Police Labor and Exploitation: Case Study of North India

This chapter analyzes data collected over more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork with police in north India. It argues that subordinate police personnel in this decolonizing world region often experience exploitation as laborers, even as they routinely deploy excessive force and sometimes misuse their authority to intervene in everyday life. The analysis reveals an imbrication of official police rank hierarchies with broader forms of social inequality (especially socioeconomic class, religion, and caste) through observations of interactions among police personnel of various ranks and interviews with current and former officers in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. It also develops methodological concepts of “strategic complicity” and “critical empathy,” and suggests directions for future ethnographic research on policing that may help us discern the complexities of both local and global social justice movements and power relations.

The Use of Twitter by Police Officers in Urban and Rural Contexts in Sweden

The aim of this article is to investigate the nature of information sharing via Twitter by police officers. We examine the content of Tweets in urban and rural contexts using a sample of 20 police-related Twitter accounts, comparing official and personal accounts active in Southern Sweden. Exploratory data analysis and in-depth content analysis of a sample of Tweets compose the underlying methodology. We find a distinct pattern of consistency in the content of the information shared via the official police accounts compared to the personal accounts, regardless of if they are from urban or rural areas. However, some urban–rural differences were observed between official and personal accounts regarding public engagement, operationalized as likes and Retweets. The study calls for a discussion of new models of police engagement using social media by a society that is increasingly shaped by the internet.

SEARCHING FOR THE FORGOTTEN: EXAMINING THE ONLINE PRESENCE OF VICTIMS OF POLICE KILLINGS

This paper examines the potential role of social media in enhancing the understanding and perception of victims of police killings and the data collection surrounding these incidents. Through a series of content analysis and social media mining exercises, the authors observe the emergence of three distinct types of social media content offered on victims of police killings: persistence of the deceased’s activity across social media, sensational commentary on videos and blog postings, and memorials on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. As part of a larger investigation of the availability and accessibility of official police homicide data, this paper aims to present social media data as a potentially powerful source of information to supplement quantitative reports. This process may be especially useful for the most affected communities, particularly BIPOC communities.

Policing Human Rights

Human rights are a common feature of police reform, rhetoric and regulation in many jurisdictions. Yet how human rights law might serve to regulate policing, function as a discourse for describing what police ‘do’ or perform as a critical concept for engaging with what the police role is, or ought to be, has received limited attention. This book is an endeavour to produce one of the first sustained, interdisciplinary accounts of the empirical realities of human rights law in policing. The substantive insights are drawn from unprecedented access to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The book takes the reader on a tour of four sites of policing: the public forums host to ‘official’ police narratives, routine policing, public order policing and police custody. It seeks to better understand how and why police officers performing different aspects of policing, operating in distinct regulatory sites and enacting their own identities and experiences, come to encounter and engage with human rights law in their everyday work. The book aspires to embrace criminology’s interdisciplinary spirit, drawing on concepts from criminology itself, as well as law, anthropology, sociology and organizational studies, to illuminate the empirical realities of human rights law. It offers a series of findings and insights that expose how human rights law functions in modern policing, and the histories, imaginations, visions and values police officers’ express in narratives, sensemaking and practices of routine police work.

The Official Police Voice

The task of this chapter is to trace how and why human rights law has come to be such an integral and sustained feature of the PSNI’s official narrative. The reason, this chapter argues, lies in the apparent power of human rights discourse to cool down, even if not quite neutralize, political tensions, debates and controversies that still animate ‘high-level policing’ (Brodeur, 1983) in the country. To frame this chapter’s analysis of the PSNI’s official vernacular of human rights, a ‘dialogic’ model of legitimacy is drawn upon to better account for the conditional nature of power and legitimation. Doing so enables us to better identify and account for the dynamic struggles in which rights-based claims are deployed as part of efforts to frame, or even resolve, contemporary political and public debates. By closely examining chief officers’ forewords and speeches, as well as their public responses to questions at the Policing Board’s public session, three central properties are identified that define this official vernacular. These are: human rights as legality; as an ethics of power; and as accountability. Each of these major strands of the police voice, it is argued, contribute to a purported vision of the PSNI as worthy of endorsement by elite audiences.

