Jinee Lokaneeta co-edited Policing and Violence in India
August 2025 – Drew University Associate Dean of Curriculum and Professor of Political Science and International Relations Jinee Lokaneeta recently published a co-edited book with Deana Health, Policing and Violence in India (Speaking Tiger).
Since the book was officially launched in April, the book has generated significant attention with the editors participating in interviews with print and online media, podcasts, and YouTube shows.
The book brings together a variety of perspectives on the subject, including leading scholars, lawyers, activists, former police, and detainees. Containing essays and interviews with these cohorts, the book focuses on the police both as individuals and as a hierarchical institution. Each section of the book features a powerful reflective piece pointing to future directions of thinking.
Lokaneeta’s 2020 book, The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India, generated wide interest and pointed to the need for more books that both were for a general audience and brought in different critical perspectives.
The writing and research has ties to Lokaneeta’s courses at Drew. She first introduced a course called Policing and the Rule of Law in 2016, inspired by the rise of Black Lives Matter movements several years earlier.
“The attempt was to understand whether we have the intellectual and analytical resources that could understand the nature of policing, the police as an institution, and the different sites of their interaction with people,” said Lokaneeta. “While initially the focus of the class was theoretical and centered on the U.S. experience, the course gained a lot from all the insightful comparative research on policing in different countries.”
The summer after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Lokaneeta and a small group of students had an informal study group reading articles from her policing course to fully understand the highly public deaths.
“That really prompted me to think of how to create materials that are more accessible, and the need to connect the theoretical debates with activist insights even more intentionally.”
With this co-edited book on the subject, Lokaneeta has contributed to this very need.
