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The infralegal system of order maintenance in Santiago streets and the pains of policing
Fri, September 13, 5:00 to 6:15pm, Faculty of Law, University of Bucharest, Floor: Ground floor, Amphitheater 2 „Nicolae Titulescu”Abstract
I have been researching the messy and complex legal framework that bans certain behaviors in public spaces and provides legal power to police for order maintenance (Irarrázabal 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022). However, the state regulation of this social sphere goes far beyond this legal straitjacket. Using a normative social-legal methodology (Lacey 1996), in the current work I explore the existence of “informal” tools and state-like actors which appear to be the prevalent mechanisms of order control of daily life in Santiago streets. Bringing together the legal framework and those informal mechanisms I aim to gain understanding of the penal actualities of everyday policing (Duff and Garland 1994) and the pains it provokes (Newburn and Jones, 2022 and Harkin, 2015), broaden our compression of punitive state power.
After describing the “legal system of the streets”, I will share the results of a fieldwork developed in 2023 in Santiago, Chile, in which several informal mechanisms of order maintenance were examined. I will describe the existence of actors exercising coercion whose relation with the state is obscure, such as the so-called “agentes de copamiento” (space-filling agents) who walk around public spaces dressed in black with their faces covered and wearing devices for personal protection. I will also describe the consistent use of indeterminate methods of control by those actors such as space occupation, seizure of belonging, questioning, and “retentions”. I will further my analysis by focusing on a case study regarding the persecution of street sellers and sex workers. I will conclude by showing that when looking from the point of view of those citizens subjected to these control mechanisms, a different authoritative system of urban order control arises. This is an opaque system and very questionable from the rule of law standards which anyway is experienced as compulsory.