This book documents a horrific system set up to hold horror at bay...monsters to guard against the monstrous, a policing system that stands in the way of thinking and building a new world. It does so through an analysis of policing procedures, technologies, and narrative ("police stories.")

Why does such a horrific system/network remain in place? What does it hide and hold at bay, and what stops any process to imagine a world without police?

"What is hidden from view - or, rather, what provisions have we made to shelter our own minds from that which is too terrifying to confront?" (4)

"The ongoing and perpetual hunt for the monster - in the mind and on the streets - calls forth and reproduces the police power." (49)

"Rather than diagnosing a personal preference or even political ideology, the widespread unwillingness to soberly confront just what the police are and what we ask them to do is rooted in our subjective experiences of living in and actively crafting this world-for-us. Collectively, we have not yet let the police go, because to do so would require that we let this world go. And so, we endorse, adopt, and reproduce an ontology where a never-ending war between good and evil is determined by savior, hero, God." (71)

"Despite what we are taught to believe, we must face the horrifying fact that the police offer no real protection. Even when positioned to do so, police are under no legal obligation to save the proverbial cat from the tree. Quite often, in fact, they just turn and walk away...police have the best of both worlds, able to invoke the gift of fear to excuse both overreaction and inaction. This contradiction, revealing yet again that police are not the faithful protectors they claim to be, lies at the heart of our shuddering ontological schism, the horror of police." (163)