Urban borderwork: Ethnographies of policing

Ethnographies of police and policing

Since the turn of the millennium, a growing body of ethnographically informed scholarship on police and policing has emerged (Albrecht and Kyed, 2015; Baker, 2008; Beek et al., 2017; Buur and Jensen, 2004; Fassin, 2017; Jensen, 2008). This body of literature has contributed to existing studies in a field that up until that point primarily had been shaped by the disciplines of sociology, criminology and political science (see, for instance, Bittner, 1970; Erickson, 1981; Manning, 1977). Most significantly, ethnographic approaches have challenged a divide between police as a state institution and policing as a set of practices, which has enabled a critical discussion of what policing is, and who or what is in charge of it. The traditional divide between police and policing neglected how wider social, political, economic and cultural dynamics shape police organizations and policing practices, and vice versa (Bradford et al., 2016). Furthermore, it produced a body of research that mainly relate to formal dimensions of the police, and specifically, questions around instrumental and operational effectiveness. An ethnographic focus on the interface between police and policing has led to both theoretical and empirical innovations in the field by emphasizing a bottom-up perspective on micro-dynamics and everyday practices of policing.

First, by engaging with everyday policing practices, ethnographic studies have documented how police and policing diffuse into and shape socio-political and institutional orders (cf. Comaroff, 2013: xv). They have questioned the very idea of what policing is and shown that it extends far beyond the official mandate of state-sanctioned law enforcement and crime regulation (Albrecht, 2015; Buur, 2006; Buur and Jensen, 2004; Kyed, 2014; Martin, 2013). Hence, what the police are, and what constitutes policing, cannot be reduced to a specific form of centrally governed bureaucratic organization, capacity or activity that ‘upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order’ (Weber, 1978: 54). Of equal importance are the symbolic and coercive functions associated with the idea of policing and the considerably more ephemeral and diffuse notion of ‘policeness’, which does not necessarily tie practices of policing as order-making to a distinctive police organization (Hills, 2014).

Second, ethnographic studies depict policing as characterized by the co-existence, competition and collaboration among a range of actors (Kyed, 2015; Sowatey and Atuguba, 2015; Telle, 2015). Again, this calls for a reassessment of distinguishing between regular and irregular policing, and between the public and the private (Christensen, 2017). In scholarly literature, the empirical need for such a reassessment has inspired notions of ‘plural’ (Loader, 2000; Rodgers, 2017) ‘hybrid’ (Albrecht, 2018, 2020; Baker, 2013) and ‘twilight’ policing (Diphoorn, 2016). Together, they have brought attention to the context-specific ways in which policing practices are produced (and produce effects) that cannot be labelled as either public or private (cf. Albrecht and Moe, 2015).

These ethnographically informed frameworks and concepts share a relational approach to policing which enables explorations of police and policing beyond centrally governed state bureaucracies. By emphasizing relational aspects of policing to capture the entanglement of multiple policing actors that characterize contemporary security landscapes, the aim is to open up to an exploration of order-making beyond the state police, but without substituting a focus on the state with that of the non-state or private (Abrahamsen and Williams, 2009; Albrecht and Kyed, 2015; Wood and Shearing, 2007).

The study of the interface between police and policing practices, and the adaptation of a relational lens to capture the entanglement of policing actors, has generated significant insight into the complexity and ambiguity of contemporary policing landscapes. Yet, the emphasis on understanding policing as a set of practices rather than the police as an institutional expression has to some extent backgrounded the state police as an explicit focus of analysis. Especially in the global South, and in contexts of limited statehood, scholarship on policing has tended to focus mainly on non-state policing actors, such as vigilantes, gangs, ex-combatants, private security firms and traditional leaders (see Christensen, 2015; Pratten and Sen, 2007). While such actors have not simply been studied in isolation from the state police, the focus on everyday policing has, as noted by Cooper-Knock and Owen (2015: 356), offered limited insight into the role, practices and logics of state actors.

