current issue

JAKE MONAGHAN

THE PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM OF DEMOCRATIC POLICING

This article provides a critical overview of democratic policing from a philosophical perspective. To do so, it constructs a stylized taxonomy of philosophical approaches to the topic, featuring the legalist and the participatory democratic. This taxonomy allows for the formulation of general theoretical problems for democratically legitimizing police power. The most significant problem is the passive ideal of policing shared by both approaches. But there is the overlooked option of an active, strategic conception of policing aimed at the democratic value of responsiveness.

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ALEX S. VITALE

TOWARD AN ABOLITIONIST EPISTEMOLOGY

The theoretical underpinnings of police and penal abolition can provide important epistemological guidance to social science researchers. A review of the conceptual frames of abolition and the social science theories underlying it provides a basis for an abolitionist epistemology that incorporates insights from queer theory, critical race theory, feminism, historical materialism, and postcolonial theory. An exposition of existing studies that conform to these theoretical frameworks shows this approach’s value.

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DIDIER FASSIN

THE POLITICS OF THE AFTERMATH: ON THE SEQUELS TO POLICE VIOLENCE

The killing of an adolescent by a police officer near Paris in 2023 sparked major protests and brutal repression in France. As the production or justification of such police violence has been much studied, this article investigates what follows the violence and contributes to its reproduction—the politics of the aftermath. The mechanics of normalization of misconduct by officers, their institutions, and the state involve collateral practices that have received little attention despite their crucial role. Emphasis is on forgery and perjury, praising perpetrators and blaming victims, crackdown on protests, and condoning or denying police brutality. In a context of growing authoritarianism, the police appear to be both a state within a state and the armed wing of the state.

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VICTORIA HATTAM

BORDER TIME: POLICING MOVEMENT IN THE RIO GRANDE VALLEY

The southern border of the United States has been policed intensively for over half a century. Donald Trump and many other global political leaders have narrowed their policy focuses from bordering more generally to building walls. Even short trips to the US-Mexico border make clear that the wall is not a continuous integrated structure. On the contrary, the wall is fragmented by design. Attending to the materialization of the wall, to the bits and pieces, puts the question: How is political authority operating here? Rather than assuming fragmentation to be a sign of weakness, I suggest we shift in analysis of border policing from space to time. I draw evidence from government documents, site visits, and photographs.

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ANNE-MARIE LIVINGSTONE AND BENOIT DÉCARY-SECOURS

PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC RATIONALIZATIONS FOR POLICE RACISM IN THE CRIMINOLOGY OF “STREET GANGS”

For almost four decades, there has been much talk in the press and political arenas in Montreal about a scourge of “street gangs” allegedly made up of Black youths and other youths of color and fueling crime and insecurity in an otherwise peaceable city. The article critically examines the criminological literature on “street gangs” that arose during a period of escalating racial tensions and White anxieties about Black immigration in the 1980s. Findings reveal the “gang” literature is replete with conceptual and methodological deficiencies. Although criminologists have never produced any conclusive evidence of street gangs, they have fitted their methods and findings to suit racial ideologies of delinquency. The article shows concretely how positivist criminology lends a veneer of scientific legitimacy to police racism.

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AGNIESZKA KOsCIAnSKA

POLAND: POLICING WOMEN, POLICING MINORITIES

The departure point for this essay is the massive 2020 pro-choice protests following a ruling by Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal that restricted access to abortion. The essay analyzes police violence during these demonstrations, which was mostly directed at young, urban, middle-class women, and draws attention to changing Polish attitudes toward the police and their brutality vis-à-vis notions of class, gender, race, and ethnicity. In the preceding 30 years, there had been many cases of police brutality in Poland, mostly targeting minorities, migrants, and working-class men, but these had been ignored by the Polish public. Only after police violence was directed toward young, urban, middle-class women did the Polish public finally start to take notice.

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GAIL SUPER

PENAL VIOLENCE IN SPACES OF PRECARITY

Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s argument that liberal law is founded on and preserved through violence and on Hannah Arendt’s and Frantz Fanon’s ideas on the unpredictability of violence, this article uses the term penal violence to highlight the violence of lawful (state) punishment and the overlaps between different forms of lawful state violence and extralegal/extrajudicial violence. Focusing on South Africa, I argue that there is an ever-present possibility of law’s (legal) violence transgressing its own fictitious boundary (of reasonableness and nonviolence) and spiraling into unlawful (excessive and visible) violence. Adopting a multiscalar spatiotemporal approach to analyze extralegal violence by civilians in informal settlements, by the police when they engage in unlawful violence, and by prison wardens when they inflict excessive violence inside prisons, I emphasize the connections between law and violence, those between punishment and vengeance, and the malleability of violence.​​​