Special Issue of Anthropology News features two articles on Police

Although there’s been quite a bit of rumbling over the AAA’s “open access” policies over the last several years, one positive development IMHO has been to move the association’s newsletter, Anthropology News, to an online and OA format.

Police propaganda billboard advertising goals for building a “Peaceful and Healthy Society.” This photograph was taken in Taiwan in the early 2000s. Photo courtesy Jeffrey T Martin

And now readers of this blog can benefit.  The most recent issue features several articles on the Anthropology of Law in its “In Focus” section, including two articles on the anthropology of policing: one from Anthropoliteia’s own Jeff Martin, entitled “How the Law Matters to the Taiwanese Police” and another by Jennie Simpson, a recent PhD from American University, “Building the Anthropology of Policing” (the latter featuring a short–and unexpected cameo from yours truly).

Personally, I’m super-psyched that the anthropology of policing is beginning to carve out a space in the larger world of anthropology.  Not only am I currently brainstorming how to incorporate these blog posts into my course on Policing in Society, but I’m secretly formulating a response to Jeff arguing that his use of my beloved Max Weber is all wrong!

In The News: Anthropologists, Criminologists (and some others) on the Newtown Shootings

I still haven’t found much of a voice or aptitude for addressing current events in a timeframe that seems relevant, so like the Trayvon Martin incident, I feel like this blog post is a bit “late to the game” and with less than I’d like to offer. This is of course made more difficult by the fact that research on gun violence has been blocked in the U.S. along multiple lines for some time.

Despite these impediments, there have been several serious attempts to gain an understanding of the role of guns and gun accessibility on mass shootings:

Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman and the Anthropology of Police

I’m sure I’m not the only one on this blog who’s been trying to think of a way to approach the whole Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman fiasco.  Like a lot of scholarship, it’s just so hard to figure out what to add to the constant shit-storm of a media frenzy.  But in my Police & Society class at EMU we have broached the topic, and the discussion has been both passionate and useful.

I thought I’d share the online discussion question I just prompted my students with. I’m curious to hear what readers of this blog might have to say.  Here’s the prompt:

So our discussion seems to have gotten us to an interesting place: on the one hand, the question of what to do with George Zimmerman–did he have the right to be policing his neighborhood?  did he have the right to carry and use a gun?  did he have the right to suspect and pursue Trayvon?–brings us back to a question we’ve been asking repeatedly in the class…  What should be the relationship between “police” and “society,” especially when we consider the use of force/power/gewalt?  Should they be fully integral things, so that there’s no distinct institution of policing?  Should there be an absolute distinction, so that only a small community can claim the right to police power?  If the answer is somewhere in the middle, how would that work?

On the other hand, we’ve also been circulating around the question of freedom and security, norms and rights.  Was George Zimmerman policing legitimately when we acted upon his suspicions, regardless of any evidence of law-breaking? Should the goal, the ends, of policing be the maintaince of community norms at the expense of individual liberty, or is a technocratic focus on law enforcement and civil rights the necessary priority of a democratic police force?

Anyone have any thoughts on how we can use some of the ideas and/or authors from this course to help us answer some of these questions?

Following up on the British “riots”: Jonathan Simon on GTC

In the spirit of continuing our discussion of the British “riots”, Jonathan Simon has an interesting post that I think echoes many of the things that came up in our own discussion.  Here’s one particularly cogent nut he offers up in describing the importation of American criminal justice techniques to Britain over the past decade:

“….[C]hronic overuse of criminal justice as a ready made tool for addressing social insecurity under Neo-liberal economic assumptions has led to collapse of both deterrence and legitimacy.”

Now there’s a thesis.  Thoughts?

Some thoughts on the London “riots”: Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism and “police as a public service”

I have to say I resisted writing this post.  I have a visceral distaste for academic discursive hermeneutics performed from afar–this is partly why I’m an ethnographer, after all– and, that’s even more the case when trying to write au courant journalistically

However, despite having absolutely no ethnographic expertise among British police and only a concerned collaborator’s familiarity with the issues on the ground there, I’m going to just get over it–tempered still, hopefully, by a degree of humility and a recognition of our responsibility to ignorance.  The reason I’ve made this decision is to emphasize an ethnographic fact that I think is important for this blog: so much of what makes police a salient issue in broader terms are in fact riots and, conversely, so many riots, uprisings and rebellions are in fact about police.

