Tag Archives: violence

DragNet

DragNet: May 16 – 31, 2014

militarization of US police

“An armored military assault vehicle was donated to the department by the US military, fueling discussions about whether there should be (or is) a separation of US police and US military.”

The U.S. isn’t the only country experiencing a stark growth in prison populations. While true that the US has the highest proportion of its citizens behind bars, Brazil and China are among other countries recording higher prison population numbers. In honor of the 40th anniversary of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History will be hosting a global conference for social sciences and humanities researchers to discuss the rising role of the prison in the modern age.

A supposedly “shifting” image of the typical heroin user in the 21st century strikingly resembles the rich, white, socialite users of 1880s Boston. A feature by Adam Rathge appeared in Points Blog; chronicling the shift of opiate usage by race and social class during this time frame. Special attention is paid to the impact of state legislation and local law enforcement initiatives prior to the passing of official federal mandates. In other opiate-related news, the question as to whether heroin use should be pursued as a crime versus an illness is being debated in states such as Rhode Island. With this past January seeing a more than doubled rate of lethal heroin overdoses, the state is pushing to equip officers with Narcan to better prevent heroin-related deaths. Read the interview with the state’s Director of Health, Dr. Michael Fine, for details.

$6.2 billion (to most of us) is quite a large sum of money. This is precisely the amount allocated to US police departments by the 41 million speeding tickets issued in any given year. What would happen to law enforcement budgets if cars were (almost magically) able to “drive themselves”? Google’s driverless cars are raising precisely this question among law enforcement officials and civilians alike.

Have you suddenly started noticing people talking a lot about Netflix’s newest series, Orange is the New Black? Even without being caught up, you can still enjoy a roundtable discussion inspired by the show that was hosted by the folks at Public Books.

Is live monitoring of surveillance cameras the way to ensure “effective panopticism”? Syracuse Chief of Police Frank Fowler seems to think so. Earlier in May, Fowler proposed that officers should evolve from their current, reactive use of cameras to respond to crimes that have already committed. Fowler argues that live monitoring of surveillance feeds by officers will convert cameras into a proactive policing tool.

If you’re planning a summer vacation that requires a considerable amount of time in the car, plug into NPR News’ RSS feed we shared last month. A myriad of police-related podcasts are featured, and are sure to make the ride feel faster. In case you exhaust that list, we recommend Archipelago’s feature on policing in downtown Oakland. Listen to Bryan Finoki, Nick Sowers and Javier Arbona as they explore the hyper-policed areas of the former Occupy movement.

Originally published 35 years ago, Policing the Crisis regained the spotlight in our Book Reviews section in May. Merijn Oudenampsen discusses how the book’s message has evolved since its first publication and applies its take-aways to the current climate of Dutch politics.

Speaking of anniversaries, 2014 also marks 10 years since Jacque’s Derrida’s passing. Anthropoliteia circulated information about an upcoming gathering of Derridian legal scholars organized by Critical Legal Thinking. Speakers include Aggie Hirst and Cathering Kellogg.

In other news, Hamtramck, MI police inspired mixed emotions upon the debut of its newest “addition”. An armored military assault vehicle was donated to the department by the US military, fueling discussions about whether there should be (or is) a separation of US police and US military.

Macedonian police also made headlines in May, with ethnic rioting in Skopje provoking criticisms about excessive use of force. Thanks to Tweeter Chris Diming, who provided an additional post from the Independent Balkan News Agency.

Do anthropologists belong in police departments? Anthropoliteia’s newest regular feature –Practicum– debuted with a post from our new author Jennie Simpson. Tune in to read Jennie’s reflections and experiences about what its like to be a social scientist working for/with departments.

 

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Dossiers

Views of Venezuelan Protests, Pt. 4: Looking at The “Collaboration” Between the Police and the Collectives

The editors of Anthropoliteia would like to welcome a special guest post, the fourth in a series from Rebecca Hanson on recent political developments in Venezuela. 

