CFP – THE CULTURE CONCEPT IN CONTEMPORARY CIRCULATION

(This CFP seems relevant to this dialogue about the utility of theorizing policing around a concept of culture)

Call For Papers — Proposed Session for AAA 2010
THE CULTURE CONCEPT IN CONTEMPORARY CIRCULATION

Does the culture concept have a place in anthropological understandings of a world increasingly defined and shaped by global circulations? Or, as decades of critique would wish it, can a concept of distinctive logics organizing human relations no longer hold water as the boundaries between the contexts and spaces in which those relations are negotiated become increasingly porous? This panel will consider, in light of both the history of its critiques, and recent ethnographic work from diverse locations and positions, the continuing relevance of a concept of culture — taken as a distinctive logic organizing social relations, moral and political projects, collective histories and imagined futures — as anthropology responds to the apparent dissolution of spatio-temporal, social and communicative boundaries. To what extent does the culture concept rely on our capacity to identify bounded collectivities, or on the isolation of those collectivities from each other, their ignorance of a world outside their “own” world, or on the difficulty of people associating with more than one of them or moving between them? (To put it another way: must “cultural” context always be relatively presupposed, rather than entailed?) What do prior theorizations of culture qua both difference and structure bring to our understanding of contemporary negotiations of the semiotic fields in which identity, alterity, and other sorts of projects come (or fail to come) into being? As it proliferates as a form in circulation beyond anthropological discourse, what force does culture retain or accrue as context or pretext, social text or hypertext? What pressure does the appearance of culture as a form in circulation place on our uses of culture as analytic frame?

Rather than seeing contemporary difficulties with deploying the concept of cultures as objects coterminous with geographically bounded social entities as an occasion for despair we see it as an opportunity for a productive untangling: Is difference (especially difference marked by a boundary) essential to the culture concept or simply the context in which it was first noticed? Need cultural “logics” be largely or partly unconscious to be powerful or is this a misguided analogy with linguistics? Need people have only one culture? Are unit cultures but one historically specific way in which human semiotic life can be organized (as bands, empires, or states are historically specific ways of organizing human political life)? Such untangling might let us continue to understand culture as the ground on which both alterity and alliance are negotiated regardless of the size and boundedness of the units involved, a use we see as faithful to its intellectual and political history, as well as one with a promising future on both fronts. As a platform for — and as a form accompanying— people and projects in circulation, the analytic concept of culture may in fact be of greater importance than ever.

Please address inquiries and submissions, in the form of an abstract of no more than 250 words, as e-mail text or attachment, to session organizers: Amy McLachlan (University of Chicago) amclachlan@uchicago.edu, or Daniel Rosenblatt (Carleton University) daniel.rosenblatt@gmail.com, by Friday, March 26th. In addition to an abstract, please also include your full name, contact information and institutional affiliation.

Feel free to circulate this announcement widely!

Pedagogy

Resolved: Culture is the Center of the Anthropology of Policing

This is the second entry in my series of posts on the question: “What is the curriculum for the anthropology of policing?” As promised, in this post I will share a syllabus I taught last semester, and follow Kevin’s lead in using critical reflection on my teaching experience as a way to think about the challenges of “canon formation” for the anthropology of policing. Before I do this, however, I should put all my cards on the table and say that I am beginning from a particular assumption about the anthropology of policing. My ‘original position’ (apologies to Rawls) is this: (a) the disciplinary core of anthropology is its concern with culture and, therefore, (b) the integrating core of the anthropology of policing is an anthropological concern with culture. Based on this assumption, I expect the answer to the question of my previous post (i.e. overlap in the syllabi for three hypothetical courses on the anthropology of policing pitched to the distinct audiences of (i) practitioners, (ii) undergraduate liberal arts majors, and (iii) anthropology graduate students) to be “Yes.” And not just “Yes,” but “Yes, there is an overlap. And it consists of a particular literature about the culture of policing.”

