The Anthropology of Police as Public Anthropology

Mutsaers, Paul; Simpson, Jennie; Karpiak, Kevin G.

doi:10.1111/aman.12372

Cited by 15 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…This depressing scenario calls into question the relevance and impact of scholarly work in response to the urgency of everyday life. In analyzing the challenges of an anthropology of policing, some colleagues have moved beyond “just” denouncing police violence to investigating the ideological work accomplished by policing, as well as how society may reclaim democratic control of the police (Garriott ; Mutsaers, Simpson, and Karpiak ). In this article, I join them to argue that street gangs can offer some important insights on the matter.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Refusing to Be Governed: Urban Policing, Gang Violence, and the Politics of Evilness in an Afro‐Colombian Shantytown

Alves

2019

PoLAR

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What is the role of policing within urban contexts marked by economic dispossession, crime, and gang violence? This article grapples with this question by examining both policing practices and the strategies of resistance embraced by residents of El Guayacán, a predominantly black neighborhood in the outskirts of Cali, Colombia. I argue that policing is not only about repression but also about enforcing spatial‐racial boundaries and administering social death. On the one hand, targeting black bodies and black places as the problem of urban security provides police a spatial fix (to borrow from critical geographers) for broad anxieties around crime. On the other hand, the discursive and material production of unruly bodies and ungovernable spaces justifies state disinvestment, social abandonment, and police aggression against racialized others.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Refusing to Be Governed: Urban Policing, Gang Violence, and the Politics of Evilness in an Afro‐Colombian Shantytown

Alves

2019

PoLAR

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“…The police are often rightly criticised and held responsible for the violence they commit and the ways in which borders are enacted, enforced and configured within the urban. Very much in the sense of a public anthropology of the police (Fassin, 2013c, 2015; Mutsaers et al., 2015), however, there is a need for engaged scholarship that goes beyond much needed criticism and opens the lens for the police officer’s emotional entanglements, their bodily experiences, and their intrinsic motivations, fears, passions and sufferings. We can only come towards a better understanding of how police shape space and vice versa, if we dive more into the immediacy of what moves police officers themselves.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Working at the edge: Police, emotions and space in Rio de Janeiro

Pauschinger

2019

Environ Plan D

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Rio de Janeiro’s police officers habitually work on the edge of a border – between rationalised and ordered routines on one hand, and risk, disorder and incipient violence on the other. The article argues that this edge has distinct emotional components and concrete spatial consequences for the production of the city as a bordered space. Conceptually, the article combines spatial thinking about the production of territoriality with an emotional understanding of the police as ‘edgeworkers’ grounded in cultural criminology. Empirically, this piece uses ethnographic material from research with ordinary civil police officers and Special Forces in Rio. Across three empirical sections, the article explores police emotions and their significant spatial effects. First, the article mobilises the metaphor of ‘drying ice’ that police officers use to symbolise their everyday struggle with Rio’s urban conflict, and which leads them to produce spaces of secrecy. Second, the article shows how the police consider their job to be a vocation, a stance which simultaneously produces spaces of exposure. Finally, the Special Forces’ activities are compared to those of soldiers in war zones, assessing how the officers as edgeworkers find ways of escaping their emotional dilemma, thereby producing the city as a space of war.

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“…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).…”

Section: Ethnographies Of Police and Policingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban borderwork: Ethnographies of policing

Christensen

Albrecht

2020

Environ Plan D

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This special issue introduces a conceptual framework for ethnographies of urban policing that foregrounds how defining features of the city produce police work, and in turn, how police work produces the city. To address how the mutually productive relationship of policing and the city shape current transformations in the ordering of urban space, the notions of borders and bordering are invoked. In contemporary cities across the global North and South, borders and bordering practices are reconfigured to address mobilities and flows deemed to threaten social order and have thus become manifestations of fear and anxiety linked to these mobilities and flows. At the core of our framework is the argument that urban policing is principally a practice of bordering. By approaching urban policing as a practice of bordering that is informed by material and imaginary manifestations, tensions between (de)territorializing and (de)stabilization are highlighted as both the vehicle and outcome of bordering practices. These tensions, we propose, can be captured through the concept of trembling. Trembling implies both a physical and emotional response to anxiety, excitement and frailty that is paradoxically built into borders and bordering practices.

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The Anthropology of Police as Public Anthropology

Cited by 15 publications

References 14 publications

Refusing to Be Governed: Urban Policing, Gang Violence, and the Politics of Evilness in an Afro‐Colombian Shantytown

Refusing to Be Governed: Urban Policing, Gang Violence, and the Politics of Evilness in an Afro‐Colombian Shantytown

Working at the edge: Police, emotions and space in Rio de Janeiro

Urban borderwork: Ethnographies of policing

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