 

A water tower in Catia with Hugo Chávez's face on one side and the face of Lina Ron (founder of the Venezuelan Popular Union party and symbol of La Piedrita, another well known collective) on the other © Richard Snyder 2014

A water tower in Catia with Hugo Chávez’s face on one side and the face of Lina Ron (founder of the Venezuelan Popular Union party and symbol of La Piedrita, another well known collective) on the other © Richard Snyder 2014

In my last post I looked at the security force that is playing the most active role in policing the protests: the National Guard. While police officers overwhelmingly support the National Guard’s participation, there is second group that the police identify as “policing the protests” whose presence they do not condone: the collectives.

The collectives’ relationship to the state and state security forces has garnered much attention in the press since the protests began.  Providing little evidence, recent news reports (the Wall Street Journal , the BBC, and AlJazeera to name a few) have suggested that the police are working alongside and in collaboration with the collectives to repress protestors.  And this past week Human Rights Watch, though avoiding the term “collective,” published a report suggesting that the police and “armed pro-government groups” were in collusion with one another.

But National Bolivarian Police (PNB) officers describe this relationship quite differently, reporting that they must compete with the collectives for territorial control, access to arms, and even state protection.  For them, their relationship to the collectives is one structured by competition, not collaboration. In fact, since the Metropolitan Police in Caracas sided with the opposition in the 2002 coup against Chávez, officers feel that the government trusts the collectives–ideologically aligned with the Bolivarian Revolution–more than the police to work the protests. Though the police as an institution is often defined by its ability to legitimately deploy force in order to protect the state’s interests, officers perceive the collectives as primarily designated by the state to fulfill this function.

In this post, I provide a brief summary of the collectives’ history and then describe how police officers talk about their relationship to the collectives. Continue reading →

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Dossiers

Ethnic Profiling as a Societal Institution in the Netherlands

The editors of Anthropoliteia would like to welcome this special “Dossier” from our own Paul Mutsaers

Psychologism and profiling ‘the other’

It is common knowledge in the sociology of police that law enforcers do not merely apply legal maxims but ‘employ discretion in invoking the law’, as Egon Bittner already put it in 1970 in The Functions of the Police in Modern Society. There is often not much consistency in the application of the law as beat officers have a large leeway when they operate in the blind spot of their desk superiors, that is, on the street. While on the beat, policing may be turned into a mechanism of social ordering that has the potential to significantly alter the life prospects of those who are encountered. When roaming in the districts, containing a demonstration, responding to an emergency call, mediating a conflict, investigating a homicide, or containing a riot, the police are actually (re)producing social hierarchies and differences in the settings in which they operate. Continue reading →

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What's going on in Ukraine?

Police violence and ideas of the state in Ukrainian ‘Euromaidan’

The editors of Anthropoliteia would like to welcome Taras Fedirko with the latest entry in our developing Forum What’s Going on in Ukraine?

Violence as other; other as the authorities

In their responses to police violence during the ‘Euromaidan’in Ukraine, protesters and engaged commentators often located the source of brutality in some sort of unofficial, ‘other’realm within the state. Narratives of police brutality became narratives of the state as the riot police came to be imagined as commanded directly by the president Yanuokovych; authorities were thought to conspire against the Maidan; and snipers shooting at protesters on February 18-20 were said to be ‘Russian-trained.’

My interest here is in how protesters and sympathetic media represented the standoff between Maidan and ‘Berkut’ riot police not so much in terms of the enforcement of public order or contestations over what such order is/should be, but in terms of a confrontation between protesters and the authorities (rather than the police). The term for the ‘authorities’in Ukrainian is vlada, which simultaneously means abstract ‘power’and ‘people in/holding power’. Although it has an official usage (e.g. orhany vlady—state institutions, literally ‘organs of power’), it is crucial that in Ukrainian there is no word for ‘authority’and, I would add, no pragmatic difference between power and authority. The ‘realist’term vlada therefore maps the lack of emic differentiation between the official and unofficial power. I suggest that the displacement of the source of police agency to vlada was premised on understandings of vlada as the source of both official/formal and informal power in the society. Continue reading →