So, the ultimate purpose of this exercise in public auto-critique is to rise to the challenge of converting the vague prejudices of an American-cultural-anthropologist into a bibliography of canonical ideas about the culture of policing. The job will be finished when we have assembled a bibliography robust enough to answer critiques registered on behalf of any of the three audiences listed above. And if, at the end of this ordeal, my culturalist prejudices have not been crushed under the jackboot of political economy, or scattered to the winds of the policy community, then I will call myself a winner and buy everyone a drink at the November AAAs.

So, on to the syllabus. It is for a course I taught last semester, called Policing: An International Perspective, as an elective in the University of Hong Kong’s masters program in criminology. This is a popular two-year coursework-based degree “designed as a professional qualification for practitioners in criminal justice and related fields (including NGOs), [but also] open for people with an interest in the field of criminology in general.” The program is housed within a sociology department that awards PHDs in sociology, anthropology and criminology. Thus the experience of working here has thus brought me into contact with all three audiences mentioned above. The course itself enrolled 18 students, about half of whom were serving in what is locally known as the “disciplined forces.” I designed the course before I came to Hong Kong, however. And the lack of a practical familiarity with my audience gave a rather free rein to my personal sense of the how the anthropology of policing fit together as a coherent topic of instruction.

So, without further ado, for your apprasial and critique, here is the syllabus.

Where do you think its grand intellectual vision crumbled most dramatically in its confrontation with the realities of the classroom?

Blotter

L’anthropoliteia In the News (12-février-2012)

That’s right, since I haven’t done one of these in a while, since my stock of saved links has become overwhelming and since a string of news events this week has got my mojo running, I’ve decided to do a Franco-centric version of Anthropoliteia In the News… so here goes:

Pyjama-Gate

A teenage girl was held in police custody for anywhere, from 7 and a half to 11 hours, after being involved in a fight outside her school in the 20th arrondissement of Paris. Police took her from her home without letting her change out of her pajamas, leading to the media explosion of what I’m calling “pyjama-gate”.

[rant button on]

As could probably be expected from these sort of media affairs, there has been a proliferation of punditry and position taking only tenusously connecting to reality or real political seriousness. It looks like if there’s any real movement that results from this, it will involve re-examining the use of “garde a vue” detention practices by police officers.

On the other hand, the obsessive repetition of the detail of the girl’s pajamas in the story seems completely non-random in a country that is going through a parallel obsession over of the burka/veil/hijab/head scarf/any-“ostentatious”-religious-sign. If I were to try to bring the quickly accumulating scholarship on the veil controversy to bear on this issue, I would say that this is the flip side, or at least another angle on, the contradictions of French republican democracy as played out upon female bodies.

… so color me Joan W. Scott, with an important addendum: in the framing of the voice *against* state intervention, the state is imagined as police. In the framing *for* state intervention, state as “protector of women” and “guarantor of secular equality” there are many governmental institutions imagined and invoked (school, post-office, bus drivers, banks) but almost never the police. There’s an important point to be explored there…

[rant button off]

Survey on ethnic and racial composition of French police

As I’ve discussed over at my personal blog, a survey was published suggesting that almost 10% of French police are “issued from immigration” (itself a tricky term in need of significant unpacking). This was big news because, on the one hand, these kind state-run surveys of race & ethnicity are extremely rare and politically contentious in France; and, on the other, not many people thought the numbers would be even that high.

“Welcome to Le Jungle (again), now leave (again)”

First there was the Red Cross center at Sangatte, which housed immigrants looking to make their way from France to the UK. Then, in 2002 this center was closed down, causing the quasi-organic growth of a much-criticized quasi-detention center/refugee camp known as “Le Jungle”. Then, last September, this was also closed down and bulldozed over. From this rubble, an organization known as No Border took over a wharehouse where it housed about 100 refugees from Afghanistan. That is, until now. The BBC reports that French police created a security perimeter and eventually moved in to expel the remaining activists and refugees.