The ethnographic focus on how non-state policing actors relate to, engage with, and act on behalf of or in the absence of state-sanctioned policing actors has occurred at the expense of understanding how the police themselves perceive of, perform and navigate what it means to police. In recent years, this has resulted in a significant body of ethnographically driven studies focusing on the police and policing (Beek, 2016; Beek et al., 2017; Fassin, 2013, 2017; Garriott, 2013; Göpfert, 2013, 2016; Hornberger, 2010, 2011; Jauregui, 2016; Karpiak, 2016; Martin, 2013, 2016; Mutsaers, 2014, 2018; Owen, 2013, 2016; Steinberger, 2008). Many of these works emerged from a growing interest in ‘the state’, as an idea and as a set of practices, but also as Cooper-Knock and Owen (2015: 356) emphasize, because of a relative analytical neglect of ‘state actors and statehood’ in the context of policing, and consequently ‘everyday realities and modes of state policing’ (see also Mutsaers et al., 2015: 786).

With an emphasis on order-making in urban spaces, this special issue suggests that the two literatures on policing, oscillating between relational policing practices and a more institutional focus on state-sanctioned policing, can be productively combined. Hence, we propose that the state police should be studied alongside other policing actors and the policed, and that the state should be given conceptual priority to counterbalance earlier attempts to capture policing analytically (cf. Cooper-Knock and Owen, 2015: 356). We thus maintain that the gains made in studies of how a range of policing actors relate to, engage with and act on behalf of or in the absence of the police, and about how the police are perceived and experienced from the perspective of the policed, should be employed simultaneously. In the next section, we outline how the notions of borders and bordering are engaged to construct a framework for policing that foregrounds the city through an empirical focus on the state police.

Policing as bordering

What constitutes a border? What does it do? And where are borders found? Addressing such questions has commonly generated answers relating to the state, to linkages between sovereignty and political order, and to national territory. Since the 16th century when the modern idea of the border was first introduced in a geopolitical sense, the border has been approached as a territorial line of division – or connection. Most commonly, the idea of a border has been associated with a frontier, marking a boundary between two nation states, and thus with a rather static and fixed entity. However, over the last three decades, the emergent field of critical border studies (see Parker and Vaughan-Williams, 2012) has introduced novel conceptualizations of the separation and control that bordering implies. This has captured the changing nature of the border, calling for a shift in its conceptualization as a territorial line that demarcates the edge of a political entity, and of state sovereignty. Integral to this shift is a move beyond the periphery of the nation state, and beyond the idea that a border can only be mapped onto geographical topographies. Borders, recent studies have emphasized, should not simply be approached as political entities on the scale of nation states. On the contrary, they diffuse throughout society (Rumford, 2006).

Policing and control of borders, previously concentrated at territorial edges of states, are currently disaggregated and delocalized away from national borders (Walters, 2006: 193). Most significantly in this regard, national borders increasingly expand into and take effect in the city, resulting in a blurring between national and urban borders (Graham, 2010: 89). Expansion and intensified politicization are at least partly consequences of rapid urbanization and densification. The co-existence of extreme expressions of poverty and wealth in growing cities produces difference and antagonism.

The urban is, as Isin (2002: 49) points out, a non-mechanical ‘difference machine’ that enables processes of stigmatization, marginalization and racialization, whereby specific categories of people are made to be strangers, outsiders or alien, while others emerge as belonging and citizens worthy of protection. The influx of large numbers of refugees and migrants into cities fuels the difference machine, and has, for instance, moved the policing of migration from the external national borders into urban environments (see Campbell, 2006; K’Akumu and Olima, 2007).

Contemporary cities are characterized by a tension between a constant attempt to defend and harden its borders, and at the same time expand and soften them (Lazzarini, 2015). A tension between fixity and motion is at stake, which results in a tremble. Urban spaces thus give rise to attempts to separate and draw lines; to policies of order-making and securitization. At the same time, cities are characterized by intersections of multiple networks and flows (Jaffe and De Koning, 2016), which trigger the expansion of borders along spatial lines – a diffusion of the territorial limits of the city (Lazzarini, 2015: 180). Such diffusion is integral to urban planning designs that aim to facilitate – and ultimately control – the circulation of things and people across the city.

Borders are trespassed and collapsed, a process that in turn create new borders. In other words, borders are in a constant process of (de)territorialization and (re)territorialization; of (de)bordering and (re)bordering (Rumford, 2006). The tension of and trembling inherent to borders can be captured by shifting attention from borders as markers of territorial control to practices of bordering. This shift implies a focus on everyday enactments and negotiations of borders (Scott, 2014), and on how borders result from complex human responses, rather than policies and governance structures per se (Brunet-Jailly, 2007; Konrad, 2015). In line with this shift, borders are considered spaces of ongoing encounters; a cluster of multiple relations and connections that both establish and dissolve the borders (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, 2007).

