Adjusting La Police: The Use of Distance in the Calibration of Legitimate Violence among the Police Nationale

Karpiak, Kevin G.

doi:10.1057/9781137309679_4

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Much of the literature on the anthropology of public engagement emphasizes the degree to which such meetings can be fora in which political fault lines are articulated (Abram, 2017). This is especially so in the case of matters pertaining to policing (Fassin, 2013;Karpiak, 2013;Mutsaers et al, 2015). Meetings can also offer prescient insight into the unspoken mechanics of political action (Bernstein and Mertz, 2011), ethical thought (Jacob and Riles, 2007;Reed, 2017) and underlying power structures (Heyman, 2004).…”

Section: Methods 1: Archival Work/public Record Content Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A persistent insight of anthropological studies of security agencies is that they cannot be adequately understood in isolation. Rather, their location within a broader political landscape must be understood in order to make sense of the particular forms they take (Karpiak, 2010; Martin, 2019), the antagonisms and affinities they harbor towards other agencies (Jauregui, 2016), the career trajectories of their personnel (Göpfert, 2020), the biases and ethical investments they exhibit (Karpiak, 2013) and the day-to-day practices they enact (Beliso-De Jesús, 2020). One implication of this research is also a lesson about how oversight must be effectively practiced and for how research and evaluation of such bodies must frame its analysis.…”

Section: Lessons Learned From Other Reform Effortsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The plurality of police oversight: a method for building upon lessons learned for understanding an evolving strategy

Karpiak

Mulla

Pérez

2022

PIJPSM

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PurposeThe purpose of this article is to describe an innovative research methods framework designed to address some of the persistent challenges to a social scientific understanding of civilian-led police oversight commissions.Design/methodology/approachThe project design begins by acknowledging that oversight commissions take multiple and varied forms, which are contingent on local histories, institutional dynamics and discursive strategies for indexing racial inequality. The authors find such variation not to be an impediment to insightful research design. Rather, the methodological frame makes use of multi-sited ethnographic methods, organized at the county level across three research clusters (in this example, Milwaukee Co, WI; San Diego Co., CA; and Washtenaw Co, MI), to draw attention to the effects of such multiplicity to complicate, localize and render visible the specific practices of policing and its critique through civilian oversight.FindingsAmongst an increasing national concern with the racialized nature of police violence, one evolving strategy for police reform among municipalities is to establish civilian oversight boards that can monitor, make recommendations for, and potentially direct police policy. However, there is very little research on such commissions, leaving many unanswered questions for proponents of evidence-based criminal justice policy. One reason for this lack is that the tremendous variability of such commissions has led some researchers to abandon hope for a comparative analysis which might offer generalizable conclusions beyond individual case studies. Lessons learned from previous reform efforts suggest that without a solid evidentiary basis, such reform efforts can easily succumb to institutional inertia or even failure. This danger is especially present when policy and practice recommendations are not based on research designs particularly attuned to making audible the experiences and concerns of the most marginalized targets of police attention.Originality/valueThe value of this method rests in its ability to provide comparative insights into the ways in which oversight commissions operate within a broader pluralized security landscape that both makes possible and constrains democratic participation along racial lines. The method contextualizes and renders audible ways of understanding, evaluating, and practicing democratic community as it is articulated through the issue of police and its oversight.

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Section: Methods 1: Archival Work/public Record Content Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Lessons Learned From Other Reform Effortsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The plurality of police oversight: a method for building upon lessons learned for understanding an evolving strategy

Karpiak

Mulla

Pérez

2022

PIJPSM

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…How do police presence and practices (which are certainly diverse and not homogenous), for instance, reorder social life not only by means of punishing but also by means of sustaining 'the politics of aesthetics', as Rancière put it, 'regimes of sensibility, intelligibility, and possibility' (Dole 2012: 11)? How does policing -as a form of sociability practised not only by police -inform the workings of collective life and the moral/ethical questions that invigorate the notion of 'living together' which is usually abstracted as citizenry (Karpiak 2013)?…”

Section: Amnestymentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Proportioning violence’: Ethnographic notes on the contingencies of police reform in Turkey

Akarsu

2018

Anthropology Today

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In spite of years of efforts in Turkey to reform the police, including an increase in budget allocations for ‘democratic policing training’, ‘capacity building programmes’ and ‘non‐lethal technologies and tools’, police violence persists. How might we conceptualize the relationship between the upsurge of police violence and such investments? In this article, the author suggests that instead of taking ‘reform’ or ‘transformation’ discourses at face value, we look at some of the ways in which police violence is reformatted through the very tools, discourses and idioms of police reform itself. The article draws on 18 months of fieldwork research on police and security in Turkey, where the author observed the on‐site implementation of police reforms in several venues: police academy classes, practical training programmes that also involved ‘international’ security experts, and local police stations and neighbourhoods. The article examines how the processes of reforming expand the contours of not only policing practice but also the boundaries of police violence – ostensibly what these reforms were supposed to restrain.

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“…Likewise, body camera initiatives, in Seattle or elsewhere, raise a number of questions around how their policies explicitly and inadvertently form officers as certain kinds of socio-techno police subjects. Policing, as Karpiak (2013: 79) has explored, is “a type of sociality that is constituted through practice”, and the practices that have emerged for police camera technologies serve to reinforce the existing system rather than changing it. Faubion (2011: 4) points out that “actors are never born ethical subjects”, as though becoming an officer were the equivalent of having a certain sized foot, and finding the right shoe.…”

Section: Between Techno-optimism and Techno-pessimismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cops, cameras, and the policing of ethics

Stalcup

Hahn

2016

Theoretical Criminology

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In this article, we explore how cameras are used in policing in the United States. We outline the trajectory of key new media technologies, arguing that cameras and social media together generate the ambient surveillance through which graphic violence is now routinely captured and circulated. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, we identify and examine intersections between video footage and police subjectivity in case studies of recruit training at the Washington state Basic Law Enforcement Academy and the Seattle Police Department's body-worn camera project. We analyze these cases in relation to the major arguments for and against initiatives to increase police use of cameras, outlining what we see as techno-optimistic and techno-pessimistic positions. Drawing on the pragmatism of John Dewey, we argue for a third position that calls for field-based inquiry into the specific co-production of socio-techno subjectivities.

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Adjusting La Police: The Use of Distance in the Calibration of Legitimate Violence among the Police Nationale

Cited by 7 publications

References 5 publications

The plurality of police oversight: a method for building upon lessons learned for understanding an evolving strategy

The plurality of police oversight: a method for building upon lessons learned for understanding an evolving strategy

‘Proportioning violence’: Ethnographic notes on the contingencies of police reform in Turkey

Cops, cameras, and the policing of ethics

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