The spokesman for Sarkozy’s UMP party defended the move by denouncing “the manipulation of migrants by anti-globalization associations…. [who] feed on human misery in order to defend their extreme ideology,” echoing vice-president of the Front nationale Marie Le Pen’s criticism of No Border as “facilitating illegal immigration through illegal and violent actions”. For his part, former Socialist Prime Minister Laurent Fabius suggested that while France couldn’t naturalize everyone, those who couldn’t be accepted should be treated in a “more European” manner.

Quick Hits

TF1 News reports that, in the 2010 report of the Cour de Comptes, a sort of budgetary and auditing office of the French government, the Police Nationale are criticized for its extravagant use of funds, especially around the use of unmarked police vehicles. In addition to the sheer increase in number of the vehicles (1,469 in September 2008 versus 1,218 in January 2003), the court alleges that these vehicles are often “luxurious” and “over-equipped… to an unjustifiable degree” while at the same time they’re driven overly recklessly (each vehicle being involved in an accident on average every 15 months) and being requisitioned for the personal use not only of police officers, but former Presidents and Prime Ministers (read between the political lines here) as well.
On the other hand, the municipal police in Toulouse have been trying out the use of Segway vehicles, or “gyropodes” as they’re called in French. This gave Ladepeche.fr the opportunity to publish some killer stats, which include:
- the total costs of these vehicles amounts to about 5 euros a day, calculating the electricity cost at about 2.50 euros per 1000 kilometers
- policemen using the vehicle cover 9x the area, deploy 4x faster and have 15x the contact with the population (don’t ask me how the calculate that last one, especially because whatever that contact means it includes interacting with someone standing 20cm about the ground)
Even though they don’t directly refer to this specific 20cm, in an interview with Le Monde criminologists Sebastian Roché and Jacques de Maillard (who make frequent appearances in my own dissertation, both as solo acts and as a tag team) decry the increasing distance in France between police and the people they’re supposed to be policing. The idea behind the police de proximité was not only a move towards preventative policing, but towards a less centralized and hierarchical structure within the police itself.
Finally, Claude Bartolone, deputy of the Socialist Party (PS), accused Minister of the Interior Brice Hortefeux of trying to create a “police without policemen” through his use of video surveillance… Which, those of us who have read too much Foucault, would say is of course kind of exactly the point

As always, if you have any news you’d like added, let me know in the comments section or contact me

Pedagogy

What is the Curriculum for the Anthropology of Policing?

Hello Anthropolitians,

After surviving baptisms by fire, ice and everything in between (lukewarm beer, mostly) in my new position, I now have recovered enough to aspire to blog. In particular I hope, over the next few months, to write a series of posts musing on the following topic: “What is the curriculum for the anthropology of policing?”

To begin, I would like to start thinking about the different ways in which the anthropology of policing fits into the contemporary markets for higher education. I wonder if we can identity a set of core concerns that effectively translates between these different contexts?

For example, suppose that you are an anthropologist joining a department with a broader social-sciences identity (e.g. sociology/criminology/anthropology). And suppose that this department is – shockingly – rather cohesive as an intellectual community. Your colleagues consider interdisciplinary give-and-take a font of inspiration, and treat the department’s disciplinary fusion as a substantive asset rather than an administrative convenience. And now suppose that, as the newest member of the club, you have been asked to develop a “signature” course in your specialization – policing. Moreover, you are asked to develop it in a way demonstrates the distinctive assets that anthropology brings to the conversation, and do this in a way that harmonizes synergetically with the theoretical interests your sociologically and criminologically trained friends have in the police. How do you design your syllabus?

Now, by contrast to the above syllabus, suppose that you are an anthropologist working for a college that offers degree programs in criminal justice and social work (among other things). You have been invited to develop a course in your specialization – policing – with the purpose of contributing an anthropological (or “cultural”) perspective to these semi-professional degrees. How do you design this syllabus? Just how different is it from the one you designed above?

