Beatings, Beacons, and Big Men: Police Disempowerment and Delegitimation in India

Abstract

It is a truism that police in India generally lack legitimate authority and public trust. This lack is widely understood by scholars, policy analysts, and police practitioners as being rooted in the institution's colonial development as a means of oppression, and its alleged corruption and criminalization in the postcolonial period. The social facts of situational hyper-empowerment and the widespread decadence of police do much to explain their poor image and performance, but these explanations do not account for the fact that police in India are also structurally disempowered by cultural-political and legal-institutional claims to multiple and conflicting forms of authority that challenge and often overwhelm the authority of police. This structural disempowerment and its performances in everyday interactions between the police and the public constitute an ongoing social process of delegitimation of police authority in contemporary India. Following ethnographic analysis of this process of delegitimation, I explore the implications of focusing on police disempowerment for theorizations of the sources and capabilities of state legal authority more generally.

In Search of Moral Recognition? Policing and Eudaemonic Legitimacy in Ghana

“…Police officers of all ranks are believed to be used by politicians against their political opponents (Ghanaian Chronicle ) and to carry out personal business. Similar to Jauregui's () analysis of the Indian situation, the clientelistic relations between the police and the elites translate into “police disempowerment.” Police officers are pressured into underenforcing or overenforcing the law, to investigate or not investigate certain cases, to prosecute or not to prosecute certain cases, or even to release suspects without criminal charges (GhanaWeb.com ).…”

Exploring the Connection between Job Satisfaction and Different Forms of Organizational Commitment among Police

“…Many, but not all, transfers involve the request of the officer to move to a new location. Sometimes transfers are done to move a problem officer or to punish an officer, sometimes due to political interference (Jauregui, 2013).…”

States of Camouflage

“…His provocative idea finds support in a series of ethnographic studies that document how organized crime is intricately connected to the operation of states (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 2006;Heyman and Smart 1999;Nordstrom 2007, Roitman 2004van Schendel and Abraham 2005;Schneider and Schneider 2003). These studies acknowledge hybrid forms of governance wherein state bureaucracies and criminal organizations compete and even overlap in their claims for sovereignty (Bobick 2011;Civico 2012;Jaffe 2013;Pansters 2012;Penglase 2009). Challenging state-centric views, according to which legal society and criminal networks are opposites, they pursue the outlaw into zones where, as Carolyn Nordstrom (2007,145) writes, "legality bleeds into illegality" and "illegality enters mainstream society."…”

“…Firefighters are also frontline street‐level bureaucrats (Lipsky ) who, like law‐enforcement officers, customs agents, and social workers, in the day‐today performance of public service deal with contradictions between the formal rules and the pragmatics of governance and who negotiate their legal mandates against ethical and cultural values (see, e.g., Chalfin ; Fassin ; Herzfeld , ; Heyman , ; Jauregui ). But in Iguazú firefighters are also intricately connected to other private and public interests.…”