The Anthropology of Police

What are the potential contributions of anthropology to the study of police? Even
beyond the methodological particularities and geographic breadth of cultural
anthropology, there are a set of conceptual and analytical traditions that have
much to bring to broader scholarship in police studies.
Including original and international contributions from both senior and
emerging scholars, this pioneering book represents a foundational document for
a burgeoning field of study: the anthropology of police. The chapters in this
volume open up the question of police in new ways: mining the disciplinary
legacies of anthropology in order to discover new conceptual tools, methods,
and pedagogies; reworking relationships between “police,” “public,” and
“researcher” in ways that open up new avenues for exploration at the same time
as they articulate new demands; and retracing a hauntology that, through inter-
actions with individuals and collectives, constitutes a body politic through the
figure of police.
Illustrating the various ways that anthropology enables a reassessment of the
police/violence relationship with a broad consideration of the human stakes at
the center, this book will be of interest to criminologists, sociologists, anthropol-
ogists, and the broad interdisciplinary field invested in the study of policing,
order-making, and governance.

Kevin G. Karpiak is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology,

Anthropology and Criminology at Eastern Michigan University. His work
focuses on policing as a useful nexus for exploring questions in anthropology,
politics, and ethics. He serves as the General Editor of the group academic blog
Anthropoliteia and co-editor of the Cornell University Press monograph series
Police/Worlds: Studies in Security, Crime and Governance.

William Garriott is Associate Professor in the Law, Politics, and Society

program at Drake University. The focus of his current research and teaching is
the relationship between law, crime, and criminal justice, broadly conceived,
with specific interest in drugs, addiction, policing, and governance.
Routledge Frontiers of Criminal Justice

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-

Frontiers-of-Criminal-Justice/book-series/RFCJ.

Restoring Justice and Security in Intercultural Europe

Edited by Brunilda Pali and Ivo Aertsen

Monitoring Penal Policy in Europe

Edited by Gaëtan Cliquennois and Hugues de Suremain

Big Data, Crime and Social Control

Edited by Aleš Završnik

Moral Issues in Intelligence- led Policing

Edited by Nicholas R. Fyfe, Helene O. I. Gundhus and Kira Vrist Rønn

The Enforcement of Offender Supervision in Europe

Understanding Breach Processes
Edited by Miranda M. Boone and Niamh Maguire

Diversion in Youth Justice

What Can We Learn from Historical and Contemporary Practices?
Roger Smith

Police–Citizen Relations Across the World

Comparing Sources and Contexts of Trust and Legitimacy
Edited by Dietrich Oberwittler and Sebastian Roché

Critical Perspectives on Coercive Interventions

Law, Medicine and Society
Edited by Claire Spivakovsky, Kate Seear and Adrian Carter

The Anthropology of Police

Edited by Kevin G. Karpiak and William Garriott
The Anthropology of
Police

Edited by Kevin G. Karpiak and

William Garriott
First published 2018
by Routledge
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© 2018 selection and editorial matter, Kevin G. Karpiak and
William Garriott; individual chapters, the contributors
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Names: Karpiak, Kevin, editor. | Garriott, William Campbell,
1977– editor.
Title: The anthropology of police / edited by Kevin Karpiak and
William Garriott.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018.
| Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017059495| ISBN 9781138919655 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781315687759 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Police. | Anthropology.
Classification: LCC HV7921 .A598 2018 | DDC 363.2–dc23
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ISBN: 978-1-138-91965-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-68775-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
Contents

List of figures vii

List of contributors viii
Acknowledgments xii

  1  Introduction: disciplines, fields, and problems 1
Kevin G. KaRpiaK anD William GaRRioTT

PART I
Legacies and lessons 21

2 An anthropology of policing 23
peTeR K. manninG

3 Police culture: what it is, what it does, and what we should

do with it 34
JeFFRey T. maRTin

4 Policing shit; or, whatever happened to the medical police? 54

maTTheW WolF-meyeR

  5  Practice in the anthropology of policing: building the base of 
practice 72
Jennie m. SimpSon

6 Anthropological lessons for police 82

avRam BoRnSTein
vi Contents

PART II
Publics and relations 99

  7  “The boys with blue eyes”: an anthropology of a secret 
police 101
KaTheRine veRDeRy

  8  Policed bodies and subjectivities: football fans at the Gezi 
Uprising in Turkey 119
yağmUR nUhRaT

9 Police, hospitality, and mega-event security in

Rio de Janeiro 139
eRiKa RoBB laRKinS

10 Protesting police 153

paUl mUTSaeRS anD Tom van nUenen

PART III
Esprit de corps 173

11 A moral interpretation of police deviance 175

DiDieR FaSSin

12 The Black Box of police torture 188

laURenCe Ralph

13  The good police officer: ambivalent intimacies with the state 
in the Greek asylum procedure 209
heaTh CaBoT

Index 230
Figures

6.1 From “Crime and enforcement activity in new york City”

report, new york police Department (2011) 86
6.2 Students in anT 130 are asked to estimate, using
anonymously polling “clickers,” the percentage of the Black
population in nyC that they think are involved as perps in
violent crimes. This chart shows the aggregated results of
three sections (n = 45) when asked about shooting, murder or
non-negligent manslaughter in 2011 87
10.1 Tweet connecting #mitchhenriquez to political debate on the
punishment of illegal police use-of-force 167
Contributors

Avram Bornstein is professor in the Department of anthropology at the CUny

Graduate Center and at CUny John Jay where he also serves as Dean of
Graduate Studies. His research and teaching focus on violence and ethnic
conflict. he has done extensive ethnographic research over two decades in
Israel-Palestine and published on issues such as border enforcement, work,
political prisoners, healthcare, international intervention, and ethnographic
reflexivity. in recent years, Bornstein has also focused on the psycho-cultural
elements of policing in new york City, with particular attention to com-
munity policing, police ethnicity, and police education.

Heath  Cabot is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh in the

Department of Anthropology. She is the author of On the Doorstep of
Europe: Asylum and Citizenship in Greece (philadelphia, pa: University of
pennsylvania press, 2014). her research interests include political and legal
anthropology, asylum and human rights, the anthropology of ethics, advo-
cacy, and activism. Her current research concerns social insurance and
community-based healthcare in Greece. She is currently the co-editor (with
William Garriott) of the Political and Legal Anthropology Review.