All that was a way of putting a large preliminary asterisk on certain observations I’ve made following the news coverage via my own personal extended network of interwebs (BBC, CNN, NPR, Jeff Martin’s twitter feed…).  I’ve noticed a narrative dynamic emerging that I find a bit frustrating: on the one hand, news coverage presents the familiar “these are criminals/hoodlums without a politics,” with all its logical absurdities (is criminality innate and apolitical? If so, if these are innate tendencies and not the result of social conditions, how has London and then other cities in the UK suddenly–within the last several days– sprouted so many of this type? What would be the litmus test for whether determining this is a political act, by the way?).

On the other hand, often in an effort to show “the other side” or to emphasize some diversity of opinion on the events, news coverage includes another narrative which risks being equally tired and absurd, the “this is an expression of political-economic disenfranchisement” argument (with it’s equally non-falsifiable claims–what, again, are the criteria for deciding that this is political, and when where these events put to that criteria? what factors and/or data were considered? what would apolitical events look like? If at least one of these criteria should be statements of such from the protesters themselves, it does not seem to meet the definition…)

Even within stories framed in such a manner, however, I’ve noticed an interesting set of dissonances; some contradictions that, if properly attended to, don’t quite fit the dominant framing:

• Generational conflict.  The “this is political” camp insists that the events are the result of the UK’s disinvestiture in social programs while experiencing wideing gaps in real wealth, but within that analysis there’s a type of inter-generational awkwardness, especially between what I think of as the Stuart Hall generation, associated with the Tottenham riots of the early 1980′s, and the present generation of protesters.  What’s interesting is to watch the older leftists struggle with understanding and/or translating the events; I’m thinking of some of the interviews with the MP from Tottenham and others, such as Darcus Howe, who seem to be attempting to work out some space for understanding them within a framework of social dis-investiture in the absence of an actually articulated voice of such a grievance.  The terms, or even the very language, seems to have moved somehow in the last 30 years.
• Policing is a social program.  On the other hand, the “these are hoodlums” camp–set up as critics of the protesters (and thus anti-anti-dis-investiture)–emphasizes the affected business people and residents, often pointing to their calls for more police presence and in fact outrage at the lack of protection.  The contradiction here, of course, is that policing is a social program financed through government.  If anything, this is the voice criticizing dis-investiture.  What to make of that?

I think a less contradictory framing is possible if we make use of Foucault’s geneaology of liberalism (which I’ve written a bit on before), itself formulated during a crisis-point in global capitalism, which identifies neoliberal efforts to “reduce government” as one strategy, within a longer history of liberal political thought, which attempts to find external principles of limitation on government.  Part of why Foucault spends so much time on this is that it offers a prescient insight into so much of the nature of policing, security & surveillance today: namely that it springs from the same concern and theory of government.  Although often misread, I think, Foucault’s point is that the policing techniques of surveillance (much used in Britain) which skeev many of us out are not efforts to achieve a tightly controlled police state, but the opposite: it’s a strategy of governance which, for many reasons, sees such totalitarian aspirations as ineffectual and unnatural.  In this sense, security strategies of surveillance are attempts to provide a “policed” state (in the older sense of “happy, well -ordered and thriving”) with minimal police (in the sense of a specialized political organ claiming the monopoly of legitimate violence) interventon; police without policing.

In this sense, the policing strategies so heavily relied upon by Britain over the last several years are both part and parcel of a political rationality that also focused on finding more “economical” forms of government.  The same rationality which leads to a dis-investiture of the social programs targeted by “austerity measures.”  The two sides of the framing in the popular news-framing, then, are certainly not contradictory, nor is the one an effect of the other: they are two sides of the very same political rationality; one that more and more seems diseased.  What will be the alternative? I’m not sure, but finding a useful answer, I think, depends on understanding the political logic in which we find ourselves.

Police and the Social Network – Rights at Stake?

