What does policing have to do with democracy?

That's a great question.

So, um, democracy needs a state, a set of institutions, um, that govern a territory, but it also needs policing to be strong enough, right? So we need policing to make possible the centerpiece of democracy, which is free and fair elections.

So if you think back to Reconstruction, something I'm working on now, biracial coalitions under the Republican Party banner won hundreds of city and county government offices across the South.

But they lacked the resources to stop or, or repress Klan violence that blocked many freedmen's access to the polls.

Um, the federal government was also inconsistent in blocking this kind of violence.

So in that sense, I think we'd say that the, the state or policing was too weak.

I imagine to a lot of folks, this might sound relatively mundane compared with debates about violent crime or police shootings, but help us understand why are those routine encounters that are fairly common useful for thinking about the relationship between citizens and government?