Conclusions: Reclaiming the Public in Policing

This concluding chapter synergizes the previous chapters and adds something new. Both functions are captured by the title, Reclaiming the Public in Policing. First, it argues that the empirical and conceptual work in this book points at the corrosion of the public character of policing, which results in law enforcement agencies that find it increasingly difficult to exclude politics, particularism, and populism from their operations. This part of the chapter concludes that it is imperative that we ‘unthink’ bureaucracy as the social evil of our time and revalue the public contours of policing. A second way to reclaim the ‘public’ in policing, now defined not as a quality of the police but an engaged citizenry that is involved in public debates on the police, concerns the role of police scholars in the public sphere. The chapter advocates a public anthropology of police and reflects on the author's efforts to ‘go public’.

Thickening Borderlands

While Chapter 2 mainly refers to the lack of separation between roles and personalities, this chapter draws attention to the fading division between the Dutch police and its organizational environment. It argues that police power is now often divided across a multiplicity of organizations. This expanded notion of the police prompts us to look beyond the police organization, particularly when we want to understand an urgent matter such as police discrimination. The chapter engages with the literature on the ‘policing of migration’, as it is mainly in this field that diffuse, or networked policing has quickly advanced. Second, it provides detailed empirical data on how migrants experience borders within the nation-state due to a thickening of borderlands.

Migrant-Hostile Policing

This chapter opens with three arrest cases that shed light on the non-modular constitution of present-day policing. Modularity is here understood as the segmentation of social life into separate and relatively independent spheres. The three vignettes show what happens when policing becomes non-modular: private and public considerations are blurred in the operations that police officers undertake. The rest of the chapter adds ethnographic materials collected in various settings to argue that this organizational development turns racial profiling, and migrant-hostile policing more broadly, into an everyday affair. One conclusion is emphasized repeatedly: police discrimination is a public issue that concerns the entire organization rather than an outcome of the private troubles of the individuals it employs.

Introduction: The Anthropology of Police

This introduction starts with a general discussion of the conflicted contours of police as reported by police anthropologists in various parts of the world. It leans on the notion of law and disorder, which is marked by the idea that police are not always a prerequisite of a socio-legal order and can sometimes even disturb it. It subsequently argues that this is largely due to an unmediated proximity between police and the policed that exists in many societies across the north–south divide. The risks of such ‘state proximity’ are manifold and yet, law enforcement bodies have carried out numerous reforms that make it possible. The chapter discusses various anti-bureaucracy reforms and the negative social effects they have had in The Netherlands. It concludes with an introduction of the chapters of the book, specifying the various links between the theories it has outlined and the empirical parts of the book.

Psycho-Technicians and Greedy Institutions

Chapter 4 focuses on police discrimination and ethnic boundaries within the police organization. A number of ethnographic cases are discussed that help to understand how biocracy—the inclusion of the whole person in the workplace—works as a holistic type of power that makes it almost impossible for officers with a migration background to combat discrimination. More specifically, the chapter approaches diversity management, personal development plans, and other psychological instruments as forms of ‘identity control’ that stretch the outer bounds of labour control. Linguistic anthropological methods are used to study how psychological discourses traverse the Dutch police and undergo metamorphosis when they move from production to consumption sites.