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Book review: Andrew Faull, Police Work and Identity: A South African Ethnography

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Published date01 May 2018
DOI10.1177/1362480618756206
Date01 May 2018
Subject MatterBook reviews
/tmp/tmp-174I01rPC1hmUZ/input Book reviews
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programs, ranging from 287(g) to the more recent Secure Communities and Prioritized
Enforcement Program.
Armenta’s ethnographic skills pair beautifully with her clear prose, which contributes
a sense of momentum and urgency to the text. Indeed, the book is a page-turner: a testa-
ment to the quality of her fieldwork and clarity of her analysis. She demonstrates a meth-
odological savvy in what she shares with officers, and her analysis maintains a judicious
empathy for her subjects. I cannot recall, for example, the last time I was brought to tears
reading an academic text. Armenta describes one haunting story of a domestic violence
call in which a young girl called the police about her two parents during a conflict, lied
about her father’s use of a weapon to compel officers to respond, and finally witnessed
her mother’s refusal to press charges. The scene closes with the officers escorting the
allegedly abusive father outside while Armenta hugs the child who reported the violence.
She alternately cultivates an intellectual distance and intimacy in a complex ethnographic
terrain shared by the powerful and marginalized alike.
As with all books, Armenta’s, too, has its limits. It is not, for example, entirely clear
what difference Nashville as a new immigrant destination makes to the analysis. Is the
adoption of 287(g) driven by an influx of immigrants or by conservative political elites?
If the latter, as some studies suggest, would it make any difference whether the immi-
grant community in a particular place was generations old or relatively new? I think the
text also raises questions about how immigrant communities respond collectively and
individually to the local police who engage in federal immigration enforcement. The text
elucidates much about the inner working of the local immigration control apparatus, but
somewhat less about immigrant residents’ responses to it. And while the gendered expe-
rience of enforcement is clearly...

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