The Anthropology of Police PDF

Preview

Summary

The SAGE Handbook of Global Policing Edited by Ben Bradford, Beatrice Jauregui, Ian Loader and Jonny Steinberg BK-SAGE-BRADFORD-160185.indb 3 6/21/2016 3:44:26 PM SAGE Publications Ltd Editorial arrangement © Ben Bradford, Beatrice Jauregui, 1 Oliver’s Yard Ian Loader and Jonny Steinberg 2016 55 Cit...

Description

The SAGE Handbook of

Global Policing

Edited by

Ben Bradford, Beatrice Jauregui, Ian Loader and Jonny Steinberg

BK-SAGE-BRADFORD-160185.indb 3

6/21/2016 3:44:26 PM

SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B1/I1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road New Delhi 110044 SAGE Publications Asia-Paciic Pte Ltd 3 Church Street #10-04 Samsung Hub Singapore 049483

Editor: Natalie Aguilera Editorial Assistant: Matthew Oldield Production Editor: Sushant Nailwal Copyeditor: Jill Birch Proofreader: Derek Markham Indexer: Cathryn Pritchard Marketing Manager: Sally Ransom Cover design: Wendy Scott Typeset by Cenveo Publisher Services Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

At SAGE we take sustainability seriously. Most of our products are printed in the UK using FSC papers and boards. When we print overseas we ensure sustainable papers are used as measured by the PREPS grading system. We undertake an annual audit to monitor our sustainability.

BK-SAGE-BRADFORD-160185.indb 4

Editorial arrangement © Ben Bradford, Beatrice Jauregui, Ian Loader and Jonny Steinberg 2016 Chapter 1 © Ian Loader, Ben Bradford, Beatrice Jauregui and Jonny Steinberg 2016 Chapter 2 © Seumas Miller 2016 Chapter 3 © Georgina Sinclair 2016 Chapter 4 © Mariana Valverde 2016 Chapter 5 © Rick Trinkner and Phillip Atiba Goff 2016 Chapter 6 © Jonathan Jacobs 2016 Chapter 7 © Kevin G. Karpiak 2016 Chapter 8 © Tracey L. Meares 2016 Chapter 9 © James Purdon 2016 Chapter 10 © Thomas Bierschenk 2016 Chapter 11 © Michael C. Williams 2016 Chapter 12 © Forrest Stuart and Steve Herbert 2016 Chapter 13 © Vanessa Barker 2016 Chapter 14 © Benjamin J. Goold 2016 Chapter 15 © Ben Bradford and Ian Loader 2016 Chapter 16 © Cécile Fabre 2016 Chapter 17 © Christopher Lowen Agee 2016

Chapter 18 © Olly Owen 2016 Chapter 19 © Andy Aitchison 2016 Chapter 20 © Máximo Sozzo 2016 Chapter 21 © Fangquan Liu and Jeffrey T. Martin 2016 Chapter 22 © Jonathan Simon 2016 Chapter 23 © Catarina Frois and Helena Machado 2016 Chapter 24 © Mireille Hildebrandt 2016 Chapter 25 © David Cole 2016 Chapter 26 © Robert M. Perito 2016 Chapter 27 © Rolando Ochoa 2016 Chapter 28 © Graham Denyer Willis 2016 Chapter 29 © Helene O. I. Gundhus and Katja Franko 2016 Chapter 30 © Kivanç Atak and Donatella della Porta 2016 Chapter 31 © Adam White 2016 Chapter 32 © Cameron Holley and Clifford Shearing 2016 Chapter 33 © Sarah Hautzinger 2016 Chapter 34 © Michelle Stewart 2016

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. Library of Congress Control Number: 2015956605 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-4739-0642-6

6/21/2016 3:44:28 PM

7 The Anthropology of Police Kevin G. Karpiak

INTRODUCTION Despite its foundational ties with many of the disciplines traditionally associated with police studies – cognate disciplines such as comparative legal science, sociology, political science, and criminology – the discipline of anthropology has only recently seen the emergence of a topical subfield interested specifically in the ethnographic description and broader theorization of policing. This lacuna can be attributed to several factors intimately tied to the discipline’s core selfunderstanding, chief among them its historical role as a discipline whose raison d’être rests upon serving within the interdisciplinary ecumene as specialists in the study of non-Western, small-scale, pre-modern societies existing outside, or at most only in parallel to, state formations. Ancillary to this self-definition has been a professional ethical commitment to offering voice to and acting as the political champions of otherwise disenfranchised groups. After tracing the