Now, finally, suppose you have been hired by a department that does nothing but anthropology for anthropology’s sake. And, your only teaching requirement is to lead a graduate seminar designed to establish the anthropology of policing as a viable sub-disciplinary specialization. What is the syllabus for this course? Does it have any overlap with the above two syllabi?

Look forward to any thoughts folks might have. Next, I will post the syllabus from the policing course I taught last semester, providing fodder for more specific points of critique while I work through the lessons I learned while trying to teach it.

Announcements

Studying Military, Security & Intelligence Communities Ethics Casebook by the American Anthropological Association

I don’t know how many of you have been following the machinations of the CEAUSSIC committee of the American Anthropological Association, but over the last several years they’ve been getting together to think through the admittedly thorny problem of the relationship between anthropologists and those involved in military, security and intelligence communities. As an effort to step away from grand proclamations towards thinking about what actual anthropologists in actual situations do and the decisions they make, the committee is putting together a case book in anthropological ethics. In fact, they’re looking for contributors:

We need more cases and are actively working our own networks to encourage our colleagues to provide material for the book. Rob Albro and I are spearhending this project. We have contacted friends and colleagues who work in federal agencies, but we are also interested in talking to anthropologists who self-identify as having some involvement in military, intelligence, or other forms of national security work, or who have studied or critiqued some form of national security practice. Rather than define “national security,” we are asking our contributors to tell us what that category means in their work-lives, because we think it is important that anthropologists in national security explain what this sweeping affiliation actually means. The cases must be grounded in real-world experience, even if the details are disguised; but to ensure anonymity, we are working collaboratively with our contributors to make appropriate, case-by-case decisions about publishing the contributor’s identities and disguising identifying details, such as precise places or institutions or names.

We expect to publish this case collection as a set of discussion materials for use in classrooms. We are also talking with other AAA committees involved in ethics to develop mechanisms for expanding and maintaining grounded conversations about ethics, perhaps in the form of an ethics blog, an annual update to the casebook which we hope to be made available online, or regular sessions at the Annual Meetings where we can present and debate particularly provocative or timely cases. We are also open to any creative suggestions about how maximize the relevance of this casebook, as a point of reference in ongoing disciplinary discussion on ethics, disciplinary practice, and security.

via CEAUSSIC: Ethics Casebook « American Anthropological Association.

Now, on the one hand, this seems an exactly appropriate move. On the other hand, I find interesting the lack of involvement in these discussions (at least so far, as far as I know) by any of us who understand ourselves as working on “the police”.

I’m just thinking on my feet a bit here, but I can come up with a few reasons why this might be:

Demographics. People who are part of these conversations tend to be already firmly established in the field–it’s unlikely that a junior scholar (which all of us are) gets asked to be a part of such things, and conversely, it’s not really the kind of thing junior scholars are burning to be a part of–careers aren’t exactly made on ethics committees.
Conceptualizing “police” and “security”. The problem with possibility #1 is that there’s no “old-school” police studiers either (although who that might include, I think, is a good question). This suggests the much more interesting possibility that the lack of police-studiers has more to do with an as-yet (as far as I can tell) unremarked contour of the ethical problem itself–an ethical element that distinguishes the types of violence the police use, and/or anthropologists’ relationship to it, versus the military. I haven’t quite got my finger on what that might be, but I think it might be an interesting place to try to work through the particular stakes of “anthropoliteia”…
No good reason. Of course, perhaps I’m over-thinking this and one of us should offer to contribute to the casebook

Thoughts?

Commentary & Forums

Deja vu all over again: the recurring problem of post-social policing in France

An update along the lines of our continued interest in policing “after the financial crisis”…

Le Monde reports that, come January 2010, there will be a full stop on the deployment of the unités territoriales de quartier (UTEQ), the socially-oriented policing groups developed by Nicolas Sarkozy after the banlieue riots of 2007 (and after he had virtually eliminated another socially-oriented style of policing, in 2002, known as the police de proximité).