Transnational Policing after the 1848–1849 Revolutions: The Habsburg Empire in the Mediterranean

This article investigates the policing measures of the Habsburg Empire against the exiled defeated revolutionaries in the Mediterranean after the 1848–1849 revolutions. The examination of this counter-revolutionary policy reveals the pioneering role Austria played in international policing. It shows, in particular, that Vienna invested more heavily in policing in the Mediterranean after 1848 than it did in other regions, such as Western Europe, due to the multitude of ‘Forty-Eighters’ settled there and the alleged inadequacy of the local polities (e.g., the Ottoman Empire, Greece) to satisfactorily deal with the refugee question themselves. The article explains that Austria made use of a wide array of both official and unofficial techniques to contain these allegedly dangerous political dissidents. These methods ranged from official police collaboration with Greece and the Ottoman Empire to more subtle regional information exchanges with Naples and Russia. However, they also included purely unilateral methods exercised by the Austrian consuls, Austrian Lloyd sailors and ship captains, and ad hoc recruited secret agents to monitor the émigrés at large. Overall, the article argues that Austrian policymakers in the aftermath of 1848 invented new policing formulas and reshaped different pre-existing institutions (e.g., consuls, Austrian Lloyd), channelling them against their opponents in exile. Therefore, apart from surveying early modes of international policing, this study also adds to the discussion about Austrian (and European) state-building and, furthermore, to the more specific discussion of how European states dealt with political dissidents abroad in the nineteenth century.

COMMUNITY INTENTION IN THE WHISTLE-BLOWING SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT FOR SMOKE-FREE ZONES’ LAW ENFORCEMENT IN KENDARI CITY, SULAWESI TENGGARA PROVINCE, INDONESIA

Background: Kendari City has set regional regulation No. 16 of 2014 about smoke-free zones (SFZs), however, it has been no tool that is optimal in law enforcement on the application of SFZs regulation in this region.Objectives: This study aims to measure the factors of community intentions in the development of the whistle-blowing systems (WBS) in law enforcement of the SFZs regulation in Kendari City.Methods: The action research approach was carried out with the development of the WBS application which was followed by an observational survey of the community at eight SFZs that had been set in Kendari City.Results: The WBS application for SFZs regulation enforcement in Kendari City was developed through two interfaces: the website on the law enforcement team (Pamong Praja official police and the Health Office) and an Android-based application that can be downloaded for free on the reporting side. Most people of Kendari City have good intentions (90.2 %) in using WBS for SFZs regulation enforcement. This intention indirectly tends to get support from the community (ORadj = 5.1). The age of teenagers or students has the highest proportion in intending to use the WBS for SFZs regulation law enforcement other than employees of private (ORadj = 3.2).Conclusion: Almost the entire community of Kendari intends to use the WBS to SFZs regulation law enforcement also seen indirectly through social supports. This intention related to the age group of adolescents and the type of work of private employees. Further studies are needed to make one of the SFZs as a pilot project in the implementation of the WBS, e.g. educational institutions as a place for teenagers/students.

Climbing the Protest Pyramid: A Situational Analysis of the Resistance of Rickshaw Drivers in Guangzhou, China

Guangzhou police confiscated more than 1,000 “illegal” rickshaws every day since they were banned from use in the city. However, rickshaws were omnipresent in all corners of the city, representing a massive army of unemployed or underemployed workers struggling to eke out a living. Various strategies were used by these rickshaw operators to protest and resist the mass confiscation by the police. Using data collected through systematic social observation of police law enforcement and rickshaw drivers’ routine activities, focus group interviews with the police, in-depth semistructured interviews with rickshaw drivers, official police detention statistics of rickshaw drivers, and media content data mining, this article provides a typology and an analysis of resistance. Based on the severity and intensity of resistance, these typologies are ranked in what I shall call a “pyramid of resistance.” This article further examines how situational factors such as degree of frustration, procedural justice, mobilization capacity, and campaign-style policing affect the escalation of resistance.

Securitizing Xinjiang: Police Recruitment, Informal Policing and Ethnic Minority Co-optation

Following a series of high-profile attacks in Beijing, Kunming and Urumqi by Uyghur militants, the Chinese party-state declared a “war on terror” in 2014. Since then, China's Xinjiang region has witnessed an unprecedented build-up of what we describe as a multi-tiered police force, turning it into one of the most heavily policed regions in the world. This article investigates the securitization of Xinjiang through an analysis of official police recruitment documents. Informal police jobs, which represent the backbone of recent recruitment drives, have historically carried inferior pay levels. Yet, advertised assistant police positions in Xinjiang now offer high salaries despite low educational requirements, thereby attracting lesser-educated applicants, many of whom are ethnic minorities. Besides co-opting Uyghurs into policing their own people, the resulting employment is in itself a significant stability maintenance strategy. While the known numbers of violent attacks have subsided, China's heavy-handed securitization approach risks alienating both minority and Han populations.