George Zimmerman and the paradox of “community policing”

• In Event: Transforming Law and Order: The Impact of Justifiable Homicide on American Penality

Abstract

One of the truisms of police studies is that the police are the human community which claim the monopoly of legitimate violence over a given territory and that their claim to being such rests on their status as trained experts in the use of violence. Much of the politics of policing over the last 50 years can be read as a series of ambivalences vis-à-vis this formulation. Probably the most well-known counter-formulation is the group of efforts loosely collected under the aegis of “community policing,” of which the “Neighborhood Watch” program Zimmerman imagined himself as participating in is one variant. Community policing in this form is meant to counteract the concentration of political power; to “democratize” police, in the sense of distributing its power more broadly throughout the demos, to incorporate more people into the ability to shape police, and therefore, its violence. From this perspective, the line between understanding George Zimmerman as a racially paranoid vigilante or as a (still racially paranoid) partisan of community policing is troublingly blurry. As such, the incident can serve as a flashpoint for the problem of thinking though “police” as a phenomenon, fallible and human.

Author

• Kevin Karpiak, Eastern Michigan University