Policing the Pandemic

Fatsis, Lambros; Lamb, Melayna

doi:10.2307/j.ctv249sg07

Cited by 3 publications

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“…Critical criminologists are beginning to document and analyse how the implementation of government measures to stop the spread of COVID-19 can target and disproportionately impact marginalised groups (Brown, 2021;Suhomlinova et al, 2022;Vegh Weis and Magnin, 2021;Vogl et al, 2021). Pandemic policing has been an important arena where inequalities have unfurled (Boon-Kuo et al, 2021;Fatsis and Lamb, 2021;Lelliott et al, 2021;Stanley and Bradley, 2021;Waight et al, 2021). In Australia, this has included media reports of 'unfair' COVID fining practices that amplify existing inequalities experienced by youth, homeless and First Nations people (Fox Koob, 2021); the selective application of restrictions on movement applied to lower socioeconomic areas; and detention orders issued without warning to public housing tower residents in Melbourne.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘It is not about punishment, it’s about protection’: Policing ‘vulnerabilities’ and the securitisation of public health in the COVID-19 pandemic

Russell

Phillips

Gaylor

et al. 2022

Criminology & Criminal Justice

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This article advances a critical analysis of the concept of ‘vulnerability’ and highlights the ways in which it can work to justify the pre-emptive detention and over-policing of marginalised populations. Building on a historical analysis of the entanglement between public health directives and carceral techniques of securitisation, we provide a contemporary case study of the ‘hard lockdown’ of nine public housing towers in Melbourne, Australia in July 2020, at the start of the city’s second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. A thematic analysis of media discourses surrounding this event reveals that tower residents were constructed as vulnerable across four interconnecting discourses: spatially, culturally, behaviourally and psychologically. This enabled government actors to frame the exceptional mobilisation of police powers and detention directives to peoples’ homes as caring measures, despite their punitive optics and effects. Our analysis suggests that the pandemic has heightened the securitisation of public health measures, which can extend notions of racial inferiority and pathology, and compound social and economic inequalities. It indicates the need for further interrogation of the nexus between ‘care’ and control and the intensification of police powers in times of crisis.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘It is not about punishment, it’s about protection’: Policing ‘vulnerabilities’ and the securitisation of public health in the COVID-19 pandemic

Russell

Phillips

Gaylor

et al. 2022

Criminology & Criminal Justice

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Copping the blame: the role of YouTube videos in the criminalisation of UK drill music

Schwarze

Fatsis²

2022

Pop. Mus.

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UK drill music frequently features as a prime suspect in newsrooms and courtrooms that charge it with driving the ‘knife crime epidemic’ in Britain's major conurbations. Such prejudicial assumptions about the role of drill in inciting violence are largely unfounded, but nevertheless inform criminal justice policy that leads to unjust and discriminatory outcomes. While drill rappers consciously post violent content on YouTube to increase viewership and gain popularity, the role of YouTube in facilitating and profiting from this traffic in violent imagery is rarely questioned in criminal proceedings – enabling, as it does, the weaponisation of such videos as ‘bad character evidence’ in court. Drawing on a selection of YouTube videos that represent drill rappers as dangerous ‘criminals’, this article argues that such videos function as a resource for the criminalisation of drill by police and prosecutors who present drill lyrics as personal testimony that is robbed of its fictive qualities, and makes rappers vulnerable to prejudicial ruling and discriminatory treatment within the criminal justice system.

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“Little wars with the police”: Aesthetic arsenals and intellects of insult

Wall,

McClanahan

2024

Crime, Media, Culture

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This paper describes the contemporary entanglement of “fuck the police” (FTP) and “all cops are bastards” (ACAB), locating each as examples of a growing rejection of an immiserating police power. We argue that these confrontational phrases emerge from the policed classes as relatively precise political diagnoses of a police power that is elementally concerned with the fabrication of capital’s social, racial, economic, and aesthetic order(s). In our view, the anti-police vitality communicated in these and other crude, combative, and dismissive symbolic confrontations with police is part of the necessary conditions for the revolutionary pursuit of a livable future.

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Policing the Pandemic

Cited by 3 publications

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‘It is not about punishment, it’s about protection’: Policing ‘vulnerabilities’ and the securitisation of public health in the COVID-19 pandemic

‘It is not about punishment, it’s about protection’: Policing ‘vulnerabilities’ and the securitisation of public health in the COVID-19 pandemic

Copping the blame: the role of YouTube videos in the criminalisation of UK drill music

“Little wars with the police”: Aesthetic arsenals and intellects of insult

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