The reason? Minister of the Interior Brice Hortefeux explains that he doesn’t have the means (“moyens”) to implement the program in light of the loss of 2,000 posts this year. This doesn’t mean a complete loss of on-the-ground policing, however (the translation is my own):

Le rapport prône également l’élaboration d’un diagnostic “approfondi” dans chaque territoire et un “partenariat sérieux” avec les élus. Un tel scénario présenterait l’avantage de combler les trous, mais mettrait à bas la philosophie même du dispositif : être en contact régulier avec la population.

[The report also argues for a “deeper” diagnostic analysis in each territory, and a “serious partnership” with elected officials. This scenario has the advantage of filling the holes in the budget while having at its core the same philosophy: to be in regular contact with the population]

So we’re back to exactly the point we were at in 2002, when Sarozy dismissed the police de proximite as irresponsibly uneconomical even while those on the left emphasized that close contact with those being policed is essential for proper police work.

This is the “problem of a post-social police” that I wrote about in my dissertation (and which I’ve been trying to develop in an article I’ve been working on): how to devise a style of policing once the object to which its been oriented (which it helped create)–the social, as represented in a population–becomes only one in a larger array of governing objects? This is the question police, and we as social scientists, still face and for which there are as yet no adequate answers…

Commentary & Forums

Reflections on Police Violence at Berkeley

I’ve been meaning to provoke a bit more discussion regarding the confrontation between police and protesters at UC Berkeley a couple of weeks ago (although I did post something on the matter before the Nov 20th occupation), but the demands of teaching and preparing for AAA’s have been forestalling my best intentions. On top of that, to be honest, i’m not sure what I think about it. I’m left, mostly, with a bunch of half-articulated questions. Aaron Bady, a graduate student in English at Berkeley has some reflections along that line over at The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Some sort of administration response to the occupation was inevitable, of course. But why was it necessary to direct police violence against the students outside Wheeler Hall? (In fact, the university has called for an independent investigation of police actions and the university’s own decisions that resulted in the police being called onto the campus.) The more the riot police surrounded Wheeler, the more students came out to watch. But the police treated that assembly of peaceful spectators like a clear and present danger, pushing and shoving back students whose crime seemed to be their very presence on their own campus. I cannot overstate how pointless and stupid it was. The police had marked off a perimeter around the building with crime-scene tape, and I have yet to hear the allegation that a single student ever tried to cross it. But when the police began to set up metal barricades, they ordered students to move back as they smashed the barricades into the front row of students. Students who didn’t respond instantly were beaten with batons; students who touched the barricades had their hands pounded with force enough to break bones.

via Making Sense of Senseless Violence at Berkeley – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In response to these questions Bady makes some gestures towards both Althusser and Weber and, while I think both are important routes to traverse, I think the tone in the passage above is probably the most appropriate–simultaneously critical and perplexed. How can we proceed and maintain its tenor?

Announcements, Conferences

Panels on Policing & Security at the 2009 American Anthropoligical Association Annual Meetings

I’ve compiled a list of panels and individual papers on security and policing-related issues at the upcoming AAA meetings. You can see them below.

I’d like to give a special shout-out to the panel THE END/S OF POLICING: ETHNOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES ON POLICE POWER (Fri., 8:00-9:45 AM in rm 406) organized by the newest anthropolitician, William Garriott of James Madison University, also featuring myself, Michelle Stewart, Thom Chivens, Eva Harmon and Mindie Lazarus-Black of Temple University. It should be good times.

Other than that, the following look interesting (panels are in bold):

Continue reading →

Blotter

More on Racial Profiling Allegations in Lake County

From the Lake County News article by Elizabeth Larson:

Deputy’s association calls racial profiling allegations false; sheriff plans to release documents
Written by Elizabeth Larson
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
LAKE COUNTY – On Monday, the county’s sheriff’s deputy association called allegations of racism and racial profiling within their ranks untrue.

Following an emergency meeting held Monday morning, the Lake County Deputy Sheriff’s Association issued a statement in response to allegations made in the Bay Area media by Deputy Francisco Rivero and former department members Kip Ringen and Brian Lande.

