Table Of ContentWriting the World of Policing
Writing the World of Policing
The Difference Ethnography Makes
Edited by Didier Fassin
The University of Chicago Press
CHICAGO & LONDON
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2017 by The University of Chicago
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Published 2017
Printed in the United States of America
26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-49750-1 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-49764-8 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-49778-5 (e-book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226497785.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fassin, Didier, editor.
Title: Writing the world of policing : the difference ethnography makes /
edited by Didier Fassin.
Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes
index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017005978 | ISBN 9780226497501 (cloth : alk.
paper) | ISBN 9780226497648 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226497785
(e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Police. | Law enforcement—Fieldwork. | Law
enforcement—Research—Methodology. | Social sciences—Research—
Methodology. | Law and the social sciences.
Classification: LCC HV7897.W75 2017 | DDC 363.2—dc23 LC record
available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017005978
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992
(Permanence of Paper).
Contents
INTRODUCTION Ethnographying the Police
Didier Fassin
PART I : Position
ONE Accountability: Ethnographic Engagement and the Ethics of the Police
(United States)
Steve Herbert
TWO Complicity: Becoming the Police (South Africa)
Julia Hornberger
THREE Intimacy: Personal Policing, Ethnographic Kinship, and Critical
Empathy (India)
Beatrice Jauregui
FOUR Affect: The Virtual Force of Policing (Taiwan)
Jeffrey T. Martin
PART II : Observation
FIVE Predicament: Interpreting Police Violence (Mozambique)
Helene Maria Kyed
SIX Morality: Understanding Police Training on Human Rights (Turkey)
Elif Babül
SEVEN Experience: Being Policed as a Condition of Life (Chile)
Clara Han
EIGHT Aspiration: Hoping for a Public Policing (Bolivia)
Daniel M. Goldstein
PART III : Description
NINE Sense and Sensibility: Crafting Tales about the Police (Thailand)
Duncan McCargo
TEN Detention: Police Discretion Revisited (Portugal)
Susana Durão
ELEVEN Alibi: The Extralegal Force Embedded in the Law (United States)
Laurence Ralph
TWELVE Boredom: Accounting for the Ordinary in the Work of Policing
(France)
Didier Fassin
Index
INTRODUCTION
Ethnographying the Police
Didier Fassin
Law and order arise out of the very processes which they govern.
—Bronislaw Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society
(1926)
The police have for a long time been an object of interest—and passions—
within society. For more than half a century, they have also been a subject of
research—and debates—within the social sciences, significantly contributing
to the renewal of criminology. In recent years, however, this dual trend has
become more pronounced, and policing has come to occupy an increasing
place in the public sphere as well as in the scientific field: new issues have
called for new approaches.
On the one hand, there has been a growing concern regarding law
enforcement practices, particularly in poor neighborhoods and toward racial
and ethnic minorities. The implication of the police in the death of young
men of color in Aulnay-sous-Bois in 2005, Tottenham in 2011, and Ferguson
in 2014, among many others, and the impunity from which they have
benefitted, have caused major urban unrest in France, the United Kingdom,
and the United States, respectively, revealing the moral gap between the law
enforcement institution and the population that it is supposed to protect.1
However, these incidents have not been limited to Western countries, and,
although they have received less international attention, tragic encounters
with the police resulting in killings have become an increasing source of
preoccupation in the global South, from Brazil to South Africa, from Egypt to
India. Yet, more than the novelty of these phenomena—or even their
aggravation, for which little evidence can be provided in the absence of
continuous statistics and homogenous data—it is their rising visibility
through traditional and social media as well as political discourses on law and
order and social mobilizations of citizens protesting abuses that explain
contemporary anxiety. The shooting, beating, or harassing by the police of
people belonging to underprivileged classes and groups has long been a
common fact without turning into a public concern. It has become one when
the experience of those affected has been exposed, thus rendering denial no
longer possible.2 But simultaneously, beyond these tragic episodes, law
enforcement has exercised an increasing fascination within society, as is
manifest in the media with the multiplication of news reports, reality shows,
television series, documentaries, and films dedicated to all aspects—actual or
fictional—of policing, from patrol work to criminal investigation, from the
war on drugs to the paramilitarization of special units.3 Whether criticized or
praised, respected or feared, the police have become a major controversial
figure in the contemporary world, while law and order policies have tended to
disseminate globally.
