Policing car space and the legal liminality of the automobile

Abstract

The car is a primary locus for police-civilian interaction as measured by routine legal intrusion into the lives of vulnerable populations – communities of color, undocumented immigrants, and those experiencing homelessness in particular. It is the car’s ability to transport bodies as well as its legal liminality as a hybrid public-private space that facilitates such coercive and carceral contact. I therefore argue for the increased inclusion of the car and contact made with its operators and occupants within studies of policing by geographers. In this article, I provide a review of how car space and the automobile have been discussed by social scientists more broadly, followed by a call for geographers to take the lead in centering the car in research looking at everyday policing and routinized state control of people occupying and moving through public space.

Carceral Geographies from Inside Prison Gates: The Micro‐Politics of Everyday Racialisation

“…While we certainly support the use of evocative autoethnographic methodologies and approaches to conducting prison research, here we more analytically engage in writing (“graphy”) about prison culture (“ethnos”) that we have personally experienced and lived (“auto”) (see also Butz and Besio 2009; for an example of autoethnography in geography, see Bloch 2019a, 2019b, 2020b, 2021; and for writing from within the prison gates, see Shabazz 2014). For sociologist and ethnographer Leon Anderson (2006:375), the method of autoethnography, when qualified as “analytical”, refers to research “in which the researcher is (1) a full member in the research group or setting, (2) visible as such a member in published texts, and (3) committed to developing theoretical understandings of broader social phenomena”.…”

Police and policing in geography: From methods, to theory, to praxis

“…Therefore, geographers might stand to become even more adept at putting lived experience into conversation with critical and radical theory, thereby enabling would-be scholars' ability to inform the work on police and prison abolition through praxis. It is here that studies of carcerality and prison research extend the thinking on geographies of policing to accomplish just that-as seen in the works of, for example, Bledsoe and Wright (2018), Bonds (2009), Camp (2016), Gilmore (2007) In my own work, I have addressed policing at a range of scales and incarnations, from how policing is conducted at the behest of security-obsessed liberal residents motivated by aversive racist practices in the context of neoliberal "community" building from a critical theoretical perspective (Bloch & Meyer, 2019), to policing that is willfully misapplied to members of disparate subcultures from a criminological perspective (Bloch, 2019c), and as enacted as deadly use-of-force from a mixed-methods perspective (Bloch & Martínez, 2020), and views of how motorists (Bloch, 2020) and "gang members" are routinely and insidiously policed in the midst of neighborhood change (Bloch, 2019b).…”

Geographies of Policing: Domestic Violence, Mandatory Arrest, and Police Liability

“…This includes illustrating how policing operates as a tool of neoliberal urban governance (Beckett and Herbert 2011; Gilmore 2007; Mitchell 2003; Smith 2001) and how technologies of policing—such as surveillance—reinforce the state’s power to regulate people of colour and the poor (Coleman 2016). Recent legal geographic work has examined increased policing of private spaces, including challenges to protections once afforded through the Fourth Amendment that now affords the police authority to search vehicles (Bloch 2020). Although other methods of policing are emphasised within this work, geographers have underscored “community policing” and “broken windows policing” as emblematic of how the institution of policing furthers neoliberal ideology and practice.…”

“…Yet feminist activists diverged over police involvement in domestic violence, including the extent to which the police should be required to intervene (Miccio 2005). In what would later be coined carceral feminism (Richie 2012), the emphasis on addressing domestic violence through arrest and punitive accountability reaffirmed the battered women's movement as a movement primarily directed by the interests and experiences of white middle class women (Blee and Twine 2001;Mohanty 2003). Women of colour pointed to the inherent racism evident in the criminal legal system and raised alarm about the overreliance on the police to address the problem of domestic violence (Crenshaw 1994;Richie 2000).…”