Didier Fassin - Writing the World of Policing

Didier Fassin

Law and order arise out of the very processes which they govern.

Bronislaw Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926)

The police have for a long time been an object of interestand passionswithin society. For more than half a century, they have also been a subject of researchand debateswithin the social sciences, significantly contributing to the renewal of criminology. In recent years, however, this dual trend has become more pronounced, and policing has come to occupy an increasing place in the public sphere as well as in the scientific field: new issues have called for new approaches.

On the one hand, there has been a growing concern regarding law enforcement practices, particularly in poor neighborhoods and toward racial and ethnic minorities. The implication of the police in the death of young men of color in Aulnay-sous-Bois in 2005, Tottenham in 2011, and Ferguson in 2014, among many others, and the impunity from which they have benefitted, have caused major urban unrest in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, respectively, revealing the moral gap between the law enforcement institution and the population that it is supposed to protect. Whether criticized or praised, respected or feared, the police have become a major controversial figure in the contemporary world, while law and order policies have tended to disseminate globally.

On the other hand, there has recently been a renewal in research on policing, both within the field of criminology, via the contestation of the dominant classical and positivist paradigms by critical, cultural, and feminist approaches, and within the humanities and the social sciences, through novel theoretical as well as empirical inquiry. An interesting trend of this renewal has been what could be called the reinvention of police ethnography. Indeed, there exists an important tradition of qualitative and observational approach in research on law enforcement. The most important implication of the ethnographic shift is that, far from being a mere empirical addition to existing methodological procedures, it obliges social scientists to reevaluate both the theoretical self-evidence of their object (policing) and their very relation to their subjects (the police).

The present volume is a collective attempt to link these two major trends: the increasing significance of policing issues in contemporary society and the growing salience of police ethnography for their comprehension.

So, what difference does police ethnography make? This interrogation can be understood from three complementary perspectives: What difference does it make for the study of the police? What difference does it make for the practice of ethnography? Finally, what difference does it make for the societies where it is conducted? In our chapters, we propose various answers to these questions, highlighting the relevance of ethnographic insight for the analysis of law enforcement and the contribution of the inquiry into policing to ethnographic practice as well as the pertinence of this approach for contemporary societies. But before going further, two prefatory comments may be necessary.

First, what is ethnography is generally taken for granted, namely as an equivalent, more or less, to fieldwork, participant observation, or qualitative approach. It is, however, much richer and more complex a practice than these self-evident equivalences imply. we do not only get to know our interlocutors better but we also realize that we have much more in common with them than what we had initially imagined. Finally, it is an operation of singular writing, that is, of transcription and translation, of putting into words and ideas what has been seen and heard, of giving a meaningful order to a succession of facts and events that may seem completely disparate at first sight: it all starts with a blank sheet or a black screen. These three aspectsmethod, experience, writingradically contrast with approaches relying on statistics, questionnaires, or interviews: ethnographers do not look at figures, but are interested in what is going on; they do not delegate their production of data to assistants, but are themselves present in the field; they do not ask standardized questions, but observe scenes and converse with their protagonists; they do not know in advance what they look for, but try to make sense of what people do, and how, and why; their mode of thinking is not deductive but inductive. All these elements differentiate ethnography from other procedures commonly used in studies on policing, particularly in the field of criminology, and pose specific epistemological, political, and ethical problems.

Second, policing also needs to be delimited, if not defined. It can refer to two quite different kinds of activities. In the usual sense, it corresponds to law enforcement and peacekeeping, in other words, what police officers and agencies do: it encompasses a remarkable diversity of practices, from arresting criminals to containing demonstrations, from ticketing drivers to assisting accident victims, with the sole common ground that they may at some point require the recourse to force, as pointed out by Egon Bittner. marginalized minorities. Our choice can easily be justified on the grounds that it represents the most common and often the most problematic activity of law enforcement in peace times all over the world. It is also where the control of the public order and the reproduction of the social order get the most confused, where the distance from professional norms is the most obvious, and where the indulgence of the authorities with respect to the deviance of their personnel is the highest. In sum, our decision to focus on this type of policing was not only guided by theoretical issues of possible comparisons and generalizations of our findings in various settings, but also by practical considerations with regard to its social relevance and political implications.