On the other hand, there has recently been a renewal in research on
policing, both within the field of criminology, via the contestation of the
dominant classical and positivist paradigms by critical, cultural, and feminist
approaches, and within the humanities and the social sciences, through novel
theoretical as well as empirical inquiry. An interesting trend of this renewal
has been what could be called the reinvention of police ethnography. Indeed,
there exists an important tradition of qualitative and observational approach
in research on law enforcement.4 One could even argue that most classics in
criminology have been nourished by the intimate knowledge of the field
acquired by their authors, which allowed for their deeply informed
interpretation of police work and organization.5 However, in their writings,
accounts of fieldwork were often limited and illustrative, as is the case with
the sociological literature of symbolic interactionism, which exercised a
significant influence on this approach in criminology. Vignettes and excerpts
served to exemplify general points.6 Rarely were they the matter of a specific
reflection on the conditions of their collection, the modalities of their
restitution, and their various epistemological, ethical, and political
implications.7 Furthermore, in later studies, the expanding prominence of
quantitative surveys and experimental studies contributed to the
marginalization of qualitative and observational works while at the same time
theoretical elaborations on policing tended to be more valued than empirical
research on the ground. Ethnography was often ignored or even disqualified
as deceptive since it relied on a limited number of cases reflecting a specific
setting and subjectively assessed by the researcher.8 Over the past decade,
however, things have begun to change as criminologists have rediscovered
the merits of participant observation and ethnographers have showed interest
in the study of policing. Anthropology in particular, which had remained
almost absent from this field since Michael Banton’s seminal study of the
British policeman fifty years ago, has significantly invested it anew.9 Today,
in different parts of the world, anthropologists are conducting fieldwork on
policing and bringing an ethnographic gaze to the study of law enforcement.10
But they do not have the monopoly of police ethnography: other scholars are
also part of this scientific move, which increasingly finds a legitimate place
within criminology.11 The most important implication of the ethnographic
shift is that, far from being a mere empirical addition to existing
methodological procedures, it obliges social scientists to reevaluate both the
theoretical self-evidence of their object (policing) and their very relation to
their subjects (the police).
The present volume is a collective attempt to link these two major trends:
the increasing significance of policing issues in contemporary society and the
growing salience of police ethnography for their comprehension.
So, what difference does police ethnography make? This interrogation can be
understood from three complementary perspectives: What difference does it
make for the study of the police? What difference does it make for the
practice of ethnography? Finally, what difference does it make for the
societies where it is conducted? In our chapters, we propose various answers
to these questions, highlighting the relevance of ethnographic insight for the
analysis of law enforcement and the contribution of the inquiry into policing
to ethnographic practice as well as the pertinence of this approach for
contemporary societies. But before going further, two prefatory comments
may be necessary.
First, what is ethnography is generally taken for granted, namely as an
equivalent, more or less, to fieldwork, participant observation, or qualitative
approach. It is, however, much richer and more complex a practice than these
self-evident equivalences imply.12 I suggest it has three dimensions. It is a
method of scientific research, requiring our long-term presence, an intimate
knowledge of people and places, the acquisition of the local language and the
identification of the local codes: more than being there, as is often said, it
involves living with, at least for certain periods of time, talking to, learning
from. It is also an experience of social worlds, resulting from an encounter
with people generally different from us and with a culture foreign to us, but
developing into a familiarization through a combination of reciprocal trust
and mutual recognition: as time goes by, we do not only get to know our
interlocutors better but we also realize that we have much more in common
with them than what we had initially imagined. Finally, it is an operation of
singular writing, that is, of transcription and translation, of putting into words
and ideas what has been seen and heard, of giving a meaningful order to a
succession of facts and events that may seem completely disparate at first
sight: it all starts with a blank sheet or a black screen. These three aspects—
method, experience, writing—radically contrast with approaches relying on
statistics, questionnaires, or interviews: ethnographers do not look at figures,
but are interested in what is going on; they do not delegate their production of
data to assistants, but are themselves present in the field; they do not ask
standardized questions, but observe scenes and converse with their
protagonists; they do not know in advance what they look for, but try to make
sense of what people do, and how, and why; their mode of thinking is not
deductive but inductive. All these elements differentiate ethnography from
other procedures commonly used in studies on policing, particularly in the
field of criminology, and pose specific epistemological, political, and ethical
problems.
