Detecting the Asian cop: policing and the incorporation of Asian Americans into American empire

ABSTRACT

In 2016, the trial of Peter Liang for murdering Akai Gurley galvanized a charged debate among Asian Americans; some defended Liang as a victim of racial profiling, while others in solidarity against anti-Black violence argued for his conviction as a police officer. Many have viewed this trial as an example of increasing conservatism among Asian Americans, yet what does the specific figure of the Asian cop reveal about Asian American support for policing? Working through a theoretical reinterpretation of Liang’s trial, I argue that policing acts as the material process for the incorporation of Asian Americans as subjects of American empire as long as they are willing to police in its interests. Through a transpacific lens that connects domestic anti-Black policing to the policing of militarized spaces in Asia, I show how the unique and uneven incorporation of Asian peoples through American policing produces the contemporary terrain of political struggle over such topics as hate crime legislation and abolition. By recognizing how transnational policing incorporates Asians as American subjects, this structural analysis complements attitudinal studies of Asian American politics to show how Asian American activists either reject or reproduce their alliance with the American state’s police power.

KEYWORDS:

• Policing
• abolition
• anti-blackness
• militarization
• transpacific

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I say subjects instead of citizens because my argument describes the transnational reach of American empire to include the technically foreign Asian cop who polices for the benefit of empire.

2 Incorporation can also be seen in relation to a prior moment in American history, before World War II, where structural exclusion defined Asian American politics. If under the condition of exclusion, even native-born Asian Americans were defined by their foreignness, under incorporation the American state still defines the ambiguous terms in which Asian American may belong to America as long as they don’t challenge white supremacist order.

3 Classic accounts of the “internal colony” thesis also include Allen (1970) and Blauner (1969).

4 For another expansion of the soldiering concept to include solidarities with indigenous soldiers, see Espiritu-Gandhi (2019).

5 Jaime Alves Amparo study of policing in Sao Paulo develops this concept of how policing the “Black city” becomes necessary to create the “white city” of the polis where proper, orderly politics happens. See Alves (2018).

6 This trope of the dark stairwell is repeated across both sympathetic and critical accounts of the shooting. For example, the documentary Down a Dark Stairwell opens with an overview shot of the Pink Houses at night that emphasizes both their literal darkness and the danger supposedly inherent to the darkness. See Liang (2020).