Didier Fassin is the James Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Insti-
tute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Director of Studies at the École des
Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Anthropologist, sociologist, and
physician, he has conducted extensive research in Senegal, Congo, South
Africa, Ecuador, and France. His most recent inquiry has consisted in a crit-
ical engagement with philosophical approaches to punishment, which was the
matter of his Tanner lectures at Berkeley, and to life, which was the topic of
his adorno lectures in Frankfurt. his theoretical reflection on the public
presence of the social sciences was the subject of his recipient lecture for the
Gold medal in anthropology at the Swedish Royal academy of arts and Sci-
ences. He is the author of Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Polic-
ing (polity, 2013) and Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral
Condition (polity, 2016).
 Contributors ix

William Garriott is Associate Professor in the Law, Politics, and Society

program at Drake University. His research and teaching focus on the relation-
ship between law, crime, and criminal justice, broadly conceived, with spe-
cific interest in drugs, addiction, policing, and governance. he is the author
of Policing Methamphetamine: Narcopolitics in Rural America as well as
editor of the volumes Policing and Contemporary Governance: The Anthro-
pology of Police in Practice and (with eugene Raikhel) Addiction Traject-
ories. he currently serves as co-editor (with heath Cabot) of PoLAR:
Political and Legal Anthropology Review.

Kevin G. Karpiak is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology,

Anthropology and Criminology at Eastern Michigan University. His work
focuses on policing as a useful nexus for exploring questions in anthropology,
politics, and ethics. He serves as the General Editor of the group academic
blog Anthropoliteia and co-editor (with ilana Feldman, William Garriott, and
Sameena mulla) of the Cornell University press monograph series Police/
Worlds: Studies in Security, Crime and Governance.

Erika Robb Larkins is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Sociology and

Director of the J. Keith Behner and Catherine m. Stiefel program on Brazil at
San Diego State University. Her research and teaching focus on violence,
urban life, and inequality in Brazil. her recent book, The Spectacular Favela:
Violence in Modern Brazil (University of California press, 2015), explores
the political economy of spectacular violence in one of Rio’s most famous
favelas. She is currently working on a new manuscript on Rio’s private
security industry.

Peter K. Manning holds the elmer v. h. and eileen m. Brooks Chair in the
School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University,
Boston, ma. he is the author and editor of some 20 books, including The
Technology of Policing: Crime Mapping, Information Technology and the
Rationality of Crime Control (new york: nyU press, 2008) and Democratic
Policing in a Changing World (Boulder, Co: paradigm publishers, 2010).
his research interests include the rationalizing and interplay of private and
public policing, democratic policing, crime mapping and crime analysis, uses
of information technology, and qualitative methods. He is currently
researching the transformation of policing in ireland since the patten Report.

Jeffrey T. Martin is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Anthropology

and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois in
Urbana-Champaign. he studies policing in China, Taiwan, hong Kong, and
the United States of America. His research agenda focuses on historical con-
tinuity and change in the cultural qualities of police power, the ways these
qualities reflect their larger political milieu, and the way they are connected
to various technical and organizational elements.
x Contributors

Paul Mutsaers is an anthropologist who gained his Ph.D. from the Department
of Culture Studies at Tilburg University. he was previously employed by the
Police Academy of the Netherlands and is now working as a postdoc at the
Tilburg School of humanities and Digital Sciences. his work on police has
appeared in journals such as American Anthropologist, The British Journal of
Criminology, Critique of Anthropology, Social Anthropology, and Anthropol-
ogy of Work Review. He recently completed his manuscript “Police Unlim-
ited: policing, migrants, and the values of Bureaucracy,” which will be
published by oxford University press in 2018.
Tom van Nuenen is assistant professor in online Culture at the Department of
Culture Studies of Tilburg University, the netherlands. he has held visiting
positions at Western Sydney University and Shanghai International Studies
University. His research and teaching focus on technologically mediated,
“plugged-in” travel, and his articles have been published in Tourist Studies,
The Journal of Popular Culture, and Games and Culture.
Yağmur  Nuhrat received her B.a. in Sociology from Boğaziçi University,
Istanbul, after which she moved to the US to pursue a Ph.D. in Anthropology
at Brown University. She completed her m.a. degree on the reception and
perception of migration in istanbul in 2008. That year, she began to work on
fair play and the concept of fairness in football (soccer) in Turkey. She com-
pleted her ph.D. in 2013 on this subject (“Fair enough? negotiating ethics in
Turkish Football”). Currently, she resides in istanbul and is assistant pro-
fessor at istanbul Bilgi University, Department of Sociology.
Laurence Ralph a Professor of Anthropology and African and African Amer-
ican Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of Renegade Dreams:
Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago, which grapples with the con-
sequences of the “war on drugs” together with mass incarceration, the ramifi-
cations of heroin trafficking for hiv-infected teenagers, the perils of gunshot
violence, and the ensuing disabilities that gang members suffer—not to
mention the legal trials of police torture victims. Investigating this encom-
passing context allows him to detail the social forces that make black urban
residents vulnerable to disease and disability. Ralph earned a ph.D. and m.a.
in anthropology from the University of Chicago, and a B.Sc. from the
Georgia institute of Technology where he majored in history, Technology,
and Society.
Jennie M. Simpson is the Staff Lead for Criminal Justice at the Substance
abuse and mental health Services administration (SamhSa). in this role,
she supports the coordination of the agency’s criminal justice activities and
leads policy initiatives and activities. over her career, Dr. Simpson has
focused on the intersections of behavioral health and criminal justice systems,
with an emphasis on law enforcement and behavioral health diversion pro-
grams for individuals with mental and substance use disorders. Prior to
 Contributors xi

joining SAMHSA, Dr. Simpson provided technical assistance to law enforce-

ment agencies, building law enforcement and behavioral health diversion pro-
grams, and worked in community mental health to build partnerships across
the criminal justice system, including law enforcement departments, pre-trial
services, specialized treatment courts, and community supervision agencies.
She has also conducted research on law enforcement diversion programs and
behavioral health and law enforcement collaborations. Dr. Simpson received
a Ph.D. in anthropology from American University.
Katherine Verdery is Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Pro-
fessor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New
york. Since 1973 she has conducted field research in Romania, resulting in
several books including The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Post-
socialist Transylvania (Cornell University press, 2003). her teaching inter-
ests include contemporary and socialist Eastern Europe, the anthropology of
property, and time and space. Her most recent project takes off from her
Secret police file, which she received from the Romanian government in
2008. Using it, she has written her field memoirs from the vantage point of
the police who followed her. The book, My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a
Secret Police File, is being published by Duke University Press.
Matthew Wolf-Meyer is the author of The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine
and Modern American Life and an Associate Professor of Anthropology at
Binghamton University. his research focuses on the biology of everyday
life—the ways that human biological experiences interact with the expecta-
tions of American capitalist institutions, and how medicine is used to ease
these frictions. The Slumbering Masses explores how consolidated sleep
developed over the 19th century into the basis for sleep medicine in the 20th
century, and how this conception of sleep foreclosed other possible ways to
sleep while shaping American work, school, and family schedules. His forth-
coming book, Unraveling, focuses on neurological injury and communica-
tion, and he is currently working on a project about the history of the use of
excrement in American medicine and the rising interest in fecal microbial
transplants in the treatment of human microbiomes, entitled The Colony
Within.
Acknowledgments