Second, policing also needs to be delimited, if not defined. It can refer to
two quite different kinds of activities. In the usual sense, it corresponds to
law enforcement and peacekeeping, in other words, what police officers and
agencies do: it encompasses a remarkable diversity of practices, from
arresting criminals to containing demonstrations, from ticketing drivers to
assisting accident victims, with the sole common ground that they may at
some point require the recourse to force, as pointed out by Egon Bittner.13 In
its older meaning, it comprises a much wider range of human interventions in
the regulation of society, from public health to child welfare, from the
maintenance of order to the control of morals: this utopic project of
normalization of life initially imagined in the eighteenth century embraces
what Michel Foucault called biopolitics.14 In fact, the contrast between these
two extremes has been reduced in recent years with the expansion of the
spectrum of police activities and the development of new technologies of
surveillance. In the following pages, we focus on the more restrictive
meaning, in other words, on policing as it appears through the presence and
activity of officers as well as other actors involved in issues related to crime
and security, law and order, social control and legitimate violence. This
delimitation is often contested on the ground, as the police can be absent or
inactive, their intervention can be deemed illegal or disproportionate, and the
distinction between official and informal agents can be blurred. This is even
truer since we chose to concentrate our observations on the policing of poor
neighborhoods, underprivileged populations, and marginalized minorities.
Our choice can easily be justified on the grounds that it represents the most
common and often the most problematic activity of law enforcement in peace
times all over the world. It is also where the control of the public order and
the reproduction of the social order get the most confused, where the distance
from professional norms is the most obvious, and where the indulgence of the
authorities with respect to the deviance of their personnel is the highest. In
sum, our decision to focus on this type of policing was not only guided by
theoretical issues of possible comparisons and generalizations of our findings
in various settings, but also by practical considerations with regard to its
social relevance and political implications.
These preliminaries being made, we can now address the two questions of
the contribution of ethnography to the understanding of policing and of the
benefits of studying policing for the practice of ethnography.
What can we learn from an ethnography of policing? Under which
conditions? With which limits? If we consider the two essential characters of
ethnography, namely its reliance on observation and induction, we can infer
two heuristic properties: first, observation confronts discursive propositions
with actual facts, thus allowing for the unveiling of discrepancies between
what is said and what is done, what is presumed to be and what really is;
second, induction restrains preconceived ideas or preformed judgments, since
it does not suppose hypotheses to test or questions to answer, but proceeds by
progressive elaboration of knowledge through the emergence of meanings.
To account for these two properties, let us call the former uncovering and the
latter discovery.
The first heuristic property—uncovering—is of course not specific to the
study of policing. But it is particularly crucial in this case, since policing is an
activity in which legal and normative constraints are important, whereas
discretionary power is the rule in the street. This tension results in potential
irregularity or deviance that officers are not inclined to mention in
questionnaires or interviews but which do not escape observation. Of course,
one can retort that the presence of the ethnographer constitutes a bias as the
agents are on their guard, that it consequently reduces the chances of
witnessing unorthodox practices, and that it allows for the presentation a
portrait of law enforcement more flattering than it would be if the officers
had been on their own. Surprisingly, however, all ethnographic accounts of
policing reveal illegal and abnormal practices such as violent gestures, racist
words, and unlawful acts in much greater quantity than one could have
expected. There are two reasons for this: on the one hand, with time, relations
of trust develop between observer and observed, and the officers’ control