In the city, bordering practices give shape to dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. They produce gateways and opportunities for some, and barriers and obstacles for others (Anderson, 2001). Bordering practices, we argue, are fundamentally directed at policing mobility, and more specifically, the social and political anxieties that are linked to these mobilities (see also Walters, 2006: 188). Thus, borders can be conceptualized as gateways or filters which differentiate

the good and the bad, the useful and the dangerous, the licit and the illicit; constituting a safe, high-trust interior secured from the wild zones outside; immobilizing and removing the risky elements so as to speed up the circulation of the rest. (Walters, 2006: 197)

Urban policing is a bordering practice that reflects a governmental desire to secure and safeguard by regulating circulations and transgressions of people, things, resources and discourse. As state bureaucrats, the police embody this desire to produce and maintain borders, and they are implicated in practices aimed at enforcing laws and securitization policies emerging from that desire. Thus, from state to street level, the police engage in multiple practices of bordering that constitute, sustain and modify borders (Parker and Vaughan-Williams, 2012). By exploring borders and bordering practices from a police perspective, it is tempting to turn ‘the state’ into the object of analysis. Yet, borders do not necessarily work in the service of the state (Rumford, 2014: 41), and they are not simply constituted or enforced through the regulation of state laws and policies.

In everyday processes and practices of bordering, where the police navigate the dilemmas of governance (Lipsky, 2010) laws and policies are circumvented and negotiated, extending bordering beyond the idea of state-sanctioned lawmaking. To capture this, attention must be directed towards how officers’ tacit knowledge informs policing when they, for instance, interpret suspicious signs and warning signals, look for criminal elements in crowds or draw on religious and traditional beliefs as they perform their roles. Furthermore, officers’ affective orientation must be scrutinized, which includes a subjective concern with securing unknown, incalculable and potential threats that are inherent to their roles and blur professional and private life. In critical border studies as well as in current urban studies, the affective registers are often neglected – despite that ‘cities may be seen as roiling maelstroms of affect’ (Thrift, 2004: 57). In sum, by approaching policing as a practice of bordering, we wish to add to the focus on the material manifestations of borders an analysis of how affective registers such as fear, anxiety and desire inform police work in the city.

Bordering the city

To explore how policing as a practice of bordering shapes the city, and in turn how the city preconditions policing practices, relational and spatial dimensions are central aspects of the analysis. The enactment, enforcement and appropriation of borders by the police do not simply produce and configure the urban context. Policing is also informed, indeed conditioned, by features of the city. Here, present-day studies on urban security commonly refer to the defining features of size, density, heterogeneity and inequality, originally outlined by Wirth (1938), to point out that ‘[u]rban centres are expected to absorb almost all population growth in the coming decades’, and consequently that ‘urban spaces are emerging as sites of intensified insecurity and violence’ (Kyed and Albrecht, 2015: 1). Analyses such as this have a descriptive-contextualizing value, but do not open up the analysis to spatial and temporal dimensions of the city. In short, it is necessary to take the urban more explicitly into account (Jaffe and De Koning, 2016: 1), when seeking to unpack the dynamics of urban borderwork in the context of policing.

In symbolic and concrete terms, bordering strategies are inscribed into geographies of wealth and poverty that produce social differentiation and relations (Glück and Low, 2017; Harvey, 1989: 216). Policing practices play a central role in both setting up and penetrating those borders that protect and deny access to security, resources and rights. They become integral to the infrastructures of physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people and finance are trafficked. Indeed, they become integral to, allow and deny the possibility of exchange over distance. Borders are shaped by governmental practices, and as a consequence also shape the police’s ability to perform its functions.

At the same time, urban infrastructure is becoming increasingly privatized and commodified (McFarlane, 2018), but also securitized and fractured (Graham and McFarlane, 2014). This is expressed in concrete spatial divides between rich and poor, and the ensuing proliferation of fortified – gated, fenced and walled (Calderia, 1996) – enclaves and communities. Consequently, border strategies in urban spaces are also becoming more prominent. In these urban spaces, policing actors are ‘agents of territoriality’ and territorial control, involving the enactment of borders through the restriction of access and regulation of movement (Herbert, 1997). Relationally, these processes of restriction and regulation require attention to how policing is established around the exercise of violence, and how both physical and symbolic violence become integral to the social infrastructure of urban life (Simone, 2004). The spatial organization, but also particular experiences of temporalities in the city space orient and coordinate social life (De Boeck, 2015; Nielsen, 2017), as well as inform means of circulation, exclusion and marginalization.

