Note from the Editors

The Politics of Policing P olicing is a crucial topic for political science not only due to its intrinsic importance but also as a window into larger questions related to authority, law, statesociety relations, inequality, violence, organizational culture, bureaucratic politics, and race and racism, among others.This special section probes the politics of policing with approaches as diverse as political theory, geospatial analysis, large-n events data, survey experiments, and single and comparative case studies.As a collection, these articles shed light on policing as a dependent variable and an independent variable, examine its relationships to social movements and racial segregation, and explore the circumstances that lead law enforcement agents to harm the very communities that they are charged with protecting.The first two articles treat policing behavior as an outcome to be explained."A Democracy of Authorities: Broken Windows Policing and the Neoconservative Political Theory of Law and Order" argues that standard neoliberal interpretations of policing fail to account for support for tough-on-crime agendas from marginalized communities.Probing this puzzle, Milo Ward shifts from an explanation centered on neoliberalism to one focused on neoconservatism and theorizes the right-wing political sensibilities underlining broken windows policing.Ward traces these ideas to James Q. Wilson's theories developed after the urban crisis of the 1960s and 1970s, as scrutinized in Wilson's papers at the RAND Corporation Archives.He argues that Wilson viewed urban problems as a crisis of moral and political authority rather than material deprivation and thus envisioned punitive policing less as a strategy for reducing crime than a way of restoring authorities in communities.Specifically, broken windows policing was seen as a way to cultivate relationships between formal authorities, such as the police, and informal leaders, such as parents, teachers, and business owners, and thereby ease urban communities' anxieties and empower them from within.Challenging the view that overpoliced communities are inherently opposed to the police as instruments of state repression, this work contributes to a growing literature on the multiracial and cross-class coalitions that support punitive politics and encourages continued nuanced work in this realm.