“These false allegations are an insult to the hard working men and women of Lake County’s law enforcement,” said association President Gary Frace in the written statement.

On Monday Rivero, Ringen and Lande all stood by their comments.

Their allegations – that some of the agency’s deputies have made arrests and traffic stops based on race – were the focus of a television report last week. Rivero said the interviews they gave were filmed in May.

The claims were cause for alarm from fellow deputies.

“On behalf of the Lake County Deputy Sheriff’s Association, we adamantly deny the allegations made by Frank Rivero, Kip Ringen and Brian Lande that racism and racial profiling are rampant within the Lake County Sheriff’s Department,” Frace’s statement said.

“The Lake County Deputy Sheriff’s Association members are extremely competent and professional men and women who strive to serve the community each and every day,” the statement continued. “We are dedicated to working with the administration and the community to establish a safe and secure place for the residents and visitors of Lake County.”

The statement went on to insist that association members “do not condone any racism, racial profiling, or discrimination of any kind and will not tolerate any such action.”

It also noted that the group is consulting with its attorneys regarding the claims and will comment further in the near future pending an investigation.

In a separate action, Sheriff Rod Mitchell said he’s planning to respond to the allegations by releasing on Tuesday documents and a time line of events to show how his agency has dealt with the issues.

Mitchell said the sheriff’s office has investigated every incident of alleged racial profiling that’s been raised, with one still under investigation that’s based on the statements of Solano County defense attorney Nick Falloy.

Falloy claimed to have seen a deputy slap a Hispanic man on the back of the head during an arrest he witnessed while on a ride-along with his longtime friend, Lande. That incident, Mitchell alleged, wasn’t reported until 10 months later.

Rivero, who was surprised to hear of the deputy association’s statement and the emergency meeting, said he stands by his assertions, including that fellow deputies have called him racial epithets including “wetback.”

One fellow deputy also allegedly called Rivero – whose family came to the United States from Cuba when he was a child – a “Cuban drug dealer.”

Rivero said he’s concerned that if deputies will say those things to one of their own, they’ll do worse things to the Hispanic community at large.

Both Rivero and Lande said a few deputies also were known to make anti-gay remarks.

Rivero and Lande said they’ve seen Hispanics called “Joses.” Rivero said he’s seen Mexicans handcuffed to a deputy’s patrol car. Lande said a deputy specifically instructed him to profile Hispanics.

In addition, Rivero contended that the association meeting was called incorrectly, but Frace said, based on the bylaws, the board can call an emergency meeting at any time.

A regular meeting of the general membership is scheduled for Tuesday, Frace said. It’s 65 members include deputies, first line supervisors at the rank of sergeant and investigators with the Lake County District Attorney’s Office.

Frace said deputies are starting to second-guess themselves on the streets because of the allegations and the publicity they’re generating. That second-guessing, he said, could impact deputies’ safety.

Deputy Michael Sobieraj, who has been with the department eight years – first as a correctional officer and more recently as a deputy – said he’s never seen the kinds of racism alleged in his time there.

Sobieraj said they had a few days’ notice that the report was coming out, and that it was upsetting to watch.

Adding to the situation is that Rivero is challenging Sheriff Rod Mitchell in next year’s election, as Lake County News reported in September. His run for sheriff is aimed at changing the atmosphere, Rivero said.

“My concern is people need to be treated fairly and without prejudice,” Rivero said. “We wield a lot of power here.”

Concerns raised about how complaints were made

Rivero accused Frace and the association of making the Monday statement as a way of hurting his campaign for sheriff, claiming that the association’s board is pro-Mitchell. He also accused Frace of trying to talk him out of running.

Frace, a deputy of four years and president of the association for the past year, said he has no issue with Rivero seeking the sheriff’s job, and that he didn’t try to talk Rivero out of anything.

“What we have a problem with is Frank continually runs us into the ground, in his actions and words,” said Frace.

Rivero said he thinks only a “handful” – or as many as half a dozen – of the department’s deputies are part of the problem. “I never said it was everyone,” he explained, adding he also didn’t say the issues were “rampant.”