The fruits that fed this volume have been both rich and numerous. We would
like to thank everyone who has provided their bounty over the years. In par-
ticular we would like to thank participants and audience members at the panels
“Collaborative engagements in policing: a Roundtable Discussion on anthro-
pology, police and oversight” and “The anthropology of police: Challenges and
opportunities” at the 2015 annual meetings of the american anthropological
association as well as the panel “Thinking Through police, producing anthro-
pological Theory: ethnography as a Tool for Critical Thought” at the 2014
Meetings. Nate Graulich provided a crucial burst of energy and attention in the
final stages of manuscript preparation, from which the volume benefited greatly.
eastern michigan University’s Faculty Research Fellowship provided significant
support, allowing Dr. Karpiak the space and time to help see this project through
to its final form. in addition, we’d like to thank the contributors to and readers of
the blog Anthropoliteia, from which so many of these conversations have
emerged.
Chapter 1

Introduction
Disciplines, fields, and problems
Kevin G. Karpiak and William Garriott

The purpose of this volume is to explore a deceptively simple question: what are
the potential contributions of anthropology to the study of police? The question
is deceptively simple because embedded within it are two much thornier ques-
tions: first, what is disciplinarily distinctive about anthropology? Second, what
exactly do we mean by “police”?
let’s start with the second question. The challenge of defining “the police” as
an object of inquiry can be fruitfully illustrated through an examination of its
origins. It is conventional to trace the origin of modern police to London in the
year 1829. a product of Robert peel and the metropolitan police act, the
london metropolitan police embarked on its first patrols on September 29 of
that year, forming the blueprint for police as we know them today. The blue
uniforms. The urban orientation. The tension between a mandate toward law
enforcement and one of order maintenance. The correspondingly complicated
relationship to (state-sanctioned) violence.
But this account is contested (Brogden 1987; Sinclair 2011; Styles 1987).
Some have traced the origins of police not to london, but to one of its colonial
contemporaries, the irish Royal Constabulary (iRC). The iRC was likewise
formed under peel, during his time as irish Secretary. it came into being with the
passing of the irish peace preservation Force act in 1814 (Jeffries 1952, 53).
The iRC was quite different from the london police. Whereas the london
“bobbies” (a nickname in honor of their progenitor, Robert peel) were formally
accountable to the citizens—indeed, the low pay that seems to accompany police
work everywhere gained its philosophical justification here as peel insisted on
the importance of not setting police officers too far above those fellow citizens
whom they were policing (Taylor 2017)—the iRC had no such mandate. as con-
stituted, the iRC was closer to what we would today call a paramilitary force:
adopting tactics more oriented toward outside occupation than co-existence with
fellow citizens (Jeffries 1952; Brogden 1987).
That there is a tension between different models and histories of police is, on
its own, not the point. The point is that these models (amongst others) developed
along different trajectories that have indelibly shaped the police institution as it
exists today, even “returning home” to their purported point of origin. indeed, if
2 Kevin G. Karpiak and William Garriott

police are today a “global form,” able to be decontextualized and recontextual-

ized across time and space, then this is the result of this earlier history (Garriott
2013). This insight sheds light on why there continues to be such strong debate
regarding the proper role of police in contemporary social and political life. That
police today are the subject of both valorization and vilification is a reflection of
this history in which they have been tasked with serving as both an outside occu-
pying force and as fellow citizens working to maintain the conditions of civil co-
existence; as both a mechanism for preserving state authority and as a
mechanism for administering and maximizing the public good; and as both a
state-based, public institution and a private, for-profit enterprise (Brogden 1987).
To speak of “police,” then, is to speak of a particular configuration of these
various, and variously intersecting, tasks as made manifest within a particular
moment in time and space.
at this point we might return to the first question: what of anthropology?
What makes anthropology distinct among the disciplines in its approach to
police? This is a question with which anthropologists themselves grapple. It is
also a question coming from scholars of police in other disciplines (such as soci-
ology and criminology) where the interest in police is longstanding. Here there
are interesting parallels, for just as specifying what is meant by “police” raises
many questions, so, too, does the effort to specify anthropology’s distinct discip-
linary identity. Not only does the professional self-imagination of anthropolo-
gists differ from how they are perceived by their extra-disciplinary colleagues,
but the question of anthropology’s core raison d’être has been and remains
exceptionally contested.
Much of the debate centers on the continued relevance of disciplinary markers
that have enjoyed hegemonic status in the past. one might ask, for instance:
What about the higher tendency amongst anthropologists to do research in “non-
western” locales (a tendency that is, of course, a legacy of anthropology’s own
connection to various forms of colonialism)? While the legacy of scholars such
as Bronislaw malinowski, often credited with establishing the standard paradigm
for anthropological research, still exerts significant influence over anthropology
(manning, this volume), the discipline has long since moved away from
the exclusive focus on so-called “primitive,” “savage,” “pre-modern,” “non-
western,” or small-scale societies that once served as a disciplinary boundary
between itself and other social sciences (Wolf 1982; Trouillot 1991; Baker 1998;
Fabian 2014). and anthropology has worked hard to rid itself of the theoretical
burdens implicit in the “cultural areas” paradigm that once defined research
agendas (malkki 1997). at the same time, it remains the case that a dispropor-
tionate amount of anthropological work does focus itself outside the Anglophone
West, particularly in comparison to neighboring disciplines that likewise study
police. moreover, though anthropology has largely ceded the terrain of formally
comparative studies—including comparative policing—to scholars formed in
other disciplinary traditions, anthropologists continue to write with an implicit
comparative, global awareness. This has led some to try to rework what a global
 Introduction 3