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DragNet

DragNet, March 2014

♫ Duh duh duh duh ♫  The editors of Anthropoliteia would like to introduce yet another new regular feature: DragNet.  An addition to our “Round Ups” series, DragNet will offer monthly highlights of the English-language academic blogosphere for topics related to policing, security, crime and punishment around the world.  We’re thrilled to have Kristin Castner serving as the Section Editor and lead author for the feature. ♫ Duh duh duh duh DUH ♫

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Continue reading →

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Dossiers

Thoughts on policing in Turkey – Football and beyond

The editors of Anthropoliteia would like to welcome a special guest post from Yağmur Nuhrat as part of our series of anthropological reports From the Field

Over the past summer, international audiences became aware of severe police violence during Turkey’s Gezi protests. In summer 2013, what started out as a peaceful demonstration in Istanbul to save a public park quickly led to a national uprising against the government. The resistance was marked with intense police violence in the form of tear gas, plastic bullets and pressurized water from cannons. In October 2013, Amnesty International called these actions “gross human rights violations.” Continue reading →

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In the Journals

In the Journals, Winter 2014

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Welcome to In the Journals, a (roughly) quarterly digest of the latest publications dealing critically with issues of crime, security, punishment, surveillance and law & order. 2014 has already seen a number of articles and whole issues grappling with these problems, the following is a selection for you to peruse at your reading leisure.

Continue reading →

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DragNet

“Today the world, once again, is watching South Africa’s response to 193x285q70kerry-chancepolice violence. Emerging from a violent Apartheid past, the newly branded South African Police Services was meant to be a shining example of how best to protect law and order, while ensuring a free democratic society for all. However, recent events in Ficksburg, Marikana and Cato Crest shake the foundation of this vision.”

Continue reading →

Kerry Chance on South African Policing

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Dispatches

kevinkarpiak's avatarKevin Karpiak's Blog

This post is my first, personal, attempt at refiguring anthropological inquiry after the internet 2.0.  I guess this is just a fancy way of saying that I’m beginning to try to come to terms with doing ethnography after the birth of social media.  For context, my original fieldwork in France, way back between 2003-2005, coincided with Friendster, but that’s about it (it’s no coincidence that it was juring that time that I met my first “blogger”).  I’ve long though about what it would mean to start up a new project in the age of blogging, microblogging, social media and whathaveyou.  I’ve had various personal inspirations, and a few more or less inchoate collaborations (especially through the various iterations of the ARC Collaboratory, whose website seems to be down right now), but, at yet, no sustained engagement.  So here goes.

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Commentary & Forums

Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman and the Anthropology of Police

I’m sure I’m not the only one on this blog who’s been trying to think of a way to approach the whole Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman fiasco.  Like a lot of scholarship, it’s just so hard to figure out what to add to the constant shit-storm of a media frenzy.  But in my Police & Society class at EMU we have broached the topic, and the discussion has been both passionate and useful.

I thought I’d share the online discussion question I just prompted my students with. I’m curious to hear what readers of this blog might have to say.  Here’s the prompt:

So our discussion seems to have gotten us to an interesting place: on the one hand, the question of what to do with George Zimmerman–did he have the right to be policing his neighborhood?  did he have the right to carry and use a gun?  did he have the right to suspect and pursue Trayvon?–brings us back to a question we’ve been asking repeatedly in the class…  What should be the relationship between “police” and “society,” especially when we consider the use of force/power/gewalt?  Should they be fully integral things, so that there’s no distinct institution of policing?  Should there be an absolute distinction, so that only a small community can claim the right to police power?  If the answer is somewhere in the middle, how would that work?

On the other hand, we’ve also been circulating around the question of freedom and security, norms and rights.  Was George Zimmerman policing legitimately when we acted upon his suspicions, regardless of any evidence of law-breaking? Should the goal, the ends, of policing be the maintaince of community norms at the expense of individual liberty, or is a technocratic focus on law enforcement and civil rights the necessary priority of a democratic police force?

Anyone have any thoughts on how we can use some of the ideas and/or authors from this course to help us answer some of these questions?

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