BK-SAGE-BRADFORD-160185.indb 103

historically vexed relationship between the discipline of anthropology and the broader field of police studies, this chapter will survey the work of a growing cadre of scholars clearing space at the intersection of the two traditions of knowledge production. As such, it will outline the current and potential contributions and challenges of the young field of the ‘anthropology of police’. Even as anthropology’s center of gravity has shifted over the last 30 years towards a general appreciation of the importance of locating its investigations within political-economic structures, processes, and imaginations that operate on a global scale, anthropologists still typically focus on the targets of police (participants in informal economies; populations experiencing heavy or inequitable police surveillance; individuals with illicit or illegal statuses suffering police violence and injustice) or relatively disembodied logics of security rather than on police practitioners themselves. However, for reasons that deserve more sustained enquiry than can be offered here, since

6/21/2016 3:44:54 PM

104

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF GLOBAL POLICING

the turn of the 21st century several anthropologists have engaged in long-term ethnographic research among police, constituting the core of an emergent sub-discipline (see Bierschenk; Owen; Fangquan and Martin; Frois and Machado; Hautzinger; Denyer Willis; and Stewart, this volume). While the development of this anthropology of police faces significant challenges, it also holds the promise, on the one hand, to transform the way ethnographic projects are conceived (especially vis-à-vis power, violence, ethics, and the nature of fieldwork relations) and, on the otherhand, to bring anthropological perspectives within the purview of an interdisciplinary criminology. Anthropology can bring a host of concepts into discussions of policing, including such alien terms as ‘magic,’ ‘witchcraft,’ ‘mana,’ ‘kinship,’ and ‘individuals’ but also a re-vamped understanding of more familiar terms such as ‘culture,’ ‘community,’ and ‘state’ as well as ‘global,’ ‘legitimacy,’ and ‘violence’. In the process, it can push the study of police beyond narrow debates concerning the evaluation of under-theorized policy evaluations – too often divorced from empirical realities, littered with uncritical ethnocentrisms and framed in terms defined by unambitious bureaucracies – and establish policing as a topic essential for a deeper understanding of the human condition in the contemporary world.

HISTORIC FRAMEWORKS AND VEXATIONS: IS AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF POLICE POSSIBLE? As a discipline, anthropology has a long and influential tradition of engaging questions of law and politics of comparative provenance, and sometimes intimate relationship, with cognate disciplines such as political science, legal studies and criminology. For example, the work of 19th century anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan was important for the development of theoretical innovations by Marx, Darwin and Freud (Moses 2009) and

BK-SAGE-BRADFORD-160185.indb 104

the work of Bronislaw Manlinowski (1926) in the first quarter of the 20th century was essential for our understanding of informal control mechanisms across cultures. Other anthropologists have contributed to our fundamental understanding of the nature of law and political order and sovereignty (cf. Roberts 1979). Although their work has had a more lasting effect within criminology – and, ultimately the study of criminality rather than police – both the ‘criminal anthropology’ of Lombroso (Horn 2003; Lombroso 2006) and the anthropométrie judiciare of Alphonse Bertillon were attempted engagements with contemporary anthropological problems such as parsing the competing philosophical claims of free will and determinism, describing the nature of consciousness and its problematic hinge on the materiality of the body, and resolving the tension between newly observed social regularities and individual variation (Hacking 1990; Rafter 2008; Kaluszynski 2014). This relationship between anthropology as the disciplined study of the ‘human thing’ (that is, as a program of inquiry into anthropos constituted by normalizing practices within a field of power/knowledge that shapes the methods, objects and ethics of its own epistemology) and criminology as an inter-disciplinary field of inquiry, similarly situated within relations of power/knowledge, centered around a central problem – crime and its control – has in many ways continued to be a productive engagement. For example, one of the most vital branches of critical criminology over the last twenty years has been that of ‘cultural criminology’ (Hayward & Young 2004; Ferrell et al. 2008), which has self-consciously imported the insights of a postmodern and interpretive anthropology in an attempt to move beyond the reductionist and positivist biases it sees in much of contemporary criminology towards a verstehen (Ferrell 1997) that can account more fully for acts of both crime and order (Young 2011). In a parallel sense, anthropological endeavors into some of the traditional sites of criminology, especially prisons and