You may want to think twice before accepting that new friend request from your favorite social networking site.  Why is that you may ask?  As social networks have experienced exponential membership growth rates over the last decade or so, the police, too, have taken notice.  More recently this has translated into law enforcement authorities employing social media sites such as Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter to combat and deter crime arguing that if average people are using these sites to find long lost friends or create new bonds there is no reason why police should not use these networks in their efforts to prevent crime.

Of the many advantages -from a police perspective- of using the social network as another tool to combat crime is that it allows officers to conduct online investigations of its users with near-anonymity.   With the click of a mouse and a few registration steps, police detectives are setting up fake profiles to ‘friend’ suspects under investigation and gain intelligence information.  Up to this point, criminal gangs have been their main focus.

For example, in the state of Florida, police report that gang members are using these sites to brag about their involvement in criminal activity^[1].  Members often post photos of themselves in gang colors along with gang related hand gestures.  Some even use these sites as a way to communicate threats about future criminal activity against other rival gangs.

Florida police have recognized these shenanigans and have used the fist of law to combat such unruly behavior.  In October of 2008, the sunshine state passed statue 874.11, which makes it a 3^rd degree felony for anyone posting electronic communications that “furthers the interest of a criminal gang,”^[2] The charge carries a sentence of up to 5 years.  What’s more, successful conviction of a felony charge such as this may result in the defendant’s loss of his or her right to vote^[3].

You may be asking yourself what exactly does “furthering the interest of a criminal gang,” mean?  Unfortunately there is no exact definition, which means that the individual police officer conducting the investigation is given total discretion in deciding who is allegedly violating the law; this should not be taken lightly and should be seen as very frightening.  Essentially, this means that anything you post online -be it a comical statement or picture that is not intended to represent anything criminal, such as a cartoon or hand gesture- can easily be misinterpreted as criminal gang activity.  One could argue that this is yet another example of our 1^st Amendment rights (freedom of expression) being tossed out the front door. Currently, Florida is the only state with such a law on the books, however, numerous states are in the process of creating similar initiatives.

Lack of clarity in the law and the deceitful process used by police to intrude members’ profiles is causing a ruckus amongst digital rights advocacy groups, such as the Electronic Frontier’s Foundation (EFF)^[4]. This civil liberties group, based in San Francisco, argues that deceptive police tactics like creating fake profiles to gain access to individual’s profiles -especially those set to private- is a blatant violation of people’s right to privacy.   Shawn Moyer -a spokesperson from the digital rights advocacy group Fishnet Enterprise- declared that such intrusion is not only wrong, but also unethical, noting that police pretending to be someone else are actually in violation of Facebook’s terms of service policy against willful impersonation of another individual.^[5] Despite this rule, however, police continue to employ this tactic without any legal ramifications because there are no state or federal laws governing when and how police may conduct their online investigations on social networking sites.

In order to gain some sort of clarity on these issues the two digital rights advocacy groups filed a Freedom of Information action suit against the Dept. of Justice.  In a whopping 33-page response, the DOJ expressed their interest in -and implied their support for- police using the social network as an investigative tool and stated that all investigations are legal, as long as they are accompanied by a valid search warrant.^[6] The DOJ did, however, remain silent on the issue of police violating social networks’ terms of service agreements. Although the DOJ did provide some answers to these fundamental questions of right to privacy online, their response seems to be mediocre at best.

Therefore, until both transparency and clarity are provided within the laws of online investigations, you may want to take some time to see who is really behind that new friend request.  Also, if there was ever a time to re-examine your profile you may want to do that now -you wouldn’t want an image or a comment you posted last week (or last year for that matter) to be misinterpreted as criminal.  Remember, there is a disclaimer on all major social networking sites that states that all posted information is public information^{[7] [8] [9].}And if you didn’t know, now you know.

