treated unfairly in different institutional settings and jobs. Through interviews with police and practitioners of these religions, participant observation of police trainings, as well as ride-alongs with police officers in the United States, this project explores issues of racism, racialization and religion in the policing of African Diaspora practices. The project will contribute to an understanding of how racialized policing, effects everyday life for these alternative religious subjects who occupy mainly marginalized locations.
News
Laurence Ralph, author of The Torture Letters, debuted his animated film, THE TORTURE LETTERS, as part of the New York Times’ Opinion Documentary Series.
Ralph depicts his own experiences with racial profiling as a teenager and what it means to be…
Princeton Alumni Weekly on The Center on Transnational Policing.
Wenner-Gren Foundation webinar "Anti-Blackness: Readings on Violence, Resistance, and Repair" featuring Laurence Ralph, Christen Smith, Savannah Shange, and Deborah A. Thomas.
A Sapiens podcast interview with Laurence Ralph reveals how legacies of anti-black racism connect to the COVID-19 pandemic.