approach itself might look like (hannerz 1996; Tsing 2005; inda and Rosaldo
2002; appadurai 1996; Collier and ong 2005), while the majority engage with
work written about a diverse set of locales by virtue simply of reviewing the
relevant literature on their particular topic of inquiry (such as police, cf. Karpiak
2013b; Karpiak 2016). Finally, there is an increasing tendency to design projects
focused less on discrete, geographically bound populations and more on multi-
sited inquiries that productively blur the distinction between locales (Marcus
1998).
What about culture? The culture concept, particularly in the United States, is
the concept most centrally associated with (cultural) anthropology. Yet its prom-
inence has been challenged, particularly over the past four decades. During this
time the culture concept has been subject to intense critique for, amongst other
things, its inattention to questions of power, to history, and to the politics of
representation (Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Wolf-meyer 2007; abu-lughod
1996; Rosaldo 1993; Clifford 1988). This is not to say, however, that culture has
disappeared from the anthropological lexicon. on the contrary, as michael
Fischer has argued, “[w]ithout a differentiated and relational notion of the cul-
tural (the arts, media, styles, religions, value-orientations, ideologies, imaginar-
ies, worldviews, soul, and the like), the social sciences would be crippled,
reducing social action to notions of pure instrumentality” (Fischer 2007, 1). But
the very need to make such a claim—and in the journal Cultural Anthropology,
no less—demonstrates the degree to which culture has lost some of its hege-
monic status. moreover, anthropologists can no longer pretend to enjoy a mono-
poly over the term (holmes and marcus 2005, 2006; Deeb and marcus 2011), as
the insights of both “cultural criminology” (hayward and young 2004; Kane
2004; Ferrell, hayward, and young 2008) and studies of “police culture” (Skol-
nick 2008; loftus 2010; see also martin, this volume) can attest.
What about ethnography? To be sure, anthropology is unique in its commit-
ment to ethnography as the research tool of choice (Van Maanen 1988; Fassin
2017). But anthropologists are by no means the only discipline to employ the
method. ethnography and other forms of “participant observation” or fieldwork
abound across the social sciences (one need only browse the pages of the journal,
Ethnography). and within anthropology, the central place accorded ethnography
continues to be rethought. For example, Gupta and Ferguson (1997) have shown
that the idea of the anthropological “field” itself, and its concomitant sense of
transformative experience, serves largely as a micropolitical academic practice
that maintains a sense of disciplinary identity even as the methods themselves
may seem inadequate to the analytical task at hand. in this vein, several prom-
inent anthropologists have articulated visions of what an anthropology less cen-
tered on fieldwork might look like (asad 2002; G. Feldman 2011), while others
continue to stand by ethnography’s value, working instead to reimagine and
rework the practice of “fieldwork” and the ethnographic project itself.1 notably,
several of the contributions to this volume do not take a strictly ethnographic or
even fieldwork-based approach. instead, they offer reflections on practical
4 Kevin G. Karpiak and William Garriott

engagements with police (Bornstein, Simpson), media analysis (mutsaers and

van nuenen), and critical analysis of official documents, such as Department of
Justice reports (martin) and legal case files (Ralph). While none of these consti-
tute an ethnography in the strict sense, all are informed deeply by the contribu-
tor’s more conventional ethnographic work.
Thus none of these tendencies, whether toward privileging ethnography,
focusing on culture, or engaging in research outside “the West,” provides a
stable point of orientation around which to organize an effort like the one
pursued here: developing an anthropology of police. This is not to say, however,
that they do not remain important tools. Didier Fassin’s recent collection, for
instance, shows just how powerful ethnography can be when applied to the
“world of policing” (Fassin 2017). and Beatrice Jauregui’s recent book shows
how guiding theoretical presuppositions must be rethought when viewed from
the perspective of a different geographic, cultural, and political context (Jauregui
2016). all the same, the anthropology of police envisioned here is a capacious
enterprise, notable for the diversity of projects operating under this name more
than for the singular perspective it promises. Just as police can be seen as a par-
ticular configuration of historically derived trends and tendencies, so, too, does
anthropology operate in the shadow of, but not thereby defined by, its particular
development as an institutionalized scholarly enterprise.
in that spirit, this collection has been put together such that this multiplicity is
highlighted rather than (superficially) disciplined or tamed. indeed, what perhaps
distinguishes current anthropological examinations of police from those taking
place in other disciplines is that, in anthropology, it remains an emergent enter-
prise. many anthropologists have come to their study of police unexpectedly,
even reluctantly, pushed toward a consideration of police in the process of
seeking answers to other questions, rather than in an effort to understand the
police in and of themselves.
This is true of the current volume’s editors. For instance, Garriott (2011)
began his research in the rural United States expecting to examine the treatment
trajectories of those using (or working to stop using) the drug methamphetamine.
he found, however, that such treatment trajectories could not be understood
apart from the broader criminal justice apparatus in which police (as institution)
and policing (as practice) played a disproportionate role. Similarly, Karpiak
(2010, 2013a) came to study police only tangentially. it seemed a promising site
to address one of the fundamental themes motivating his work: how to study and
describe the operation of multiple modes of power and resistance simultan-
eously. in this pursuit, he found his fieldwork following these lines of flight well
beyond the bounds of institutions and interactions traditionally understood as
“police.” Stories in this vein are shared by many anthropologists who have
turned to police as an object of inquiry. This emergent quality of the anthropol-
ogy of police thus brings an openness and multiplicity to the various projects
currently operating under this name. Rather than springing from a single
scholarly canon, inquiries may be framed by a variety of theoretical concerns
 Introduction 5

(the anthropology of violence, or drugs, or the state, for instance) or geograph-

ical interests.
But as the anthropology of police continues to develop, we imagine such
intellectual trajectories will become less normative. This volume appears at a
moment in which anthropologists are increasingly designing projects that make
police an explicit object of inquiry. as they make this shift, many are confronted
with a unique cluster of questions, at once conceptual, methodological, and
ethical. put briefly, contemporary anthropologists are the inheritors of what Jean
Comaroff has called a “classic legacy” in which there is a distinct tendency to
focus on “the underdog, on marginal populations” (2010, 133). The power of
this approach is that it has been and continues to be “profoundly counter-
hegemonic” (ibid.). as Comaroff notes:

as anthropologists, we question surface categories; we question the stories

that social institutions tell about themselves. in that sense, there is a tend-
ency in anthropology to assume that authoritative structures and institutions
should be questioned rather than accepted at face value. We “come from
below” methodologically and theoretically.
(Comaroff 2010, 133–134)

But this tendency creates challenges as well, specifically for anthropological

studies of police (Karpiak 2010; Jauregui 2013; Comaroff and Comaroff 2004).
Chief amongst these is the challenge of mobilizing the ethical, methodological,
and theoretical modes developed by anthropology in order to study police, the
formal representatives of violent state power. This violence is often perpetuated
against precisely those marginal communities that are the more conventional
subjects of anthropological inquiry. How anthropologists grapple with this pre-
dicament is the subject to which we now turn.

