Micol Seigel

Abstract

Present ad hoc outcries about police excesses such as shootings of young black men on the streets and mass incarceration miss the point about the nature and role of the police, argues the author. Coining her own counter-category, ‘violence work’, she shows how the police carry out violence work for the state; policing being the quintessential translation of state power. In a considered argument taking in the history of colonial policing, the development of racial capitalism and US foreign intervention, the article discusses a number of fallacies about policing: that it is civilian and distinguishable from the military; that it is a public service rather than a private endeavour; and that it is locally based and municipally controlled. Policing is in fact the human-scale expression of the state. She discusses a number of state theorists from Adam Smith, to Poulantzas, Foucault, Agamben and Hall and contemplates the role of the state to the market. The piece lifts the assumptions about public safety, state/private sector, place and scale to reveal the ideological landscape that legitimates state-market violence.

Keywords

Mass criminalisation and neoliberalism, Movement for Black Lives, police-military collaboration, private v public policing, race as a technology of rule, racial capitalism, state-market violence, ‘violence work’

From: Race & Class 2018 59 (4)

Editor: Wang Yi