Introduction Police in Practice

Cultures of Legitimacy and Postcolonial Policing: Guest Editor Introduction

“…But this suggestion assumes a naturalized triangular relationship among the police, the law, and legitimate authority. Moreover, it does not acknowledge the possibility, as argued here, that legitimation—of coercion by violence generally, and of police power to deploy it specifically—is culturally and historically configured through practice (Garriott 2013). Some theorists of police have begun to acknowledge the social fact of variations in police legitimation, including Robert Reiner (2010) in his analysis of fluctuations of police legitimacy over time in the United Kingdom, and Christopher Murphy (2005) in his call for police studies to “go global.” Murphy correctly notes that “stability and legitimacy of government and law and the public police as an effective instrument of order and security cannot be assumed in many non-Western policing contexts … [and that policing] in many global environments appears to be continually negotiated and reconstituted in a changing social and political environment with rapidly shifting policing requirements and priorities” (139).…”

Urban borderwork: Ethnographies of policing

“…The ethnographic focus on how non-state policing actors relate to, engage with, and act on behalf of or in the absence of state-sanctioned policing actors has occurred at the expense of understanding how the police themselves perceive of, perform and navigate what it means to police. In recent years, this has resulted in a significant body of ethnographically driven studies focusing on the police and policing (Beek, 2016; Beek et al., 2017; Fassin, 2013, 2017; Garriott, 2013; Göpfert, 2013, 2016; Hornberger, 2010, 2011; Jauregui, 2016; Karpiak, 2016; Martin, 2013, 2016; Mutsaers, 2014, 2018; Owen, 2013, 2016; Steinberger, 2008). Many of these works emerged from a growing interest in ‘the state’, as an idea and as a set of practices, but also as Cooper-Knock and Owen (2015: 356) emphasize, because of a relative analytical neglect of ‘state actors and statehood’ in the context of policing, and consequently ‘everyday realities and modes of state policing’ (see also Mutsaers et al., 2015: 786).…”

Rural Policing, Youth and Overlapping Fields of Youth Justice

“…social worker) (Crank, 1990; Liederbach and Frank, 2003; Pelfrey, 2007) and rural officers are subject to different stresses than an urban officer (Sandy and Devine, 1978). Researchers have examined rural policing in the United States (Liederbach and Frank, 2003; Mawby and Yarwood, 2016; Sims, 1988; Thurman and McGarrell, 2015) and United Kingdom (Garriott, 2013; Jones, 1996; Yarwood, 2005), but not to the same degree in Canada (Donnermeyer et al, 2016; Jones et al, 2018; Ricciardelli, 2018).…”