Next-Generation Urban Policing: A Pan-Institution Educational Commitment

• In Event: Community Policing, Educational Institutions, and Third-Order Change: The Promise of Interinstitutional Partnerships

Abstract

Over the last eighteen months, a rash of high profile incidents of police brutality in Ferguson, Baltimore and several other US cities have put significant strain on already tenuous relations between the police and the communities of which they are a part. This astonishing escalation in violence deployed against vulnerable (because poor, black and brown) civilian populations by increasingly paramilitarized forces has been decades in the making. How are such displays of brute force—once thought to be a savage relic of antebellum slave societies—linked genealogically to the contemporary mass incarceration experiment begun in the denouement of the civil rights movement which has become the signature development of a post-racial, post-industrial society? Is this shift to penal solutions—separatist, segregationist and isolationist by definition—to all manner of social problems only a law enforcement proclivity or the pervasive preference of a carceral society?

Much has been written about punishment creep throughout US institutions, how a zero tolerance zeitgeist shapes schools as much as prisons. This paper focuses on questions such as: Is such a trajectory reversible? If so, how does law enforcement understand its place in this history so that it can redress and repair the damage it has incurred to communal trust and coherence as well as to broader commitments to democratic freedom and social justice? What responsibility do educational and other anchor institutions in cities across the nation share in producing—but also improving—relations of inequality and exclusion within and across racially defined, managed and contained communities?

I begin with the premise that institutions designed to anchor the civic, cultural and communal life of cities—whether educational, medical, criminal justice oriented—are deeply heterogeneous and contradictory sites. I’ve spent my adult life in high schools and universities and have witnessed the incredible good will and good conscience of its resident teachers. I have also witnessed their incredible benightedness, their complicity and their collusion with respect to the sociopolitical forces that have the potential to improve society but that more often than not impose barriers and constraints, indignities and misery. Neoliberal logics have not just undermined but redefined the mission of social institutions by privatizing, instrumentalizing, downsizing and rationalizing a range of social services and critical access points. As a result, all such institutions are subject to austerity measures that require them to do more with less while serving populations having to negotiate the disruptions, dislocations and indeed dysfunctions associated with a downwardly mobile life for all but the reputed one percent—un- or underemployment, impoverishment, rising divorce, addiction and abuse rates, the dissolution of family life, the myriad and deepening mental health challenges. No contemporary institution has the resources, material or intellectual, to negotiate the complex, knotted crises informing the lives they’re meant to nurture and protect. The drive to sequester, punish and exclude become the default modes of engagement. The question is how universities, police, and hospitals might work together to redress issues that no one entity can handle on its own.

Author

• Susan Searls Giroux, McMaster University