“Accidental Intimacies”: Reconsidering Bodily Encounters Between Police and Young People Who Use Drugs

Abstract

Youth who use drugs (YWUD) are likely to encounter the police and experience victimization within those encounters. Negative experiences of police among youth can dramatically undermine youths’ trust in police, making them unlikely to ask for help when they need it. In this article, we use Rance and Fraser’s concept of “accidental intimacies” between staff and people who inject drugs arising in encounters within supervised consumption sites. Their exploration of Sarah Ahmed’s work on the social productivity of emotions argues that new subjectivities that counter or transform stigma and shame surrounding drug use can occur from the space between individuals. For Ahmed “emotions do things, and work to align individuals with collectives—[linking] bodily space with social space—through the very intensity of their attachments.” During 2017–2018, 38 youth (aged 16–30 years) who use drugs in three cities in British Columbia, Canada, were interviewed to explore their encounters (both positive and negative) with police and how these influenced their perceptions of police. In this article, we assert that the dynamic of “we” and “them,” of the YWUD and police, is constituted in part through the powerful emotions created and confirmed by negative bodily encounters where the bodies of youth and police collide through physical and/or verbal contact. The repetition of emotions and objectification through stigma within their communities force some youth to repeatedly confront harmful subjectivities. Rance and Fraser’s work provides possibilities for shifting these stigmatizing subjectivities. For change to occur, addressing the historical and present realities that impact YWUD will help facilitate and enhance more respectful communication and interactions between YWUD and police. Bodily encounters may also present opportunities for both YWUD and police to reflect on the subjectivities that reinforce and are shaped by their negative interactions with one another. Incremental change may be possible as we find new meanings in youths’ understanding of and compassion for police and their work.

‘I’m not going to leave someone to die’: carriage of naloxone by police in Scotland within a public health framework: a qualitative study of acceptability and experiences

“…Community participants recommended that officers should receive more in-depth training to develop understandings of problem drug use and to address stigma. While stigma is present in public attitudes in Scotland [ 48 ], police officers may have a particular tendency to stigmatise people who use drugs, and also be opposed to harm reduction strategies [ 21 , 49 ]. Developing a stigma training course in PS was indicated as a particular objective in the Scottish drugs strategy, ‘Rights, Respect and Recovery’ [ 44 ] and the results of this evaluation lend support to this.…”

The Spaces Between Fault/Lines: Collaborative Politics of Addiction in Japan

“…For example, in Australia, policies adopted to counter methamphetamine use often produced the problems they aimed to “solve,” as “policy can work to instantiate matters and objects as problems even as it actively refuses to confirm them as such outright” (Fraser & Moore, 2011, p. 505). These insights can be observed in many contexts, such as in the case of penal drug policies introduced in Australia that undermine relationships among individuals and their “dependent” families (Walker et al, 2018) and in the links between clinical evidence and policing (Garriott, 2011; Moore, 2007a; Selfridge et al, 2020). The CDS approach often works well with anthropological studies of addiction because they utilize both ethnographic fieldwork and the problematization of tropes based in social policies (Bartoszko, 2019; Fraser & Gordon, 1994; Raikhel & Garriott, 2015).…”

The Liminal Leisure of Disadvantaged Young People in the UK Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Instead, previous and potential ‘hassle’ from the police shaped leisure practices, resulting in the use of more ‘hidden’ public space—or private-in-public spaces—for their leisure practices, away from potential surveillance. This is understandable given that substance use in public spaces is widely subjected to formal and informal control mechanisms (Selfridge et al 2020 ). Indeed, due to various intersecting disadvantages, the young people in the pre-pandemic study were not able to retreat into private houses and virtual spaces for leisure when faced with surveillance, regulation and social control measures.…”

“…COVID-19 has heralded continuity through the familiar presentation of disadvantaged youth as ‘problem population’ alongside changes in the ‘risk’ environments of some young people. Socialisation in public and private spaces is subject to intense public and police scrutiny and increased police targeting and harassment of youth (Selfridge et al 2020 ). State intervention in the lives of young people to ‘control’ their practices within the leisure spaces they create and attend is nothing new.…”