Violence and the human

Any study of police must reckon with their unique capacity to use violence. This
is as evident from a consideration of current events, such as the police killings of
civilians throughout the world, inspiring social movements ranging from the
arab Spring to Black lives matter (Camp and heatherton 2016), as it is from a
survey of Western political institutional development: the capacity to use viol-
ence is, today, that which makes police, police (Bittner 1970; neocleous 1998).
The problem of how to negotiate this fundamentally violent capacity with the
practice of anthropological inquiry was taken up by many contributors to the
current volume in the fall of 2015, during a roundtable on the anthropology of
police at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in
Denver, Colorado. a critical mass of contributors participated in the roundtable.
Questions of how to respond to police violence were central to the discussion.
A particular focus was on how to represent police in anthropological writing.
6 Kevin G. Karpiak and William Garriott

Specifically, they asked whether there was an obligation to “humanize” the

police. Certainly in most anthropological work, there is an onus placed on the
anthropologist to present a complex, often sympathetic portrait of those with
whom one has worked and about whom one is writing. indeed, it is for precisely
this reason that police have been and continue to be a problematic object of
anthropological inquiry (Karpiak 2010). For who, in the end, could be less sym-
pathetic as an interlocutor than the police—particularly those who engage in the
kind of violence work described in the contributions to this volume by Ralph,
martin, and others? For many they occupy the same space in the anthropological
imagination as genocidaire, neo-nazis, and other “repugnant cultural others”
(Blee 2007; harding 2000) who present as fundamentally inappropriate objects
of anthropological inquiry (holmes 2000; Daniel 1996). moreover, one cannot
overlook the current political context, particularly in the United States, in which
police violence, particularly against communities of color, has become a polit-
ical flashpoint, bringing to light deep histories of police and other forms of
racialized state violence which demand critical engagement.2 in this context,
what are the ethical and political stakes of trying to humanize the police? What
would such an act of “humanization” look like? And are there any grounds on
which one could even justify an approach that took up such a project of humani-
zation over and against one centered on cataloguing, critiquing, and decrying
police-perpetuated harms?
Many rejected the idea that a critical appraisal of police behavior was
incompatible with an effort to humanize. Many more rejected the idea that
“humanization” meant generating sympathetic, uncritical portraits. as panelist
and anthropologist of police, Julia hornberger, observed, “Just making police
look nice isn’t actually our contribution.” echoing this sentiment, Kevin Karpiak
stated that he viewed his work as humanization, but not because it was about
presenting police officers in an exclusively good light. Rather, his was about
acknowledging fallibility and other traits that are just as essential to what makes
police—as both individuals and as an institution—human. in this regard, Karpiak
was extrapolating from anthropologist paul Rabinow’s (2003a) reimagining of
the anthropological project around a concern with anthropos, or as he translates
it, the “human thing” (Karpiak 2016).
For Rabinow, anthropology is best understood not as a shared methodological
toolkit or epistemological canon but as a set of open problems,3 the outcome of
which will have profound implications for what it means to be human in the con-
temporary world (Rabinow 2005). over the past several years Rabinow, along
with collaborators and students, has put forward a compelling vision for anthro-
pology that does not rest on specific nonwestern locales, reified cultural differ-
ences, or traditional ethnographic research techniques for its raison d’être
(Rabinow and Bennett 2007; Rabinow and Stavrianakis 2013). Rather, it puts its
focus on the nature of “the human” as an open, central, question. Such a project
is necessary because of the ways in which “the human” has itself been thrown
into question by contemporary developments, most notably, for Rabinow,
 Introduction 7

biotechnology and its attendant forms of biopolitics (Rabinow 1996, 1999;

Collier, lakoff, and Rabinow 2004; Rabinow and Rose 2006). But one could also
add such developments as the discourse of human rights, new forms of diagnosis,
treatment, and expertise in medicine, and the emergence of “security” as a para-
digm enabling intervention into a range of human projects, from war, rights, and
terrorism, to food, commerce, and health. “anthropology,” in this vein, is less
centrally an endeavor to make final truth claims about “what the human is” as it is
an invitation to explore the under-determined problem space opened up by such
developments (Rabinow and Stavrianakis 2016; Faubion et al. 2016).
putting “the human” question at the forefront of an inquiry into policing is,
we believe, one of the strongest threads connecting the chapters in this volume,
and among their greatest contribution, even if most authors do not explicitly
build off of Rabinow’s framework. It reframes the question of humanization as
discussed at the AAA roundtable. No longer is it about denunciation versus
“making the police seem nice.” Rather, it is about pursuing modes of inquiry
that ask: How are police implicated in the question of what it means to be human
in the world of today? How are notions of “the human” mobilized or remade in
current policing and security practices? and, which tools of inquiry are best
suited to exploring these questions?
This framing enables us to return to the question of violence and the problems
it poses as anthropologists turn their attention to police. Each of the chapters of
the current volume addresses the question of violence in unique ways, bringing
critical nuance and contextualization, even forcing a reconsideration of the
police/violence relationship itself. Contributors to the present volume do this in
several ways. First, peter K. manning highlights the formative role of the ques-
tion of violence for classic “police studies” and a cultural anthropology of mod-
ernity. Second, there is close examination of under-considered policing
traditions, such as the Romanian secret police discussed by verdery. Such police
forces were a mainstay of communism and state socialism during the Cold War
and remain staples of state authority in most states. They have received par-
ticular attention in studies of latin america (larkins 2015; Willis 2015; peng-
lase 2014; Caldeira 2001; Goldstein 2012; Smith 2016; hautzinger 2007), but
they are hardly limited to this region (i. Feldman 2015; Karpiak 2013a; Beek
and Göpfert 2012; Ralph 2013). Similarly, Wolf-meyer provides a glimpse at a
genealogical dead end in his consideration of the “medical police” in the United
States. Why doesn’t such a police force exist, he asks, that would concern itself
with such issues as the mismanagement of human waste on private property?
And what are the consequences of the absence of such a force for those who face
such concerns? in still another approach, several contributors examine how
police function as an index or vector for violence. nuhrat and larkins, working
in Turkey and Brazil, respectively, show how security practices tied to sporting
events can metastasize well beyond the institutions formally labeled “police,”
and even into the very populations that are their targets. Finally, several contrib-
utors face the question of police violence head on. notably, both are case studies
8 Kevin G. Karpiak and William Garriott

