A historian whose expertise includes African American history, and who studies the history of the criminal punishment system in the United States, will be the next guest at Conversations on Race and Policing, scheduled for noon Wednesday, April 23.

The presentation by Simon Balto, an associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is free and open to the public and can be accessed on the program’s Zoom page.

Balto is the author of “Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power,” which he described on his faculty webpage as a work that “explores the twentieth-century transformation of the Chicago Police Department into an institution whose most important features were its massive racial disparities in general and its profound anti-Blackness in particular. Largely focused on the late 1910s to the early 1970s, the book challenges conventional wisdom about the policing crisis in the United States, looking back well before the federal drug and crime wars of the late twentieth century that many Americans assume to be the crisis’ starting point. Instead, I explore how local politicians and police officials built a huge, and hugely racially repressive, local police apparatus mostly on their own in the decades before those wars.”

The Conversations on Race and Policing program began after the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, and its aftermath. Floyd, a Black man, was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer, triggering extensive protests, demands for systemic reform in policing, and profound dialogues on race and racism. This also led to the inception of Cal State San Bernardino’s Conversations on Race and Policing, abbreviated as CoRP.

In subsequent court cases, three other former Minneapolis police officers implicated in Floyd’s death were given prison sentences.

The series has featured scholars, journalists, law enforcement officers, lawyers, activists, artists, educators, administrators and others from throughout the nation who shared their experience and expertise on issues related to race and policing.

More than 110 forums have taken place since, and video recordings of the sessions are posted online on the Conversations on Race and Policing Lecture Series Archive. 

At the next program, on April 30, Alison Phipps, Newcastle University, United Kingdom, professor of sociology, will present “Sexual Violence as a Pretext for Disposal: Rape, Race and Carcerality.”

The series organizers currently include CSUSB faculty, staff, alumni, and community members, as well as collaborators from other institutions: Amber Broaden (CSUSB and CSU Dominguez Hills, psychology), Stan Futch (president, Westside Action Group), Michael German (Brennan Center for Justice), Robie Madrigal (Pfau Library), Jeremy Murray (CSUSB History), Matt Patino (Crafton Hills College adjunct faculty and CSUSB alumnus), and Mary Texeira (CSUSB sociology).

For more information, contact Madrigal at rmadriga@csusb.edu or Murray at jmurray@csusb.edu.

Also visit the Conversations on Race and Policing webpage.