[1] Florida Police and Teen Gangs

[2] Fla. Stat. 874.11

[3] Specific case law – State of Florida v. Figueroa-Santiago

[4] EFF official website

[5] Privacy Concerns Raised by Undercover Police Tactics

[6] DOJ Report

[7] Facebook Disclaimer

[8] MySpace Disclaimer

[9]Twitter Disclaimer

Wikileaks Crib Sheet, Part 2

Source: a place, person, or thing from which something comes or can be obtained

Bradley Manning is the 23-year-old intelligence analyst who has been charged with “transferring classified data onto his personal computer and adding unauthorized software to a classified computer system,” and “communicating, transmitting and delivering national defense information to an unauthorized source,” i.e. he is allegedly the person who supplied Wikileaks with its most spectacular coups of disclosure: the Afghanistan and Iraq War logs, comprised of over 391,000 reports which cover the wars from 2004 to 2009, the video of the 2007 Apache helicopter attack released with the title Collateral Murder in April of 2010, and the 251,287 United States embassy cables, which they began releasing in November 2010.

Manning entered the Army in October 2007, and was an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq when he allegedly took the documents, passed them to Wikileaks, and confessed his actions to former hacker Adrian Lamo. A few details about the interaction between Manning and Lamo can be found in a June Washington Post article. Many more details are in what is nonetheless an extremely edited copy of their chats, available online at Wired.com. Wired’s introduction is vague enough to give the impression that Lamo edited the logs before providing them, although they don’t actually say that, and do say that they removed very personal statements by Manning or what might be sensitive military secrets. According to Glenn Greenwald in Salon, the editing was done by the magazine, and further:

Lamo told me that Manning first sent him a series of encrypted emails which Lamo was unable to decrypt because Manning “encrypted it to an outdated PGP key of mine” [PGP is an encryption program].  After receiving this first set of emails, Lamo says he replied — despite not knowing who these emails were from or what they were about — by inviting the emailer to chat with him on AOL IM, and provided his screen name to do so.  Lamo says that Manning thereafter sent him additional emails encrypted to his current PGP key, but that Lamo never bothered to decrypt them.  Instead, Lamo claims he turned over all those Manning emails to the FBI without ever reading a single one of them.  Thus, the actual initial communications between Manning and Lamo — what preceded and led to their chat — are completely unknown.  Lamo refuses to release the emails or chats other than the small chat snippets published by Wired.

What Greenwald goes on to explain is presumably why he thinks it is significant:

Indeed, Lamo told me (though it doesn’t appear in the chat logs published by Wired) that he told Manning early on that he was a journalist and thus could offer him confidentiality for everything they discussed under California’s shield law.  Lamo also said he told Manning that he was an ordained minister and could treat Manning’s talk as a confession, which would then compel Lamo under the law to keep their discussions confidential (early on in their chats, Manning said:  ”I can’t believe what I’m confessing to you”).  In sum, Lamo explicitly led Manning to believe he could trust him and that their discussions would be confidential — perhaps legally required to be kept confidential — only to then report everything Manning said to the Government.

Maybe that the kind of information that would help in a civilian defense of Manning; it seems unlikely to help in a court martial. But the result of the editing is a nearly one-sided conversation, which does not allow what Greenwald alleges about Lamo’s promises of the anonymity to come through at all. What does come through is Manning’s altruism and hopes for changing the world, “i want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public”. Neither factor makes what he did less illegal, and as an enlisted member of the armed forces, he is subject to different laws than civilians, as his defense attorney explains at least in relation to his detention:

PFC Bradley Manning, unlike his civilian counterpart, is afforded no civil remedy for illegal restraint under either the Federal Civil Rights Act or the Federal Tort Claims Act. Similarly, the protection from cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment and Article 55 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) does not generally apply prior to a court-martial.

But Manning’s motivations are still important in as much they were clearly not for profit, nor to harm the United States, although he was despairing of the US-backed Iraqi government, and the actions of the US government in Iraq.

The exchange between Manning and Lamo took place between 21 May, 2010, and 26 May, when Manning was arrested.