of the United States. martin, in his chapter, uses the United States Department of
Justice report following the shooting of mike Brown by police officer Darren
Wilson in Ferguson, missouri as a context from which to think through the
concept of “police culture.” in a complementary case study, laurence Ralph pro-
vides a critical examination of racialized police violence in Chicago, particularly
the use of torture over several decades by members of Chicago’s area Two
police precinct.
There are more approaches that could be highlighted, as well as additional
connections between the chapters that could be mentioned. But what this sam-
pling shows is that amidst the diverse range of projects surveyed here is a unified
concern with police as implicated in what it means to be human today. To this
end the question of violence is, again, unavoidable. But the chapters that follow
illustrate the various ways anthropology enables a reassessment of the police/
violence relationship by putting a broad consideration of the human stakes at the
center.

The chapters
The chapters that follow are organized into three Parts. Each Part centers on a
core tension animating the human dimensions of contemporary policing. The
first part, “legacies and lessons,” provides a framework through which to under-
stand the relationship between anthropology as a discipline and policing as an
object of study, looking backwards to reexamine classical tools, methods, and
practices in order to reassess their value for a forward-looking anthropology of
police.
eminent scholar of police peter K. manning begins this discussion with an
essay that serves as a synthetic overview of two disciplines—police studies and
cultural anthropology—at the same time as it offers programmatic suggestions
for the new research opportunities opened up by their intersection. Reading the
development of english, French, and american cultural anthropology over the
course of the long 20th century against the contemporary development of what
can best be called “police studies” in sociological criminology, manning high-
lights several crucial turns in the latter which, as he argues, set the stage for the
contemporary emergence of an “anthropology of policing” (or AOP). In the face
of this development, manning compels its adherents to mine the now-vast schol-
arly archive of qualitative work on policing in order to place its insights on
police “content” within a framework that is comparative (geographically, cultur-
ally, temporally), concept-focused, synthetic, and attuned to the illustrative
power of “the case.” a disciplinary program so oriented, manning argues,
can offer tremendous insight into several as-yet under-explored dimensions of
policing in modern life: secrecy, deviousness, surveillance, violence, danger, and
the sacred.
Jeff Martin’s point of entry is one of the key sites of overlap between classi-
cal anthropological work and police studies, the notion of “police culture.”
 Introduction 9

While cognizant of the decades-long critique of the “culture concept,” martin

argues nevertheless that attending to the ways the concept has been used differ-
ently by two sets of scholars points to a persistent challenge that can be fruitfully
addressed by studying police: for, he argues, police are the point at which the
abstraction of structural violence becomes disturbingly concrete and personal.
By way of illustration, he shows how attending to police culture can illuminate
the human stakes in current US debates over police violence. Focusing on the
report following the killing of michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson,
missouri, martin shows how conceptualizations of the human, as framed in the
tensions of “police culture,” are implicated in the report’s assessment of the fatal
shooting. This analysis provides important context to what has become an
entrenched debate in the US over which lives matter (a conversation sparked by
the Black Lives Matter movement and the social media-fueled counter-
movements espousing counter-slogans such as All Lives Matter and Police Lives
Matter).
Avram Bornstein also takes up issues of race and police violence in the
United States. and, like martin, his chapter likewise draws on some of the
classic tools of anthropological work—a combination of Boasian antiracism
(Boas 1940) and lévi-Straussian depaysement (lévi-Strauss 1963)—in order to
reflect upon the ways that training in anthropology can work against some of the
common prejudices of the police recruits he finds in his classes at John Jay
College of Criminal Justice in new york City. more specifically, Bornstein finds
in anthropology a way to generate understanding between the police and what
police often perceive to be a hostile public. its specific insights into race, and the
ways racism can manifest itself, have proven to have the capacity to allow offi-
cers to better understand and address the source and context of the hostilities
they experience from those they police. Such understandings mitigate the clois-
tered, siege mentality that has frequently been documented in police organiza-
tions by scholars of policing.
in a similar vein, Jennie Simpson’s chapter makes the case for incorporating
more anthropologists within applied and policy-oriented police programming.
Anthropologists have a complicated relationship working with government insti-
tutions, particularly those with the capacity to use violence in pursuing projects
of order and control. During the US wars in iraq and afghanistan, for instance,
there was significant controversy surrounding the US military’s effort to recruit
anthropologists and other social scientists to aid with the war effort (Kelly et al.
2010). as the “shock and awe” of the conflict’s early days became a mission of
fighting for the “hearts and minds” of local populations, anthropological exper-
tise took on a new value. A small number of anthropologists applauded the mili-
tary’s efforts to take cultural difference seriously, while many more condemned
the effort as a potential breach of professional ethics.4 In the wake of such lega-
cies, Simpson, like Bornstein, finds in anthropology a significant set of tools and
insights that can improve police practices, thereby directly addressing many of
the longstanding issues surrounding police violence. While such calls for greater
10 Kevin G. Karpiak and William Garriott

collaboration between anthropologists and police institutions will continue to be

