Esorcizzare lo spettro

This paper enquires into the political and juridical themes underlying Giacomo Puccini’s opera Tosca (1900). Through the comparison of Puccini’s score, the libretto by Giacosa and Illica, and the original play by Sardou, I will present a twofold reading of the intertwinement between politics, religion, and law in this musical work. On the one hand, I will show that the police power represented by the character of Scarpia can be interpreted, from a Benjaminian standpoint, as a violent power that shapes the legal and religious order. On the other hand, I will argue that the artistic couple made by Cavaradossi and Tosca is politically significant in so far as their art represents an attempt to deactivate Scarpia’s pervading and oppressive force. The conclusion will contend that the aesthetics in this opera subtends the aspiration for an “inoperative”-wise revolution in religious institutions as well as in legal and political relations.

Filmgoers’ Fingerprints

This chapter focuses on fingerprinting stations, which, from the early 1920s until the late 1950s, were often located in the lobbies of movie theaters and used both in conjunction with crime films and as part of a broader push to collect Americans’ personal biometric information. An increasingly popular component of efforts to normalize civil identification, fingerprinting stations routinely functioned to promote both crime films and local police departments. They also raised alarming questions about the scope of police power in the United States. Fingerprinting stations were naturalized aspects of a cinematic assemblage that served police power, smuggling law enforcement into the local movie theater and making the collection of patrons’ personal biometric information seem continuous both with screen representations and with the wider work of advertising and publicity departments.

Cinematic Badges

This chapter examines some of the tensions involved in the development and maintenance of film-specific forms of police public relations and addresses the persistence of certain cultural and institutional anxieties. From the threat of repetition and generic stagnation to the frictions resulting from the coexistence of strict representational codes and countervailing “realist” imperatives, these tensions and anxieties further illustrate the sheer complexity of cinema’s intersections with police power in the United States. American police departments have long been committed to shaping American film culture to their own advantage. American police officials were not necessarily easily satisfied by screen representations, and their ongoing demands had unexpected and sometimes contradictory effects.

From Kiddie Cops to the Coal Police

In the United States, the normalization of police power has often demanded the delineation of fraudulent or otherwise illegitimate aspirants to such power. This chapter considers cinematic depictions of parapolicing. Such representations speak to ongoing anxieties surrounding the actual, discernable contours of police power in the United States. In Hollywood, the Studio Relations Committee was particularly wary of analogies between “real” police officers and their privately employed counterparts. The films examined in this chapter address the complexities of those public-private partnerships that pivot around law enforcement. Ultimately, these films work to affirm the state’s monopoly on lawful violence, either because it is the state itself that “generously” grants power to particular private actors or because those private actors fail miserably and, in so doing, necessitate the expansion of “real” police forces. Such films complicate, in markedly populist terms, the professional police’s presumed monopoly on expertise, without, however, questioning the police’s monopoly on violence. The films at the center of this chapter are meant to show that while policing may be teachable—imitable—actual law enforcement officials hold the real power.

Introduction

This introduction historicizes cinema’s relationship to policing and particularizes that relationship beyond familiar questions of regulation and censorship, while also revisiting those very questions in the context of a broader study of police power. How did the institution of law enforcement interact with the studio system? How was classical Hollywood shaped by—and how, in turn, did it shape—specific police activities? To what extent and in what ways did cinema serve the emergent public relations needs of police agencies, and vice versa? Police departments were not passive beneficiaries of Hollywood’s fiscal and ideological investments but active and self-interested contributors to various cinematic projects, many of which they themselves initiated. The relative fragility of police legitimacy—its disputability, particularly in the face of obvious abuses of power—necessitated this constant advocacy in twentieth-century America, as did Hollywood’s generic, formula-driven, reiterative commercial character.

War, Police, and the Production of Global Social Order

The year 2020 saw police militarization again thrust into debates regarding the nature and extent of police violence. Critics of police militarization suggest that as departments have assumed military weaponry and tactics, the institution has drifted from its original mandate of crime control and public service, portending lethal consequences for the most vulnerable. While these critics trace its origins to the advent of SWAT, No Knock raids and other tactics born of the war on drugs, what is misread as the “blurring” of military and police is in fact symptomatic of a much older process of pacification, whereby both the war power and the police power are enlisted to discipline surplus populations and establish market conditions in the interests of capital. From this position, policing has not been poisoned by the practices of war, nor have the boundaries between foreign and domestic muddied, but rather military and police are mutually constitutive and parts of a continuum of state violence. Here the “iron fist” of open violence and repression and the velvet glove of “community policing” work in conjunction to facilitate the conditions of liberal social order.

Toward a genealogy of the police idea in imperial Japan: a synthesis

This paper explores how Japanese officials and others conceptualized police power at particular junctures in imperial Japanese history (1868–1945). It does so by synthesizing prior scholarship on the Japanese police into a broader genealogy of the police idea in prewar Japan, beginning with the first translations and explanations of police in the Meiji period, the changing perceptions of the police in the 1910s, and the evolution from the “national police” idea in the 1920s to the “emperor's police” in the late 1930s. The essay proposes that the police idea in Japan (and elsewhere) can be read as a boundary concept in which the changing conceptions of police power demarcate the shifting relationship between state and society. Indeed, it is the elusiveness of this boundary that allows for police power – and by extension, state power – to function within society and transform in response to social conditions. Approached in this way, the essay argues that the different permutations of the police idea index the evolving modality of state power in prewar Japan, and thus allows us to reconsider some of the defining questions of imperial Japanese history.

Towards a Sociological Approach to Human Rights Law

An overarching argument of the book, which connects its parts, is an epistemological one: to fully grasp the routine understandings, interpretations and practices that animate human rights law in policing, a sociological approach to law should be explored and experimented with. In sketching out what such an approach might look like, this chapter introduces the three conceptual foundations adopted and outlines the research methods deployed in the book. The first of these is how human rights law comes to be adopted and deployed as ‘vernacular’ beyond traditional legal forums and judicial audiences in order to both legitimate and challenge police power. The second is human rights law as a set of principles and standards that officers are socialized in, and engage in ‘sensemaking’ of, amidst their sub-cultures, everyday routines and organizational demands. The third is how human rights law comes to be ‘practiced’ by officers in specific roles in so far as they are professional actors required to bring a resolution to a specific factual issue through understanding, engaging with and applying human rights law principles and standards. Collectively, these features comprise the book’s sociological approach to human rights law.

POLICE POWER OF THE BRAZILIAN ARMY

This work deals with the legal frameworks that manage the exercise of the police power granted to the Armed Forces, addressing the attributions and situations in which they can be employed. The legal provisions are found in the legal system in force, among the precursors the complementary laws of n. 97/1999, n. 117/2004 and n. 136/2010, which brought significant changes in the general rules for the organization, preparation and employment of the Armed Forces. The basis of this work is the study of the use of the Brazilian Army in law and order guarantee operations, as well as ensuring Brazilian territorial sovereignty. The activities called patrolling and policing operations in the border area of the Brazilian territory are exposed throughout the work. Such activities are subsidiary duties conferred by the Armed Forces. At first, a brief exposition will be made of the legal and doctrinal foundations that deal with the power of police, distinguishing it in what is the "administrative police power" and "the power of security police", although coming from state power, both have different purposes.