(02:35:46 PM) Manning: was watching 15 detainees taken by the Iraqi Federal Police… for printing “anti-Iraqi literature”… the iraqi federal police wouldn’t cooperate with US forces, so i was instructed to investigate the matter, find out who the “bad guys” were, and how significant this was for the FPs… it turned out, they had printed a scholarly critique against PM Maliki… i had an interpreter read it for me… and when i found out that it was a benign political critique titled “Where did the money go?” and following the corruption trail within the PM’s cabinet… i immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on… he didn’t want to hear any of it… he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees…
(02:36:27 PM) Manning: everything started slipping after that… i saw things differently

(02:37:37 PM) Manning: i had always questioned the things worked, and investigated to find the truth… but that was a point where i was a *part* of something… i was actively involved in something that i was completely against…

On a later date:

02:22:47 PM) Manning: i mean what if i were someone more malicious
(02:23:25 PM) Manning: i could’ve sold to russia or china, and made bank?
(02:23:36 PM) Lamo: why didn’t you?
(02:23:58 PM) Manning: because it’s public data
(02:24:15 PM) Lamo: i mean, the cables
(02:24:46 PM) Manning: it belongs in the public domain
(02:25:15 PM) Manning: information should be free
(02:25:39 PM) Manning: it belongs in the public domain
(02:26:18 PM) Manning: because another state would just take advantage of the information… try and get some edge
(02:26:55 PM) Manning: if its out in the open… it should be a public good
(02:27:04 PM) Manning: *do the
(02:27:23 PM) Manning: rather than some slimy intel collector

One of the reasons Spc Manning’s story and situation have received much less international attention than Assange’s is because he is being held at Quantico. He’s in solitary confinement, according to Salon and the New York Times, or being held in a cell with others, according to the Guardian, but either way can’t be reached for comment, photographed, lauded or attacked.

Wikileaks and Assange in his role as its leader, are in many ways new and do not fit into familiar categories of journalism. Prosecution of Assange or his organization is likely to break new legal ground, even if old laws, such as the Espionage Act, are used. But Spc Manning is “the source”; he is charged with well-defined crimes, which I suspect have been successfully prosecuted in the past (feel free to post), and for which he can be imprisoned up to 52 years.

This configuration misses a key point though, in that the actions Manning is accused of resulted in the dissemination of a vastly greater quantity of information than leak laws were created to punish. What this means is that the type of act Manning is accused of is familiar, but the specific act, if it includes any one of the data dumps published by Wikileaks, is unprecedented in scale. This quantitative difference becomes qualitative.

At very least, it seems unlikely that the military wouldn’t take this opportunity to revise the punishments associated with “transferring classified data” and “communicating, transmitting and delivering national defense information to an unauthorized source” when those actions can occur several orders of magnitude up from what they have been in the past, although it should not be possible for this to be retroactively applied to Manning. Presumably  the military will also take the opportunity to redesign its information systems network, since the SIPRNet and  JWICS components of that system are what Manning is alleged to have accessed. What they should do is reconceptualize how information is defined, in order to then rethink how to link and store it, since the system which allowed such such a massive quantity of significant information to change “locations” (siprnet to the internet) and status (from secret to public) seems pretty clearly to not to understand digital data.

That’s all for now on sources.

A Wikileaks Crib Sheet, Part 1

I think what is happening with Wikileaks is an event, maybe the first one since 9/11. The organization has been around for about four years, this is far from its first significant release, and further, something that could be called a hacktivist subculture has been in existence for probably twenty years already; but if events are ruptures, they are ruptures of what was already existing anyway. One way or another things snowballed for Wikileaks so I am going to write a couple of posts that offer my potted analysis of how: a Wikileaks crib sheet. I needed a way to organize the pieces for myself, so, if you’ve lost track of all the threads, or don’t have time to read them exhaustively (I didn’t really either, but now it’s done), this is for you. A lot of interesting things have been written about Wikileaks, some of which I’m going to summarize. Rather less interesting and generally less accurate things have been written about the charges brought against Wikileaks’ frontman Julian Assange, international warrants and policing, and since I know relatively more about those things, I want to do an analysis of that as well.

A brief summary of what has happened might seem unnecessary except that I just watched a video in which Lula (the president of Brazil) seemed to be under the impression that the charges against Assange had to do with making public the diplomatic cables rather than sexual misconduct.

There’s a difference between not knowing what the charges are for so assuming that Assange is being held because his organization released secret cables, and knowing that the allegations against him concern sexual misconduct but believing those to be trumped up. I think that there are probably a very large number of people around the world who haven’t paid enough attention to think anything more than the first (and it is what they expect from the US anyway), and so their position doesn’t have anything to do with how seriously they take rape charges. As a point of fact though, it is important to note that it is unclear what a person associated with Wikileaks could be charged with in relation to the release of secret information, and Assange is actually being detained on four allegations of sexual misconduct and a European Arrest Warrant issued in order to question him about those charges. But this is getting ahead of myself.

