Police and Policing

Abstract

The anthropology of policing draws from a range of intellectual traditions to generate new understandings of the police as an institution and policing as a social practice. This article reviews recent anthropological work on police, situating it in longer-term disciplinary concerns. I begin with the connection between policing and personhood, exploring how the subject–object dynamics of police domination are related to anthropological conceptions of kinship, law, and social control. I then turn to the contribution that anthropological ethnography makes to a critical theory of the relationship between sovereignty, violence, and police power. I conclude by reflecting on the situation of scholarship in our current political environment, suggesting that the anthropological turn to policing is animated, in part, by hope for a better understanding of the nature of moral agency under difficult conditions.

Police Legitimacy and the Norm to Cooperate: Using a Mixed Effects Location-Scale Model to Estimate the Strength of Social Norms at a Small Spatial Scale

“…Neighborhoods with the norm (not) to cooperate: Evidence from ethnographic studies While studies have found significant variation across neighborhoods in willingness to cooperate with police, no quantitative study has addressed the possibility that some of this variation arises from placebased social norms. This is surprising, in part because ethnographic studies have shown considerable variability between communities in norms of cooperation with authorities (for a review, see Martin, 2018). For instance, Stoutland (2001) conducted in-depth interviews with community members in four high-violence neighborhoods in Boston, all of which had been affected by a rise in youth violence.…”

Police Legitimacy and the Norm to Cooperate: Using a Mixed Effects Location-Scale Model to Estimate the Strength of Social Norms at a Small Spatial Scale

“…While studies have found significant variation across neighborhoods in willingness to cooperate with police, no quantitative study has addressed the possibility that some of this variation arises from place-based social norms. This is surprising, in part because ethnographic studies have shown considerable variability between communities in norms of cooperation with authorities (for a review, see Martin 2018). For instance, Stoutland (2001) conducted in-depth interviews with community members in four high-violence neighborhoods in Boston, all of which had been affected by a rise in youth violence.…”

Experiencing police violence and insults: narratives from ethnic minority men in Denmark

“…Expressions and repressions of violence do not stand alone but are shaped by social structures, ideologies and ideas (Ibid.). In that regard, the violence taking place between a policeman and a policed individual is situated within specific historical and cultural conditions of possibility (Martin, 2018). A police officer can be understood as a street-level bureaucrat, who is licenced to manage the state's legitimate monopoly on violence by using discretionary power to manage the problems in which he is implicated (Martin, 2018).…”