For Immediate Release: March 26, 2007

Contact: Maggie Coulter, Sacramento Area Peace Action, 916-448-7157


"The Policing of Dissent" Talk Set for March 29

Luis Fernandez will speak on his book, "The Policing of Dissent: How the police monitor and control peace and justice organizing," on Saturday, March 29, 2008, at 7 p.m., at 909 12th Street in Sacramento. Fernandez is currently on a northern California speaking tour.

Professor Fernandez received his Ph.D. from the School of Justice Studies and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University. His research and teaching interests include protest policing, social movements, globalization, and social control. He has recently been researching the securitization of the Mexican-Guatemalan border as it links to US immigration policy.

In November 1999, fifty thousand anti-globalization activists converged on Seattle to shut down the World Trade Organization's Ministerial Meeting. Using innovative and network-based strategies, the protesters left police flummoxed, desperately searching for ways to control the crowds in Seattle and the emerging anti-corporate globalization movement. Faced with these network-based tactics, law enforcement agencies transformed their policing and social control mechanisms to manage this new threat.

In Policing Dissent, sociologist Luis A. Fernandez provides a firsthand account of the changing nature of control efforts employed by local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies when confronted with mass activism. Based on ethnographic research, and using an incisive, cutting-edge theoretical framework, Fernandez maps the use of legal, physical, and psychological approaches.

"Luis Fernandez has eloquently and forcefully addressed one of the central problems of our time: the repression and intimidation of grassroots democracy in America," according to Christian Parenti, author of Lockdown America and the Soft Cage. "In these pages Fernandez exposes the cancer of runaway state bullying and political intolerance that are an ever larger part of American policing. This book is frightening, urgent - crucial reading."

The event is sponsored by Sacramento Area Peace Action, Sacramento for Democracy, Sacramento County Green Party, Sacramento County Peace & Freedom Party; American Civil Liberties Union, Sacramento, CodePink Sacramento and the Central America Action Committee. For more information, call 916-448-7157 or email sacpeace [at] dcn.org.