Policing Precariousness: Accounting for Ontological and Situational Vulnerability

• In Event: Organizational Analysis to Explain Racialization and Other Vulnerability in Policing

Abstract

This paper will consider the conditions of vulnerability in the policing process. Adopting the approaches of Butler (2004), Gilson (2013) and Luna (2009), in this paper we reformulate the concept of vulnerability in departure from conventional paradigms such as ‘increased susceptibility to harm’, ‘vulnerability as weakness’ and ‘difference as vulnerability’. At the centre of popular understandings of vulnerability is the proclaimed invulnerability of the modern liberal subject. What it means to be human, in a thoroughly modern sense, is to be an independent, autonomous self-actualising individual. The processes devised to ameliorate vulnerability are framed as exceptions to the norm of the invulnerable criminal justice actor. This repudiation of our shared ontological vulnerability pathologises interdependence, and policing practices generated from this conceptualisation lead to increasingly costly service enhancements for exceptional groups. Exceptionalising crime justice encounters on the basis of group attribution fails those labelled as such—especially when miscategorised—and those who fail to receive the recognition required for service enhancements. Accounting for our ontological vulnerability and recognising the unique situational characteristics of vulnerability in the criminal justice system necessarily requires us to consider the institutional artefacts that make all criminal justice actors vulnerable.

Authors

• Nicole L. Asquith, Western Sydney University

• Isabelle Bartkowiak-Theron, Tasmanian Institute of Law Enforcement Studies