Pacification and police: A critique of the police militarization thesis

Abstract

The article offers a critique of the ‘militarization of the police’ discourse, which has gained substantial attention in both academia and the media. Particularly influential in the United States, proponents of this concept claim that the ‘traditional’ boundaries between war and policing are blurring. However, this concept is both historically and politically problematic. The fact that right-wing libertarians have been at the forefront of calling attention to the militarization of the police highlights that while it is a thesis which critiques state power it fails to provide a critique of capital. As a result, it constantly falls back into a liberal frame of trying to delineate boundaries between military and police, rather than looking at how war and police power overlap and conjoin in everyday pacification.

A Conceptualization of Militarization in Domestic Policing

“…These findings support previous studies that have found disagreement across academic research and professional resources and suggest broader unifying themes worthy of further examination (Bieler, 2016). While SMEs shared some views, the discordant stances on several fundamental issues (e.g., veteran hiring, gear ownership vs. use) indicate that not only within academic criminal justice circles (McMichael, 2017) but also more broadly, there is still no universally agreed-upon conceptualization of militarization. The lack of consensus in this study among this relatively small group of experts around a single concise definition of militarization is not necessarily a flaw.…”

‘Taser, Taser’! Exploring factors associated with police use of Taser in England and Wales

“…In contrast, critical or conflict perspectiveswith their roots in Marxist and even Weberian sociology (Terpestra 2011)understand the police as acting less in the public good, and more for dominant elites. The role of the police is to neutralise population groups considered 'dangerous', including ethnic minorities and those of lower socio-economic status (Marenin 1982, Petrocelli et al 2003, McMichael 2017, and policing decisions are made on extra-legal considerations, as well as legal factors (Lee et al 2013). For Shantz (2016, p. 18), for example, 'policing is too often regarded as a service in the maintenance of peace' when it is really a 'social war … related to class, race, gender'.…”

“…Given the centrality of use of force to the police mandate and to the human rights of citizens and officers alike, use of force and Taser appears a fruitful arena for further testing of these theories. It is also timely to revisit this debate, which has been reignited recently with discussions around police militarisation in general (den Hayer 2014, Shantz 2016, McMichael 2017 and the use of Taser in particular. For Kitossa (2016, p. 269), it is the 'bodies of poor, immigrant, people "of colour" … (who are) tased'.…”

Drugs, Violence, and Capitalism: The Expansion of Opioid Use in the Americas

“…To this end, I examine the current context of opioid use in the United States and its evolution toward Latin American countries— complementary processes that have been driving forces in state violence and in the interest of transnational pharmaceutical corporations. These actions configure what a certain literature has called “pacification” (McMichael, 2017; Neocleous, 2011; 2014), which is equivalent to the Foucauldian notion of “peace as coded war” and involves the construction/reproduction of a liberal social order (Neocleous, 2014: 34). Accordingly, the main question of this work is how opioids, capitalist interests, and state violence interact.…”