The essay was completed in early April 2020 and published during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada. Sheptycki’s paper argues the politics of policing the pandemic panic reveal tectonic shifts in the world system. He explains how the COVID-19 virus “precipitated the first global police event presenting an occasion for researchers and scholars to apply existing theory and empirical understanding to extra-ordinary circumstances.” The essay also shares how the “transnational and comparative study of police and policing reveals the contours of the emerging system of world power all the more clearly in a moment of crisis.”