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The Dangerous Class: The Concept of the Lumpenproletariat

bles such behavior and stifles reform. That harsh reality leads to Baker’s Chapter Six, on how harmful police killings are to families and communities and the trauma of losing someone to police violence. That trauma, as Baker notes, ‘‘corrodes the basis of society, government, and democracy itself’’ (p. 96), and this leads Baker to smartly articulate that the violence of a police death extends uniquely into the future. It is, in the parlance of peace studies that Baker introduces here, an ‘‘alienating violence’’ (p. 108). This is a powerful means of understanding police killings and one that echoes findings from scholars outside of criminology in the United States, whose insights might help Baker incorporate that point earlier and more forcefully into the book. The ‘‘alienating violence’’ of policing is not only true of deaths, but each chapter in the book shows how alienating American policing is for so many residents. On the other hand, because each chapter is so self-contained and introduces subfields of research on police encounters well, individual chapters on their own could be quite fruitful in undergraduate classes on police, racism, or violence. Baker smartly interviews family of people killed by police whose names are not already well known. Some of the most powerful scholarship in the book comes from the interviews with family members who felt stigmatized: if police killed someone, that person must have done something wrong. What is it like to have the apparatus of the state strategically invested in making sure your loved one is seen not as a victim but rather as worthy of death without a trial? Even if police were justified in a particular killing, how does a society ensure that the victim’s surviving family be able to grieve a loss like any other family? Is healing possible when the state was the cause of the death and vocally denies criminal responsibility even while quietly accepting civil penalty? Unfortunately, while the stories from the families powerfully frame each chapter, their voices and experiences can get subsumed by the detailed discussion of scholarly literature on police killings. In the conclusion, Baker recounts being on a panel where other participants espoused the need for change to ‘‘ensure justice liberty and equality for all’’ (p. 112). Baker replies that the panelists did not provide a meaningful praxis for such change and thus police killings would not stop. Indeed, that panel was in 2016, so it is clear Baker was and remains right. In being right about that structural reality of policing and in hearing the stories of dozens of people whose lives were shattered by policing, Baker engages with abolitionist demands for less (or no) police admirably in the conclusion; but the book’s critique of incremental change is often left implied rather than stated, often a missed opportunity to explicitly challenge presumptions about what role the police actually play in the broader structure of society. This may be because, as Baker writes, he kept the audience’s reaction to his comments—awkward silence—in mind. I would argue the awkward silence of the audience is in fact a reason to make the claim that police killings are the normal outcome of the structure as designed even louder. Abolitionist frameworks get the last words of the conclusion, but I want to know what the version of this book that does not center naı̈veté might argue.