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Contemporary debates on policing trace the rise of “law and order” populism and police militarization to colonial histories and imperial boomerang effects. In a time marked by the renewed imperative “to decolonize,” however, few studies examine what decolonizing policing did or could look like in practice. This article draws on oral history narratives of Jamaican police officers to recover their ideas about transforming the colonial Jamaica Constabulary Force in the 1970s. Born out of black power mobilizations and under a democratic socialist government (1972–1980), police decolonization was viewed as part of broader transformative effort to rid the country of colonial inheritances in economics, culture, and politics. Jamaican policemen, radicalized since the early twentieth century, then began revising their social mandate and ask who the police should serve and protect. Ultimately, due to internal contradictions and external pressures, the experiment failed, giving rise to police populism and increased violence against black men and women in the ghettos. The episode reveals how populism emerges out of a failure of emancipatory campaigns and how radical critique can turn into ideological justification. It also highlights the need to distinguish between diverse, contradictory, and overlapping demands to decolonize societies and institutions today.
This article explores how the relationship between crime and property values is reshaped by the transformation of houses into investible assets. Departing from neoclassical economics of crime, we introduce the notion of “capitalization of crime” to illustrate how crime is utilized to generate forward-looking financial expectations and shape housing markets in gentrifying neighborhoods. The study, based in Haifa, Israel, combines quantitative and qualitative data to demonstrate how investors and renters each play a role in constructing the value of crime by capitalizing crime in opposite directions. First, using a geographic information system to map crime alongside real-estate prices, we show that the effect of crime on property values is offset by prospects of future gentrification, thereby contributing to housing speculation. Second, using digital ethnography, we show how renters use “crime” to dampen investor expectations, reduce rents, and delay their displacement. Thus, our study adds to the established body of critical criminology, which examines the manipulation of crime for economic and political gains. It further contributes to emergent debates in urban criminology by explicating how the financialization of rental housing is remaking urban politics of crime and criminalization.
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