The spatial, relational and temporal dynamics of the urban experience highlight the ambivalence of bordering in urban settings. This ambivalence is reflected in the instability, unpredictability and sense of looming crisis that characterize the urban experience, where the potentiality for violence and loss of control is ubiquitous. This condition of unease, its permanence, is captured through the imagery of the trembling city, which is shaped by the desire to create a sense of order, predictability and control through bordering practices, and fixate permanently that, which essentially cannot be fixated.

In many big cities globally, especially in marginal and economically poor neighbourhoods, the relationship between state police and population is indeed considered to be in a quasi-permanent state of crisis from the perspective of government as well as population. This perceived crisis of control leads to crisis mode responses in policing, articulated for instance through the use of ‘war on’ – war on terror, gangs, crime, drugs, etc. – as a dominant state discourse to legitimize the securitization and militarization of urban life (Graham, 2010: XIII). Such crisis mode responses are reflected in violent and covert counter-terror operations characterized by an increasing blurring between police and military, but also in more ‘subtle’ practices of policing. These practices include surveillance, risk assessments and preemptive profiling of individuals, behaviours, groups and places based on their apparent association with violence and their perceived threat to urban orders, for instance, through racial and religious affiliations (Graham, 2010: XV).

The attempts to locate, fixate and control the lurking threats to urban life through the proliferation of borders are, however, challenged and undermined by attempts of transgression and resistance by those who are the target of policing. For instance, this is reflected in the policing of safety strategies underpinning urban planning and the management of space, such as zoning policies as well as processes of gentrification. These policies and processes are neither apolitical nor purely instrumental, but driven by ideas of social and spatial improvement, which in turn often reflect specific ideological constructions of what urban space should look like and how it should be used. It is in these processes that we most clearly see urban governance as driven by ideas of social and spatial improvements and capital investments that produce infrastructures of in/exclusion (Lefebvre, 1991).

Clashes between state-sanctioned and other practices of spatial containment and order-making lead to friction, which challenge existing orders and push them to the verge of breakdown. This is the sense of unremitting trembling that size, density, heterogeneity and inequality on an urban scale invoke. The experience of urban time–space as unstable becomes integral to social relations as they are shaped by and shape existing linkages between crime, violence and inequality. Its permanence, its intimacy, leads to and reinforces friction that is both unpredictable and productive of awkward, unequal, unstable and creative qualities of interconnection across difference (Tsing, 2004: 4), where new configurations of time and space, and thus social relations, are manifested. Friction, and the concomitant potential for instability, is not only a consequence of external impact, but ongoing, internal and integral to urban space and to bordering of the city.

A framework for the ethnography of urban policing

The aim of this special issue is to introduce a framework for the ethnography of urban policing that foregrounds the mutually productive relationship of policing and the city. While the city is indeed a setting in which policing is practiced, it is increasingly becoming the very medium of policing – a battleground where multiple visions of order-making and strategies of securitization are enacted simultaneously with conflicting effects. To address this, we invoke the notions of borders and bordering. Borders and bordering practices, previously constituted by state and geographical boundaries, are taking on new forms as they expand into and become embedded in and condition urban infrastructure, exchange and movement.

In contemporary cities, borders are no longer imposed simply to separate insiders from outsiders, or to distinguish the internal from the external. Rather, borders and bordering practices are being reconfigured to address mobilities and flows deemed to contaminate and threaten social order, and have thus become momentous manifestations of fear and anxiety linked to these mobilities and flows (Graham, 2010: 91). At the core of our framework is the argument that urban policing is principally a practice of bordering which is paradigmatic of the volatility that characterize attempts to enforce urban orders under conditions of flux, speed and instability. The proclamation of separation and control, of bordering practices, is an attempt at permanent fixture urban order-making, yet it is an aspiration that can never be fully achieved. From this emanates a sense of trembling. Trembling is a tension between attempts to stabilize and the inescapable instability of the urban condition that may be partially suppressed through bordering, but never fully eradicated.

