Blurring Public Health and Public Safety: Policing in Municipal Crisis Governance

• In Event: Crime, Law and Deviance Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 3: Criminal Justice System Actors (1)

Abstract

Since 2020, intersecting crises—including ongoing anti-Black police violence, the COVID-19 pandemic, and rising homelessness—have raised questions around how the state approaches public health and public safety. In this paper, we examine how a small, progressive local government responded to these overlapping crises within its Public Health and Public Safety Committee. Drawing on public materials from 50 committee meetings, we conduct a systematic content analysis of meeting minutes and a digital ethnography of video footage to describe the extent of police involvement in emergent public health and public safety initiatives over a six-year period. We find that, though city officials adopted more critical stances on policing following the racial reckoning, the police remained integrated into approaches to crises that were technically rooted in public health frameworks. We point to the utility of analysis over time, across substantive problems faced by the state, and outside of conventional public safety activities when investigating the role of the police in municipal governance.

Author

• Daanika Gordon, Tufts University