Ringen estimated that as much as a third of the deputies are somehow involved in unfair treatment.

Another concern for the deputies association, said Frace, is that Rivero never brought his reports about racism and racial profiling to them. Neither did Lande, nor did Ringen, who preceded Frace as the association president, Frace said.

Rivero concurred that, “officially,” he didn’t take his concerns to the association. He said he did take the matter to the sheriff personally and, when he couldn’t get anywhere, he went to the county’s administration and the Board of Supervisors, which resulted in an investigation.

Mitchell countered that Rivero never came to him about the allegations, but went to the board on March 27, several weeks after he was passed over for promotion in a sergeant’s test.

Lande, who Mitchell said gave a resignation letter dated March 20 before leaving for another law enforcement agency, joined Rivero in that complaint to the board.

That complaint included allegations by Falloy, who Lande had invited on a ride-along around Memorial Day of 2008, Lande said.

They were at a sobriety checkpoint when Falloy allegedly witnessed a deputy slap a Hispanic man in the back of the head during an arrest. Lande said he didn’t personally see the incident.

Mitchell questioned why Lande waited 10 months to make that complaint. “When did Falloy tell Lande, when did Lande tell anyone else?” he asked.

Lande admitted that the sheriff is right – it was many months later before he made the report. That’s because he was afraid of retaliation.

Falloy “wanted to say something immediately,” but Lande said he asked him not to. “I was still on probation and afraid of losing my job,” and had already made an internal affairs complaint against another deputy for safety concerns, Lande said.

Because of making that complaint, Lande was told he would never make the SWAT team.

Lande said he feels guilty because he didn’t speak up sooner.

Ringen, who was aware of deputies targeting Hispanics, said he didn’t report it to senior officials because he claimed everyone knew it was going on.

Mitchell agreed that Ringen never reported racial profiling during his time with the agency. “That was never something he ever mentioned.”

He questioned when Ringen became aware of the issues leading to the race-based allegations he’s making and when he decided to report them. “Those are the key questions,” he said, noting peace officers have a duty to report crimes and civil rights violations in a timely manner.

This past April 15, Ringen – who just turned 57 – retired after nearly 27 years with the sheriff’s office.

At the time of his retirement Ringen said he had been on administrative leave for just over four months.

While he said he hadn’t previously reported racist remarks, he said he did take information about the race-based harassment against Rivero to the sheriff’s administration on Dec. 4, 2008.

Shortly after taking that action, Ringen said he was placed on leave with internal affairs investigations leveled against him accusing him of calling a fellow sergeant a name and not following a direct order.

“I wasn’t going to continue to go through the humiliation of what Mitchell was putting me through,” said Ringen, explaining that he decided to retire. “The hunt was on.”

During the summer, Ringen – who had considered running for sheriff – decided instead to endorse Rivero. “I believe that Frank is truly a better candidate and I think he has a lot more to give the citizens of Lake County.”

He said that shortly afterward he received a call from a friend who was a district attorney’s investigator, telling him he could no longer come into the office to visit. “I’ve been basically cut off from law enforcement in Lake County,” Ringen said.

Sheriff: Investigations have taken place

Rivero is one of two people in the sheriff’s office who have filed complaints with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, as Lake County News has reported.

Everyone – including Rivero – is limited on what they can say about the EEOC investigation at this point, but Rivero stated in a previous interview with Lake County News that the issues involved lack of merit-based promotions at the sheriff’s office and mistreatment of minorities by certain deputies. He indicated that he’s willing to sign a waiver to have the information released to the public.

Both Ringen and Lande said they gave statements to the EEOC on Rivero’s behalf.

County Counsel Anita Grant told Lake County News on Monday that the report the county completed earlier this year on Rivero’s complaint was sent to the EEOC, which will decide at some point if further action is taken.

While she said the report may be disclosable at some point, it can’t be released publicly while the EEOC investigation is taking place, and she has no time estimate for completion based on the EEOC being “woefully understaffed.”

