LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE | JULY 2020 3 · G E T T Y · N U R P H O T O F A R Z A T A D N A N born myth that all the police do is fight crime. Apart from a few specialist units, crime fighting accounts for only 20% of police time.2 Most of it is spent tack­ling situations that have nothing to do with the criminal law: intervening in disputes between neighbours, with­in households or in public spaces; dir­ecting traffic; providing official information; managing public gatherings; checking immigration status; conducting political surveillance; and supporting other state agencies dealing with everything from medical emergencies to evictions. US sociologist Egon Bittner points out that ‘there is no human problem, real or imaginable, of which you could say with certainty that it could in no circumstances become a police matter.’3 So the police are less an institution that enforces the law, despite the commonly used US term ‘law enforcement agency’, and more an institution dedicated to maintaining a particular social order. From the 1980s, many politicians came to see the police as a quick-fix sol­ution to the consequences of widening social and economic inequalities within western societies and between countries in the global north and south. The tone and timing varied, but insec­urity and immigration, especially unsanctioned, became politicised, with parties turning them into electoral battlegrounds. Social policies prioritising prevention and development, though never completely dropped, yielded to security-based approaches of control and coercion. It became less a question of tackling the structural causes of inequality, which some saw as desirable but others considered impossible to achieve, than about making the least tractable people conform to the new neoliberal social order. The ‘broken windows’ theory The ‘broken windows’ theory had a special place among the rationalisations of this development. US academics James Q Wilson and George L Kelling posited that tolerance for small, visible acts of urban disorder (such as broken windows) leads over time to more serious criminality.4 Though not based on empirical research – Wilson later admitted it was merely ‘a speculation’ (New York Times, 6 January 2004) – it gained worldwide attention when New York’s mayor Rudy Giuliani (1994-2001) and his chief of police William Bratton took it as their inspiration for police reform. The US, France, the UK and Spain focused on complementary tracks: tougher criminal law enforcement for minor offences in public spaces, and the development of administrative policies of sometimes dubious legality, such as anti-begging measures and curfews for minors and gangs, which made it possible to impose fines for what the UK calls ‘anti-social behaviour’. Consuming alcohol or taking drugs in the street, occupying a public space, using public transport without a ticket, gambling, ‘aggressive begging’, washing windscreens at traffic lights, hawking anything from cold drinks to DVDs and sunglasses, and street prostitution became favourite police targets. Politicians were happy to entrust the task of regulating petty crime and antisocial behaviour largely to the police, and granted them new powers to help. As Wilson and Kelling write, ‘Until quite recently in many states, and even today in some places, the police made arrests on such charges as “suspicious person” or “vagrancy” or “public drunkenness” – charges with scarcely any legal meaning. These charges exist not because society wants judges to punish vagrants or drunks but because it wants an officer to have the legal tools to remove undesirable persons from a neighbourhood when informal efforts to preserve order in the streets have failed.’ But giving the police this remit privileges their interpretation of any situation and gives their viewpoint special importance. As US political scientist Murray Edelman suggests, bureaucracies tend to ‘construct problems as just­ifications for the solutions they are proposing’.5 There are institutional viewpoints embedded in their history, in the form of routines, scenarios, knowhow and profiles, that officers are obliged to follow in their training and day-to-day work, through advice or reprimands from senior figures. The police like to emphasise that they are not social workers, and valorise coercion. So urban order is maintained on their terms, often through strategies of harassment. A Catalan police commissioner explained his technique for handling young people who gathered in Barcelona’s public spaces: ‘You go and you shout at them. You exert a bit of pressure and tell them you’ll be back every day. And if they’re here again tomor­row, you’ll demand to see their papers, and if they’re drinking alcohol in a public space, you’ll charge them...Which means, one way or another, you make them leave. That enables you to relocate the problem.’ This combination of repression and exclusion of those deemed undesirables is a microcosm of how the forces of order view the practical fulfilment of their mission. These tactics naturally provoke physical and verbal reactions from their tar­gets, including non-compliance and confrontations, especially when the police are outnumbered. In France, the number of verbal and physical assaults on the police has tripled in 30 years, from 22,000 in 1990 to 68,000 in 2019. ‘We own the night’ The police have responded by equipping officers defensively (flak jackets, dispersal grenades) and offensively (‘less lethal’ weapons such as tasers and Flash-Ball riot guns). This has led to accusations that the police are becoming militarised, particularly specialist units such as France’s Anti-Crime Brigades (BAC). Their badges feature predators such as tigers, wolves, lions, crocodiles, and cobras watching over a sleeping city, illustrating the relationship to people and public space that they want to embody. New York’s Street Crimes Unit, disbanded in 2002 after the shooting of a young unarmed African American man, Amadou Diallo, used the motto ‘We own the night’. Such units and their aggressive intervention tactics are the basis of many accusations against the police of using excessive or deadly force, and of raising tensions wherever they are de­ployed. This has led to the development of complementary strategies, ‘community policing’ or ‘proximity policing’, which aim to improve the police’s relationship with the public through their visible presence (foot patrols) and the creation of opportunities for dialogue to address local problems. Such experiments have met with a lack of police enthusiasm (or the continuation of violent behaviour) and suffered from recurrent budget constraints because they require personnel. But in places where they have been established, they have strengthened the centrality of the police in regulating social relations and redefining those relations as security issues. So repressive and preventative policing are complementary rather You exert a bit of pressure and tell them if they’re here tomorrow, you’ll demand to see their papers. Which means, you make them leave. That enables you to relocate the problem Catalan police commissioner than opposites, constraining the everyday lives of ever more people. Have such strategies delivered on their promise to quell urban disorder? Evidence suggests not. But who seriously thought they would succeed without tackling the deeper causes? Many police officers show they realise this when they talk of their ‘Sisyphean task’. Yet this failure has not influenced politicians’ decisions but has led to ever greater recourse to security measures, which the police have eagerly adopted to allow them ever greater freedom of action. The political decision to make law enforcement agencies spearhead the defence of urban order has raised their status within the state administration and put governments in a relationship of unfavourable interdependence. This is particularly marked in France (and the US, see Being black and poor in Min- neapolis, page 4) because of powerful corporatist police unions. The police, with a union membership of 70% (19% for civil servants and 8% for private sec­tor workers) are by far the most unionised profession in France. These unions, organ­ised by grade (superintendents, officers, commissioners), play an important role in career development. Because of professional confidentiality, they alone, apart from senior management, are permitted to make media statements, limiting public expression of internal disagreement and reinforcing the image of the police as a monolith. This power means the unions de facto jointly manage the police. Though not entirely exempt, the police have been more successful than other public services at protecting themselves from neoliberal reform, in terms of salary or statutory re-assessments and of their operating budget. During the French pensions reform process in December 2019, the police unions only had to mention the possibility of a strike to immediately secure a special pension regime, while hundreds of thousands of other employees in public transport, hospitals and education organised demonstrations and strikes for weeks without result. Hostility to criticism The police effectively thwart anything they see as a challenge to their powers. Castaner’s recent comments about possibly outlawing the use of chokeholds immediately brought accusations of ‘betrayal’ and localised protests, forcing him to reconsider. There are other previous examples, including demonstrations against justice minister Robert Badinter in 1983 and the law on the presumption of innocence (15 June 2000), and opposition to the reform of arrest procedures (14 April 2011) and probation orders (15 August 2014). Continued on page 4 ▶ Repressers: Gendarmes clash with ‘black block’ protesters at a gilet jaune demonstration in Paris, March 2020 Laurent Bonelli is a lecturer in political science at the University of Paris-Nanterre and co-author, with Fabien Carrié, of La Fabrique de la radicalité: Une sociologie des jeunes djihadistes français (The radicalisation factory: A sociology of young French jihadists), Seuil, Paris, 2018 1 Fabien Jobard, ‘Le gibier de police immuable ou changeant?’ (Who is fair game for the police and does it change?), Archives de politique criminelle, vol 32, no 1, Paris, 2010 2 Richard V Ericson and Kevin D Haggerty, Policing the Risk Society, University of Toronto Press, 1997 3 Egon Bittner, ‘Florence Nightingale in pursuit of Willie Sutton: a Theory of the Police’ in H Jacob, The Potential for Reform of Criminal Justice, Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, 1974 4 See George L Kelling and James Q Wilson, ‘Broken Windows: the Police and Neighbourhood Safety’, Atlantic Monthly, Washington DC, March 1982 5 Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle, University of Chicago Press, 1988