In order to capture the instability that is built into the attempt to stabilize urban orders through bordering practices, our framework highlights the fact that the practice of bordering does not necessarily depend on the material manifestation of ‘hard’ borders such as walls or fences. Policing as a practice of bordering is informed also by an affective orientation – by imaginaries of and desires for their materialization, and the stability, protection and sense of ordering that they represent. When we direct our gaze towards everyday practices of policing, the empirical implications of trembling, certain involuntary vibration or shaking – unease – as a consequence of the attempt to make order, are brought to the fore. To understand the police’s ability – and failure – to embody or perform this role, it is particularly fruitful to explore the police ethnographically ‘from within’ and take into account how police organizations and individual officers imagine and enact borders as a strategy of urban order-making. These dynamics illuminate that policing as a bordering practice is informed by tensions between the desire for borders, their establishment and inevitable dissolution or failure to materialize.

Each article in this volume contributes to and extends this framework for urban policing by ethnographically exploring how police work is productive of borders and bordering in cities across the global North and South (see also Albrecht et al., 2017). The articles explore diverse manifestations of borders and modalities of bordering in contexts ranging from urban warfare to welfare policing. In the context of ‘War on Drugs’ in the Philippines, Anna Bræmer Warburg and Steffen Jensen analyze how the implementation of counter-insurgency strategies has transformed urban space through a spatialized bordering of state-sanctioned, extra-judicial killings. In Bagong Silang, a ‘slum’ area on the outskirts of Manila in which many of these killings have occurred, this bordering has produced a climate of fear which has reconfigured structures of intimacy underpinning social relations between residents. The unpredictability and illegibility permeating perceptions of security among police and policed alike have caused the proliferation of numerous new borders within the neighbourhood. In the poor urban settlements of Mathare, Nairobi, fear is similarly a consequence of systematic extra-judicial killings. Naomi van Stapele’s article focuses on how police killings engender highly selective temporal and spatial borders around and within low-income urban settlements that are productive of local tensions. These police killings occur under the pretext of the conflated ‘wars’ on crime and terror

and in a context where practices of bordering are linked to geographies of inclusion and exclusion, as well as struggles over the right to the city. These geographies and struggles are also prominent in the wealthier parts of Nairobi’s ‘Westlands.

As in Nairobi, police work in Bogota is informed by patterns of segregation and socio-spatial divisions that characterize the urban morphology. Jairo Matallana-Villareal’s article discusses how arbitrary detentions are employed as a pre-emptive military policing technique that serves the purpose of social control, disciplining and indoctrination of working-class youth. These arbitrary detentions are spatially patterned and reinforce dynamics of social segregation. In Aarhus, Denmark, Mette-Louise Johansen illuminates how measures for countering violent extremism have resulted in a process of de-gendering and de-classing suspected communities. Whereas policing previously focused mainly on vulnerable public housing areas, characterized by a high concentration of refugees and immigrants, the ‘War on Terror’ has resulted in an expansion of the governmental field around crime and violence, which has produced a tension between intensified territorial control and de-territorialized policing. Here, the challenge for the police is that they can no longer fix or locate the threat because locations previously considered secure are now potentially inhabited by so-called radicalized youngsters.

Policing as a practice of bordering is not simply constitutive of social, spatial and temporal borders in the city, but also productive of borders within police institutions and among police officers. Tessa Diphoorn’s contribution provides insight into how police diversity influences police work and experiences of police officers. Approaching police reform initiatives in Kenya as moral bordering, she illuminates how police officers define and differentiate themselves from others in a context where police reform initiatives revolve around eradicating officers engaged in police violence and corruption. Certainly, police officers not only embody the attempt to order the city, but also the fears and anxieties linked to urban insecurity and uncertainties.

While the police are often criticized for the violent and repressive operations which especially target the urban poor, police work is often imbued with risks and dangers which give shape to practices of urban policing. As Dennis Pauschinger discusses in his article on the policing of favelas in Rio de Janeiro, police work is shaped by the desperate attempt to change security conditions, which give rise to profound feelings of failure. Through the emic notion of ‘drying ice’, he empirically illuminates how emotions impact on the everyday practices of policing, and how pleasure and excitement become strategies for regaining control and overcoming the experience of failure. Finally, in her article on policing in a crime-ridden area on the outskirts of Maputo city, Helene Maria Kyed shows how the police constantly negotiate their role and engage in a multiplicity of relationships and exchanges to assert their authority. Such negotiations mirror urban insecurities as well as the insecurities of officers, emanating from being assigned the burden the state’s ‘dirty work’. Yet, as Kyed illuminates, it is neither purely violent nor purely extractive, but influenced by intimacy and compassion. In combination, the articles collected here contribute with novel and diverse ethnographic insights into the mutually productive relationship of policing and the city.