In 2010, Wikileaks describes itself as a non-profit media organization. I actually like the term “media insurgency” (from this June New Yorker piece, because “rising in active revolt” against the status quo of  excessive secrecy and repression of information in both governments and the mainstream media seems apt. I also like the term because it has resonance with the “talibanization” of information in a “flat world” or as Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens more eloquently put it in their Twelve theses on WikiLeaks “Despite being a puny non-state and non-corporate actor, in its fight against the US government WikiLeaks does not believe it is punching above its weight – and is starting to behave accordingly. One might call this the ‘Talibanization’ stage of the postmodern ‘Flat World’ theory, where scales, times and places are declared largely irrelevant”. What Wikileaks is legally defined as is much more important than what I happen to like though, since its status as a media organization (or not) will determine what protections it has and what charges can be brought against it. This exchange at a press briefing by Department of State Assistant Secretary Philip J. Crowley on 2 December 2010 was meant to lay the ground for the US government position that Wikileaks shouldn’t get first amendment protections:

QUESTION: Some of the governments that have been mentioned in these cables are heavily censoring press in terms of releasing some of this information. How do you feel about that? (Laughter.)
MR. CROWLEY: The official position of the United States Government and the State Department has not changed. We value a vibrant, active, aggressive media. It is important to the development of civil society in this country and around the world. Our views have not changed, even if occasionally there are activities which we think are unhelpful and potentially harmful.
QUESTION: Do you know if the State Department regards WikiLeaks as a media organization?
MR. CROWLEY: No. We do not.
QUESTION: And why not?
MR. CROWLEY: WikiLeaks is not a media organization. That is our view.

Wikileaks traces the principles on which its work is based (on its site, which I can’t reliably link to because it keeps getting shut down), “freedom of speech and media publishing, the improvement of our common historical record and the support of the rights of all people to create new history” not of course to the US constitution and its amendments, but to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in particular, Article 19.

I think that Wikileaks problematizes both our conceptions of media and information, but more about that later. Since officially launched in 2006 (according to Wikipedia) or 2007 (according to its site), the organization has posted a staggering number of leaked documents. Until recently, everyone’s favorite leak, for which it won the 2009 Amnesty International human rights reporting award (New Media) was the 2008 publication of “Kenya: The Cry of Blood – Extrajudicial Killings and Disappearances”, a report by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights about police killings in Kenya. According to the Wikileaks website, the leak “swung the vote by 10%. This led to changes in the constitution and the establishment of a more open government”. Since the beginning of 2010, Wikileaks has made four major releases, possibly all from the same leak, of information from various branches of the US government: on 5 April 2010 a video of US soldiers in an Apache helicopter shooting people in an Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad; on 25 July 2010 the “Afghanistan War logs” and on 22 October 2010 the “Iraq War Logs”, both compilations of documents detailing the war and occupation of those countries by the United States military; and beginning on 28 November 2010, what will eventually be a quarter million diplomatic cables from US Embassies around the world.

Below are some pieces I’ve found useful. Next post, I’ll write about the charges against Julian Assange, the role of Interpol, European Arrest Warrants, and extradition, among other things.

Best pieces on Wikileaks
Twelve theses on WikiLeaks
Wikileaks, Now

Best pieces on Assange
Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; “To destroy this invisible government”
What is Julian Assange Up To?

In Julian Assange’s own words
Interview on the Colbert Report
His blog on the wayback machine
Opinion piece posted 8 December 2010 in an Australian paper, before turning himself in the UK Don’t shoot messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths

What happened in Ecuador?

How does it happen that the president of a country is held captive in a hospital where he is being treated after the police tear-gassed him, and then has to be make a dramatic escape through gunfire, under the cover of military special forces?

Or, to turn that around, what happened that the police, who tend to embody the inherently conservative stance of the institution’s law and order mandate, would rise up against the nation’s leader?