Rivero also complained to the US Department of Justice. A US Attorney’s Office spokesman could not be reached for comment late Monday. Rivero said he was told by an individual within the DOJ’s Civil Rights division that the matter was being looked into.

Mitchell said his department has a long history of responding to complaints and making sure they’re appropriately investigated.

He said he went to Rivero this past May 18 for information about his allegations, and initially was put off.

Mitchell said every issue brought to his attention was investigated, including charges that deputies were targeting Hispanics for selective enforcement at driving under the influence checkpoints. There were resolutions and the resulting discipline was appropriate, he said.

One investigation remains open, said Mitchell – that regarding what Falloy said he saw during the ride-along.

Since the television broadcast there are new allegations. Mitchell said his department is exploring claims that Ringen himself made inappropriate comments.

Since the allegations have gone public, Lande said he’s been receiving hateful e-mails making personal attacks on him. “I knew that might happen.”

Lande said all he had wanted was an investigation.

“My hope is just that this will stop, not that it’s going to turn into a shouting match,” said Lande.

E-mail Elizabeth Larson at elarson@lakeconews.com . Follow Lake County News on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LakeCoNews and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lake-County-News/143156775604?ref=mf .

Commentary & Forums

Jonathan Simon’s provocative thoughts on the UC Strike

Over at Governing through Crime, UC Professor Jonathan Simon has some provocative words for those participating in the current 3-day UC strike:

….We ought to be united in mobilization to save higher education in California. But in choosing to make the fight a convenient and ideologically satisfying (but for the most part phony) story about privatization, down-sizing, and pernicious, corporate minded university leadership, UC’s unions and their student and faculty allies are missing a historic opportunity to engage our fellow citizens in a critical dialog about our state’s future.

That future has been mortgaged to expensive dysfunctional prisons and a bipartisan law-enforcement establishment that is committed to mass incarceration at any price. But across three decades in which that project of exiling tens of thousands of largely poor and minority Californians to a prison archipelago of mammoth proportions (which yet remains grotesquely overcrowded) has been constructed, the supporters of higher education in this state have remained silent, assuming that the incarceration of people who don’t go to college anyway is not our problem. Now the chickens have come home to roost.

via Governing through Crime: Strike Against Prisons not Education.

I think Simon is dead on here, and offers a framing that explains some of the ambivalence I’ve had about the political mobilization that’s been developing.

Most of that ambivalence, I think, revolves around my hesitation at some of the explanatory narratives that have been used as organizational and motivational tools by unions and protesters… what Simon calls the”convenient and ideologically satisfying (but for the most part phony) story about privatization, down-sizing, and pernicious, corporate minded university leadership”.

Part of what I’ve been trying to point out, both vis-a-vis the strike and in my work on French policing, is that–as both Max Weber and Walter Benjamin have shown–all politics is necessarily about violence. This includes, especially includes, such mundane acts of governance as budgetary allocations. As everyone from Michel Foucault to Nikolas Rose have also tried to show, these decisions are literally choices between life and death. This is one aspect of what scholars are referring to when they talk about the biopolitical.

On the other hand, Californians are not completely comfortable with this violence and, for good reasons which I’ve also tried to explore, have tried to devise ways to limit it as much as possible.

What Jonathan’s work in Governing through Crime has shown, however, is that one of the few remaining–maybe the only remaining–domain in which the violence of governance seems legitimate to American voters is in the domain of crime control and punishment. It therefore has become the trope through which all American governance is filtered.

What we’re left with is, on the one hand, a massively inflated, impractical and unjust incarceration system and–importantly–on the the other hand, no way of conceiving any other legitimate form of governance.

This is not a question of corporate greed versus educational egalitarianism, or even good guys versus bad guys (as much as I’d like to hate on Mark Yudof along with everyone else), but of finding a way–literally–of justifying the very real kinds of violence involved in supporting education; of including higher education into the political calculus of life and death.