controversial—and, in some contexts, completely inconceivable—these chapters
provide examples in which anthropological inquiry can be a source of both illu-
mination and intervention into police practice.
Finally, matthew Wolf-meyer’s chapter explores the other side of the “lega-
cies” question, that of the path not followed. he asks why, unlike europe, did
the institution of the medical police fail to take hold in the United States? The
medical police, as Wolf-meyer details, is part of the early history and genealogy
of police in europe. The medical police performed functions, particularly in
urban environments, which are now associated with non-police institutions such
as sanitation and public health. To explain this conspicuous absence (and its
implications for today), Wolf-meyer highlights the interplay of context-specific
understandings of disease and political culture. in so doing, he sheds light on the
specific place police occupy and don’t occupy within contemporary practices of
governance and formations of “the public” in the United States.
The second part, “publics and relations,” centers on the relationship between
the “public” and the “police.” For reasons highlighted in the previous part, the
relation between “the police” and “the public” is one of the enduring tensions in
the history of policing (mutsaers, Simpson, and Karpiak 2015). For instance,
five of the nine statements that comprise Sir Robert peel’s iconic and oft-cited
“Nine Principles of Policing” deal with the police/public relationship. This is
due in no small part to the fact that a defining feature of police is their focus on
questions of domestic order rather than questions of external threats (the latter,
of course, is traditionally the domain of the military). While this distinction is
contingent on local circumstances and political histories, and is often much less
clear in practice (as can be seen in Katherine verdery’s contribution to this
volume), it remains a defining ideal for police organization and thus for police as
an anthropological problem.
Katherine verdery’s chapter opens this part. over the past several years,
verdery has been analyzing a unique ethnographic object: her own police file.
verdery conducted fieldwork in Romania in the 1970s and 80s. During this time,
she, like her interlocutors, was the subject of surveillance by the Romanian
secret police. Reading her file, verdery learned that she was suspected of being a
spy, working for the US Central intelligence agency (Cia). verdery’s actions
as an anthropologist fueled these suspicions. Those surveilling her made note of
her interviewing techniques, her record keeping, her use of terms such as
“informants,” her interest in “socio-political information,” and so on. verdery’s
police surveillers were struck by the similarities between their work and hers.
Reading her file decades later, verdery, too, was struck by the similarity—so
much so that it made her question some of the conventional anthropological
techniques she employed in the field.
Verdery’s chapter underscores what others have observed about the “secret”
or “political” police, namely that their presence exacts a palpable yet complex
impact on everyday life. For instance, verdery notes how the Romanian police’s
 Introduction 11

practices recruiting informants, mapping, and exploiting their networks for

information impacted those networks while generating unique police-mediated
representations of the Romanian public. Verdery likewise notes how Romanians
developed and deployed a language of “otherness” to describe those individuals
who filled the ranks of the police. They were described as lacking kin, or coming
from outside Romania. Conversely, verdery notes that, in the wake of the fall of
the communist state, and the opening up of Securitate records, members of the
Securitate have worked openly to manage their public image and stave off neg-
ative representations. in this way, verdery highlights the multiple registers
through which “humanization” occurred. Her own encounters with former
members of the Securitate, for instance, were confounding in that those with
whom she spoke were quite “normal,” pleasant, even affable—a far cry from
their characterization as violent, parentless monsters in the public imaginary. at
the same time, she left questioning the trustworthiness and authenticity of these
encounters. Was she, for instance, meeting the “true” person? or a savvy per-
formance by someone trained in the arts of disinformation? if it was, in fact, the
true person, what should she make of it? Does “humanization” here provide a
moment of empathy and understanding? or does it serve as another reminder,
pace hannah arendt, of the “banality of evil” (arendt 2006)?
yağmur nuhrat examines the police/public relation by examining the ways in
which football fans in Turkey have undergone unique police-inflected socializa-
tions. examining the Gezi uprising of 2013, she analyzes how it is that football
fans came to be key participants in the demonstrations, and an organized force of
resistance against the police.
Nuhrat’s analysis provides an example of anthropological work that
approaches police through their effects, rather than directly as interlocutors
(through interviews or the like). Starting with the ethnographic puzzle of football
fans’ participation in the Gezi uprising, she excavates the police/public relation
by showing how specific policing techniques have become entwined with
football—and attending football matches—in Turkey. in so doing, she shows how
police practices, when focused on specific groups, can perform a collectivizing
function. This collectivizing occurs at the level of the body itself, as responding
to particular forms of policing becomes a “technique of the body” (cf. Mauss
1973). in this way, she outlines how police are not just central to contemporary
political life (in Turkey and elsewhere), but are a crucial element in the making of
the “body politic” in the most literal of senses. This mode of humanization
involves a “making human” through the medium of police practice.
The chapter by Mutsaers and van Nuenen approaches the topic of policing
and protest with a slightly different lens, although with similar insight. Writing
in reaction to Diarmaid harkin’s (2015) argument that aggressively violent
forms of policing reflect a general public will to punition, mutsaers and van
Nuenen hope to complicate the sense of “public” at stake in policing. They bring
a growing body of literature on “hashtag” internet activism to bear on the
singular case of mitch henriquez, an aruban citizen of the netherlands killed
12 Kevin G. Karpiak and William Garriott

during a confrontation with Dutch police at a concert in The hague in order to

both diversify our sense of “the public” that speaks in relation to police violence
and to pay attention to the ways that social media technologies enable the consti-
tution of transnational publics in opposition to police violence. Such protests
make explicit the parallels between the Henriquez case and those more familiar
to a US audience, in which mobile technologies make visible the forms of viol-
ence to which non-white bodies are subjected and, in so doing, open up the
possibility to rethink forms of political action and opposition beyond and in rela-
tion to the nation state.
Robb Larkins’ chapter troubles tidy distinctions between “public” and
“private” in the realm of policing. Though such a distinction is fundamental to
the conceptualization of the modern police institution itself, its assumptions
about the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force crumble in the face of
realities on the ground. here, the line between “public” and “private” becomes
quite blurred amidst the panoply of institutions and actors engaged in the pro-
duction of security. Robb larkins’ focus is “mega-event” Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil—host to both the 2014 World Cup and 2016 olympics. hosting such
mega-events is the result of a long, competitive process in which aspiring host
cities and countries work to woo event organizers and sponsors. Part of this
wooing process involves reassuring decision makers that the potential host is
capable of meeting the infrastructural needs of the events, including those of
security. Working ethnographically, Robb larkins details the various compon-
ents of the policing and security apparatus springing up around Rio. These range
from formal infrastructural projects, such as transit and water system upgrades,
to the hiring and training of droves of new security personnel. Proceeding in this
way, Robb larkins shows that policing today, particularly in urban locales, is
better envisioned as webs of policing provision “co-constituted” by many public
and private forces (cf. Brodeur 2010). in this sense, policing can be read as
parallel to other mechanisms of “development” in the Third World, an insight
that suggests Robb Larkins’ account of policing urban space in “mega-event”
Rio has much to teach us about how strategies of police serve to connect urban
space to transnational regimes of capital.
One of the interesting contrasts between each work is the very different
senses of police that emerge, an aspect particularly highlighted in the third part
titled “Esprit de corps.”5 To some degree this can be attributed to the very
different contexts being examined, as well as the very different social positions
occupied by each ethnographer vis-à-vis their subjects. however, even beyond
these muddling factors, there remains a set of interesting contrasts that deserve
further pause; a kind of specter (Benjamin 1986), or daimon (Rabinow 2003b),
that hangs over many of the texts, uniting, if not conforming, them. in that sense,
this section offers a “hauntology” (Derrida 1994), a pantheon of ghostly appari-
tions that haunt those in their ambit (including the reader). As they punctuate the
lives of individuals and collectives, often in startlingly material ways, they play
a decisive role constituting the body politic through the figure of police.
 Introduction 13