6/21/2016 3:44:55 PM

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF POLICE

other detention centers (Rhodes 2001; 2004; Ticktin 2011; Cunha 2014; Drybread 2014), have opened up new kinds of research questions – with different canonical references, different operational concepts, different kinds of questions, different assumptions, different affective dispositions, and different ethical obligations – in a whole array of related sites (Parnell & Kane 2003; Schneider & Schneider 2008; Penglase 2009). For example, efforts to reframe traditional sites of anthropological analysis, such as colonialism (Parnell 2003; Rizzo 2013), nationalism (Siegel 1998) and even magic (Comaroff & Comaroff 2004; Jensen & Buur 2004; Comaroff 2006) in dialog with crime have pushed the conceptual boundaries of both projects by drawing attention to the ways that ‘rationality,’ ‘modernity,’ ‘crime’ and ‘the human’ have and continue to operate in a variety of contexts – oftentimes in ways that defy the expectations of more positivistic social science. However, the study of police has always occupied a troubled, virtually abject, place within the broader discipline of anthropology (Fassin 2006; 2008; 2013). Although much more historiographic work needs to be done on the potential causes of this vexed relationship,1 a broad outline can offer a sense of the challenges faced in developing an anthropological tradition of police studies. One such challenge, which remains strangely persistent in the discipline despite rather thorough critique, is the discipline’s own sense that its ‘core’ should adhere to a focus on exotic colonial subjects (Trouillot 1991; Baker 1998). In part, this is the legacy of a disciplinary d’etente with sociology (and other disciplines) which directed anthropology away from the study of urban (Hannerz 1980), modern (Rabinow 1989; Fabian 2014) and Western (Said 1979; Nader 1989; Carrier 1995) contexts. In other part, it is the result of a long-standing evasion of issues of power and inequality (Asad 1973; 1993; Rosaldo 1993), that was then, subsequently, largely in reaction to this evasion, redirected to almost exclusive focus on the various forms of suffering experienced by

BK-SAGE-BRADFORD-160185.indb 105

105

less powerful, abject and marginalized people (Robbins 2013). This combination of factors has created a sort of anthropological lacuna for the study of police: as, on the one hand, an institution associated, especially by early anthropologists, with the West and processes of modernization, descriptions of police were relegated to the margins in favor of more ‘traditional’ elements of culture. On the other hand, as relatively powerful actors, anthropologists who have been concerned with addressing issues of power and inequality have tended to consider nuanced engagements with police to be less critical task than capturing and giving voice to the perspectives of more marginalized populations, despite rather widespread calls to ‘study up’ (Nader 1972). This combination of factors has resulted in a paucity of anthropological engagements with police, per se. Perhaps paradoxically, however, even while such disciplinary dispositions have deeply structured anthropological research projects and relations in the field, they have not erased the image of police, or the fact of policing, from its narratives. Instead, images of police have occupied structurally central roles in anthropological texts and, consequently, served to develop a specific relation vis-à-vis police that has deeply shaped the professional, political and ethical senses of an anthropology’s disciplinary self. Using the classic example of Clifford Geertz’s (1973) description of the Balinese cockfight, Karpiak (2010) has described this anthropological engagement with police as ‘polemic’ and contrasted it with the more recognized relation of ‘rapport’.2 In this account, Geertz describes his initial inability to establish genuine relationship with the people in his field site, until the occurrence of a police raid in the village allows for the creation of a certain camaraderie. Karpiak explains: The episode with the police has allowed Geertz, in his particular masculinist imagery, ‘in.’ It is the pivot through which he is able to establish what, for him, is the necessary component of fieldwork – ‘rapport.’ It is this location ‘inside,’ due to the ‘rapport’ established during the episode with the police in which

6/21/2016 3:44:55 PM

106

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF GLOBAL POLICING

the contrast between the police and Geertz as an anthropologist is drawn, that allows the ensuing – and oft-critiqued – textual reading of the Balinese cockfight. There is by now a substantial critique of Geertz’s method […]. However, what is often overlooked is precisely the figure of the policeman that allows Geertz to establish this idealized form of relation. This is important for our purposes in that it makes clear that the idealization of the anthropological mode of ‘rapport’ is made possible through a contrast with the figure of the policeman. In other words, the ideal Geertzian mode of relation with the Balinese lies in stark contrast to the mode of relation he takes up with the police. In fact, this latter mode might be accurately labeled ‘polemic’ and, as a central affect, itself remains an underremarked dimension of Geertz’s ethnographic mode …. Both modes of relation – both ‘moves’ – characterize the preponderance of anthropological engagement with police and policing. (Karpiak 2010)