According to the Ecuadorian newspaper El Comercio, [i] 193 were injured in chaos on 30 September 2010. Five people died in Quito, either during the president’s escape or afterward from injuries, and two died in Guayaquil from the lack of police presence (although it is unclear how exactly that could be known). I spoke with a friend in Quito on Saturday who gave this local perspective, “Things got completely out of control. It was a normal Thursday for everyone until the police decided they wouldn’t work, at 9:30 AM. Then, it was a nightmare out of the movies – children were already at school, people were at their jobs, and the criminals and thieves were in the streets robbing as much as they could. The police made the announcement that they wouldn’t work and the president put himself in the middle of their protest with a not very intelligent discourse. The police are corrupt, stupid and irresponsible, and our president is an overly emotional type who doesn’t think about what he says or what he does. What was the result? The president ended up held captive by the police.”

The basic story is that the president signed a new law pertaining to civil servants that would have reduced benefits and the police staged a nationwide strike in protest. The president went to the main barracks in Quito and ended up challenging the officers there to kill him, reportedly tearing at his shirt and saying “If you want to kill the president, here he is. Kill him, if you want to. Kill him if you are brave enough”.[ii] Within moments the protesting police fired tear gas at him and he fled the building wearing a gas mark, to a police hospital, which was rapidly surrounded with angry, perhaps drunk[iii] police officers. From within, the president stayed in control, declaring a state of emergency and making declarations that were transmitted by public radio and on the state-owned EcuadorTV station. He was rescued eleven hours later in a nighttime raid by special forces, after which he declared that he had successfully resisted a coup d’état.

Political analysts in the country have opined that this was not, however, a coup d’état[iv] because, among other things, during the time he was in the hospital, three delegations of police came in to request changes to the law, and at no point did the protesting police suggest removing the president from power and installing someone else. They generally add that the president should have shown better judgment. Despite government assertions of organization and conspiracy,[v] the English language press largely agrees with the Ecuadorian analysts. They are probably right, although this also demonstrates a pointed lack of attention to the fact that the police shot real bullets, and the president of a country could reasonably say that he should be able to go where he thinks necessary, including making visits to the capitol city’s police.

It was significant that it was the police who refused to work, beyond the basic fact that they have guns. At least in the past year, “environmentalists, students, teachers, journalists and miners have protested against Mr Correa’s policies”.[vi] Although comments in the news said things later in the day were mostly quiet, that seemed to be largely because people stayed put in their homes and work places. Like doctors and nurses, the police serve a crucial function and people suffer fairly immediate harm when their services are stopped.

The basic facts of the story are embedded clearly enough in a multi-stranded web of Ecuadorian politics, the country’s history of public protest and overturning the government. Someone who has lived and worked in Ecuador would surely be able to speak with greater specificity to those elements and probably add others. Still, there are questions I want to pose here, which I think we can reasonably address because they take interpretive analytics and policing as their object rather than Ecuador per se. (1) What conceptual tools does the social science of policing have to examine what happened? What I mean is, outside of going to Ecuador and doing fieldwork, or even interviews from a distance, what are the ways that anthropology or sociology etc can approach events like these; is there something anthropological rather than journalistic that we can do, essentially analytically or synthetically (because not methodologically in this case)? (2) What is interesting about these events for people who do the anthropology/sociology/political science of policing? Did readers of this post who work on policing make connections to their own work they first found out about these events (in the paper, or reading here, or more immediately)?

---

[i] http://www.elcomercio.com/web/noticias/04_CINCOMUERTOS.html

 

[ii]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11455665

[iii]http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/world/americas/04ecuador.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=global-home

[iv] http://www.eluniverso.com/2010/10/04/1/1355/segun-analistas-correa-fue-secuestrado.html?p=1355&m=861

[v] http://www.elcomercio.com/web/noticias/04_ENTREVISTA.html

[vi] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11455665

Police “material culture”

I was earlier today contemplating this statue, which stands outside of the Philadelphia Police Department Headquarters at 8th and Race Sts.  Note the quintessential 1950s “professional officer” style of uniform… and also how there is a gun on his right hip, a little girl on his left hip.   All kinds of signification going on here…  N.B. also that the Philly PD HQ (partially visible in the photograph, behind the statue) looks like a set of locked handcuffs from an aerial view.