Policía beyond the police
| Published date | 01 August 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806221135865 |
| Author | Laura Gutiérrez,Mark Neocleous |
| Date | 01 August 2023 |
Policía beyond the police
Laura Gutiérrez
University of Liverpool, UK
Mark Neocleous
Brunel University London, UK
Abstract
This article develops and extends the critical theory of police power by applying it to
Colombia. Scholarship on police in Colombia has been undermined by a focus on the
kind of creation myth that one finds in most histories of police: that policing only prop-
erly begins in a key foundational year. In Colombia, that year is 1891. This approach
overlooks or downplays the importance of the concept of policía. This is the original
and far more expansivepolice concept through whichsocial order in Colombia wasfab-
ricated. By paying attention to the continued importance of policía, this article drastically
transforms our understanding of police power and state formation in Colombia, and
extends the critical theory of police power.
Keywords
Colombian National Police, critical theory of police power, police power, policía, policing, policing
in Colombia
The police intervene ‘for security reasons’in countless cases where no clear legal situation
exists. …A consideration of the police institution encounters nothing essential at all. Its
power is formless, like its nowhere-tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence in the life of civi-
lized states.
(Benjamin, 1996 [1921]: 243)
Corresponding author:
Mark Neocleous, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Brunel University London, Kingston Lane,
London, UB8 3PH.
Email: mark.neocleous@brunel.ac.uk
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2023, Vol. 27(3) 404–420
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13624806221135865
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
Among the many myths surrounding policing, none has greater attraction than
what we might call the creation myth. This is ‘The Story of Police Year Zero’,and
it goes something like this: once upon a time, before the modern world began,
there was no real policing, just a cluster of offices, processes, laws and regulations.
No one quite knew what policing was or should be. There was a ‘science of
police’, but it was not very scientific, did not have a clearly defined object of study
and assumed that policing involved governing the whole of human life. To overcome
this, sensible people invented a new institution that they called The Police. This insti-
tution was professionally organized, a key part of the democratic state and working
for the people. Because this ‘new police’was focused on law enforcement and
crime prevention, all the old, ambiguous and seemingly endless powers, said by
the old police science to be essential to policing, were given up. Policing was mod-
ernized. This new police was the real police.
In the telling of this story, every nation state has its Year Zero and many of those years
are in the 19th century. The archetype is 1829 in England and the creation of the
Metropolitan Police for London, but other cities and countries quickly followed: 1833
in Sydney; 1835 in Toronto; 1844 in New York, quickly followed by Chicago (1851),
New Orleans (1853), Philadelphia (1855), Lebanon (1861), Tokyo (1874), and the one
which interests us here, 1891 in Colombia. Like all myths, this one performs a notable
ideological function. Like all ideology, this function is complex and not always easy
to decipher. If we take England as the paradigmatic case, we find that histories of policing
tend to treat forms of police that existed prior to the creation of the Metropolitan Police of
London in 1829 in a rather cursory fashion. The analyses of police found within crimin-
ology, police studies and socio-legal studies, tend to take as a starting point what they see
as the essentially modern role for the police achieved in 1829. If these studies turn to the
years before 1829 at all, it is to identify ‘by the ruse of historical juxtaposition’(Zedner,
2006: 83) the 18th-century antecedents of the modern police force, wherein offices,
bodies and organizations that fulfilled seemingly similar roles in previous centuries are
pointed to simply as predecessors to the ‘new’(and ‘real’) police officer of 1829 (e.g.
Auten, 1981; Critchley, 1919: 1; Reiner, 2010: 5; Zedner, 2006: 82–83). The insinuation
is always that pre-institutional police was ‘merely a defective prologue to the modern
police’(Rawlings, 2008: 47) and that police power only really comes to life with the
invention of a specific institution created in a specific year. The implication being that
‘old’police are ‘not-new’police and therefore, somehow, not really ‘police’at all.
This Year Zero logic plays a second ideological role, which is to suggest that these
‘old’forms of police are too broad, ill-defined and confused to require much further ana-
lysis when it comes to understanding modern police. Only 19th- and post-19th-century
forms of police, so the argument goes, are worthy of attention, since it is not until
these modern forces emerge that we find the narrower, more focused and institutionalized
bodies that we recognize as ‘real police’, the responsibility of which is crime control and
law enforcement. And herein lies the real ideological issue: that such ways of thinking
about police circumvent the critical theory of police power. In this article we unravel
some of the misapprehensions that have emerged from reading police history through
an exclusively institutional lens and, in so doing, propose an alternative but more
Neocleous 405
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