While this disciplinary configuration has been productive in many ways – for example, in documenting the profound effects of discriminatory policing on minority communities (Bourgois 1995), offering examples of resistance to oppressive political domination (Scott 1990; Burton 2015; Cox 2015; Williams 2015), or highlighting the profound creativity of marginalized individuals and communities in the face of such (Ralph 2014) – it has also produced a broader lacuna in the anthropological canon; the face of policing itself remains largely overlooked. Given the centrality of this configuration for contemporary anthropological practice, let alone sense of disciplinary self, one could productively question whether an anthropology of police is possible or even desirable. The answer to both questions (which I hope to demonstrate affirmatively) hinge on the merits of a growing body of anthropological literature on police, a task to which the next section will turn.

CONTEMPORARY CONTRIBUTIONS In light of these challenges and silences, what can an anthropology of police offer the study of global policing more broadly? As

BK-SAGE-BRADFORD-160185.indb 106

anthropological engagements with police and policing are relatively nascent, any response to such a question will generally be inflected with a degree of aspiration. As such, the following sections are meant to gesture more towards the promise of such a field rather than a definitive catalog of its accomplishments. But how to give form to such potential? I suggest that a useful framework for exploring how the anthropology of police promises to both take up and augment parallel enquiries in police studies can be Max Weber’s famous definition of the state as ‘that form of human community that (successfully) lays claims to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence over a particular territory’ (Weber 2004, p.33). This framework was an absolutely integral component for early sociological work on policing (Brodeur 2005; 2007; Bittner 1970; Reiner 2015; Manning & Van Maanen 1978; Manning 2005) while also serving as the point of contention for others (Zedner 2006; Shearing & Marks 2011; Shearing 1992). Without pretending to offer a full exploration of that debate, Weber’s formula can offer a touchstone for thinking through how an anthropology of police can augment police studies in productive ways. It can bring together seemingly disparate strains of anthropological research in order to demonstrate how they might differently inflect the core components of this founding framework of police studies: human, community, claims, monopoly, legitimate, violence, territory.

Human Anthropology is the study of what it means to be human, of what some have called the ‘human thing’ (Rabinow & Stavrianakis 2013). Just as ‘psychology’ and ‘sociology’ claim domain over objects of ‘psyche’ and of ‘society’, respectively, whose logic is irreducible and distinct, and thus demanding of its own disciplined knowledge, anthropology’s

6/21/2016 3:44:55 PM

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF POLICE

object – ‘the human’ – gives a decidedly unique shape to its discipline. Placing the study of police in relation to questions of the human thing gives a particular hue to issues of crime, punishment, security, and order by virtue of placing them within a different scope of inquiry. Anthropological engagements tend to not be satisfied with rigid or reductive categories of social action, nor with maintaining a narrow focus on policy concerns or specific program evaluations, nor with contributing to what Carol Greenhouse (2011) has described as ‘the discourse of solutions’. Rather, they tend to gesture towards explorations of the existential human stakes at the heart of policing. For example, towards the end of his ethnography of the policing of the US ‘War on Drugs’ in rural Appalachian life, William Garriott writes: It would be going against the grain of this project to conclude with a set of policy recommendations that would somehow improve the system as it stands. Indeed, if there is a policy implication to be derived from this study, it is simply that the issue of illicit drugs is so deeply engrained in American political culture that one can hardly imagine political life in the United States without it … [The] very organization and orientation of the legal order … would have to be changed. (Garriott 2011, pp.163–164)

The purview of Garriott’s analysis, then, is a large one indeed, encompassing the ‘very … legal order’. In the face of such a behemoth, and in the absence of any concrete recommendations for what to do about its pathologies, so sensitively described in that very same work, some readers may well fear a strain of nihilism, or at least troubling passivity, behind this passage. However, Garriott’s stance is less animated by a sense of impotence – the text itself is a committed act – and more an insistence on the sco...