The Legal Violence of Police Calls for Service: Toward New Community Safety Infrastructure
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: In this article, we return to the scene of the police call in the United States to conceptualize the basic needs and structural forces animating calls for service and their relationship to a jurispathic form of legal violence. We do so by revisiting the perennial question of why people call the police, analyzing how conditions of organized abandonment drive the call. We follow how police reports reveal the bureaucratic and administrative legal violence of policing itself, extending police logics and power into all social problems/response, obstructing the political capacity to imagine-and demandthe most basic of nonpunitive life-supporting infrastructure. Against this dominance, many are searching for more direct and meaningful ways to respond to crisis, making the police call a contested site for municipal politics and community resources through jurisgenerative abolitionist-like practices grounded in the empirical conditions of ordinary people's lives.
DOI: 10.5070/lp64364153
Authors: Michelle Brown, Kyra Martinez, Vivian Swayne
Institution: University of Tennessee at Knoxville
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4402290133