For example, Didier Fassin explores the punitive ethos of French tactical
teams in order to argue that morality is a tool by which police constitute them-
selves as a corps. on one level, this claim resonates with much of the earlier
sociology of police (van maanen 1978; Bittner 1970) that pointed to the ways
moral claims established police as a community with certain legitimate claims to
the use of force. however, Fassin’s portrayal captures a certain hauntedness to
that classic observation. particularly striking is the account of an officer, one of
Fassin’s key informants, who continually returns to the site of one of his col-
leagues’ more egregious indignities. The event, in which a man is left barefoot
and alone in the cold, seems to hang over the officer’s conscience to such a
degree that his account feels like a confession.
laurence Ralph’s chapter, likewise, is haunted by the ghosts of police viol-
ence that, in turn, help constitute a moral community. Drawing on the innumer-
able daily encounters that constitute anthropological fieldwork, and bringing
them to bear on legal records and documents, Ralph observes the legacy of Jon
Burge’s torturous regime in the Chicago police Department. Rather than a
distant memory, this legacy saturates african-americans’ experiences with
police officers, even decades after Burge’s removal, and serves as a foundation
upon which to make moral claims. This multi-vocal legacy is made manifest in
the materiality of the Black Box, a police field transmitter first repurposed by
Burge into a mobile torture device, and later repurposed into key legal evidence
of his crimes. Ralph’s account of Burge’s legacy highlights the systemic, institu-
tional nature of political violence against black bodies, using the very example
of police torture to speak back against the sense that such encounters are excep-
tional deviations from contemporary racial formations in the United States.
Similarly haunted, though in an inverse manner, is heath Cabot’s chapter on
“the good police officer” in contemporary Greece. Cabot regularly encountered
police officers as part of her research into the Greek asylum process. police have
played a unique, perhaps outsized role given their powerful positioning within
this process. moreover, the kind of work involved sits uneasily with their local
reputation (at least in Athens) as an institution that draws its power not from
regulatory law, but violence itself. This connection to violence gives the modern
Greek name for police, the astynomia, which means “law of the city,” a very
particular connotation. It has given rise to the “oft-repeated joke among the
Greek police: that they are not the astynomia, the law of the city, but the asty-
anomia, the lawlessness of the city” (Cabot, this volume). This has also created
challenges for other institutions that work with refugees. These institutions,
including non-governmental organizations, are opponents of repressive policing
in the case of asylum seekers. Yet working with police on these cases is virtually
unavoidable. it is at this juncture where Cabot finds the emergence of the figure
of the “good police officer.” as a figure, this is a real person who takes on a
symbolic role, embodying and indexing key features of social and political life
at a particular place and time. Cabot tracks the discourse of “the good police
officer” as it circulates from nGo workers, to asylum seekers, through the
14 Kevin G. Karpiak and William Garriott

general citizenry to police themselves. Such discourse, and the figure to which it
points, she argues, outlines the potential for a pastoral power (Foucault 2009)
aspired to but felt lacking in the contemporary Greek state. Cabot’s approach
blurs the sharp distinction between police (as institution) and policing (as action
or effects), showing how the circulation of particular discursive renderings of
police can itself be a generative force within the broader milieu.
In this way the chapters of this volume open up the question of police in new
ways; they mine the disciplinary legacies of anthropology in order to discover
new conceptual tools, methods, and pedagogies; they rework relationships,
between “police,” “public,” and “researcher,” in ways that open up new avenues
for exploration at the same time as they articulate new demands; and they retrace
this spectral, diffused police that haunts our collective lives and highlights our
moral challenges, constituting us as a social body even while displaying our
flaws. in this way, the chapters presented here hope to enrich, reinvigorate, and
rework the study of police in anthropology, criminology, and across the broad
interdisciplinary field invested in the study of policing, order-making, and
governance.

Notes
1 See, for example, the recent debate initiated by Timothy ingold’s rejection of the
“ethnos” in ethnographic fieldwork (ingold 2014; macDougall 2016a, 2016b), as well
as the extended conversations over the nature of “fieldwork” emerging from the
anthropological Research on the Contemporary group (Rabinow et al. 2008; also, see
the section “violence and the human,” this chapter).
2 The energy around these issues has been particularly heartening within anthropology,
taking a wide variety of forms: from political organization and movement building at
the national professional conference of american anthropologists (Karpiak 2014),
resulting in a task force of the American Anthropological Association dedicated to
addressing racialized police violence, to highly cited articles (Bonilla and Rosa 2015),
to specialized conferences (“Racialized State violence in Global perspective: Confer-
ence Schedule” 2016) and issues of academic journals (Williams 2015; Simmons
2015), to expanded public outreach via a wide swath of new media (Furmage and
Rubin 2015) and the creation of a new public anthropology institute (harrison et al.
2016). Cumulatively such efforts speak to the great deal anthropologists have to offer
studies of policing.
3 Rabinow’s work has consistently focused on various developments within the life Sci-
ences that open up a space for rethinking what it means to be human, whether through
the development of new laboratory techniques (1996), research on the nature of genes
(1999), or the fabrication of new forms of life through synthetic biology (2007, 2011).
Many of his students have further pursued the implications of this approach for other
corners of the human sciences (Rees 2010; Bennett 2015; lakoff and Collier 2008;
Samimian-Darash 2009; Stalcup 2015); however, we hope to show here that this frame-
work can offer purchase upon police science as well, through the question of “human-
izing” police.
4 See, for example, the 2010 report by the american anthropological association’s
Commission on the engagement of anthropology with the United States Security and
intelligence Communities (CeaUSSiC) (https://blog.americananthro.org/2010/01/27/
ceaussic-ethics-casebook).
 Introduction 15

5 Though the French phrase “esprit de corps” is of course commonly used in English as
well, it is perhaps useful to point out one literal translation to anglophone readers: the
spirit of the body. The duality of im/materialism at play in this Part is nicely captured
by this rendering.

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