Policing: Populist Enjoyment and the Unmet Needs of the People

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

This panel proposes to theorize and consider the political significance of contemporary policing's functioning and effects at different sites and scales. Institutionally, policing in the United States is a complex of plural, overlapping, and interlinked jurisdictions including local, regional, state, federal, and private actors. Rather than a "thin" blue line, Lester Spence contends, we see a "thick" blue line. How should we understand the politics of the police? Jinee Lokaneeta depicts the police as "contingent state actors" in her discussion of a police officer killed in India. The significance of this case can be usefully grasped, she urges, through populism's conceptualization of the relation between government and people. Only rarely do political theorists consider the police-protester relation's importance for democratic theory. By looking at the policing of #BLM protests, Paul Passavant argues protest policing's twin tendencies are towards militarized violence, on the one hand, and Deleuzian control technologies, on the other—a combination expressing the post-legitimation state of neoliberal authoritarianism. What are the effects of contemporary policing? Here, Ricky Price explores the public health consequences of policing in light of prisons as sites where vulnerable populations suffer disproportionately from particular forms of disease like HIV/AIDS, TB, and Hepatitis-C. Quinn Lester also considers the damaging effects of policing's hold on society's thinking about government as represented by residents calling the police when they have unmet, and perhaps urgent, social needs. He asks how such needs might be better met by thinking through the question of police abolition. In sum, this round table explores how the political appeal of policing may be enjoyed through an elision of state power and populist appeal crowding out unmet social needs of the people.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Cosponsor

• DIVISION 42: New Political Science

Chair

• Jacqueline Stevens Northwestern University

Presenters

• Lester Kenyatta Spence Johns Hopkins University

• Jinee Lokaneeta Drew University

• Paul A. Passavant Hobart & William Smith Colleges

• Quinn Lester Johns Hopkins University

• J. Ricky Price Hobart and William Smith