Understanding contradictory styles of policing
| Published date | 01 August 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806231196564 |
| Author | Fernando León Tamayo Arboleda,Mariana Valverde |
| Date | 01 August 2024 |
Understanding contradictory
styles of policing
Fernando León Tamayo Arboleda
Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
Mariana Valverde
University of Toronto, Canada
Abstract
Policing scholars have shown that logics of police governance that appear mutually exclu-
sive can coexist in the same space and time. Within police institutions, we can find more
military-like mindsets alongside democratic rationalities. We here present a novel theor-
etical perspective for understanding such coexistence. Instead of attempting to identify
police rationalities by reference to organizational/structural factors such as subcultures,
training, or firearms and other equipment, we show that contradictorylogics of policing
can coexist within the same force by differentiating policing’s targets by space, tempor-
ality, and identity. To do so, we use the idea of “chronotope”to identify and understand
how police officers decide between conflicting rationalities of policing.
Keywords
Contradictory rationalities, crime governance, militarization, police, security
Western democracies have drawn a line separating military from police forces. From an
institutional point of view, specific tasks and particular governing methods are assigned
to each of those forces. However, such separation is porous. First, there are some issues
where it is not easy to distinguish which organization should intervene—like terrorism or
organized crime (Herzog, 2001). Second, there are several features of military govern-
ance in police forces.
Corresponding author:
Fernando León Tamayo Arboleda, Universidad de los Andes, Kra 1 # 18a-12, Bogotá, Colombia.
Email: fl.tamayo10@uniandes.edu.co
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2024, Vol. 28(3) 364–381
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13624806231196564
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
As Pat O’Malley (1999) has shown, it is typical for the crime control field to exhibit
contradictory governance rationalities. Policing is not an exception. Within police insti-
tutions, we can easily find more military-like mindsets alongside democratic rationalities.
Nevertheless, why have military rationalities survived the introduction of democratic
policing? Moreover, how can these seemingly contradictory rationalities coexist in the
same institution? How could we understand such conflicting rationalities in everyday
police work? As we will show, to grasp contradictory rationalities, one needs to go
beyond structural/organizational features of police and military institutions toward every-
day practices of policing and understand why individuals iterate such practices.
The structural/organizational approaches to the logic of policing and the specific tech-
niques used by state forces could be traced back to Brodeur’s analysis. Although Brodeur
was not interested in understanding conflicting rationalities, he divided military and
democratic rationalities by showing how states govern differently depending on what
is under scrutiny. Brodeur’s analysis distinguished two matters usually governed distinct-
ively. According to Brodeur (1983), states are concerned with governing two sets of pro-
blems: the political order itself (“high”policing) and the everyday life of its inhabitants
(“low”policing). He says that when upholding the sovereignty and security of the state
itself, states often rely on a militaristic approach associated with heavily armed forces,
tight surveillance, and broad authorization for using force (Brodeur, 1983). Following
Brodeur’s analysis, Lutterbeck (2004) has suggested that policing everyday disorder
and criminality depends on more democratic techniques linked with less heavily armed
police units (usually, with equipment such as teargas, batons, tasers, or water
cannons), a more horizontal relationship with citizens, and robust regulation of the use
of force.
Though such associations show a connection between military rationalities and high-
policing, and democratic rationalities with low-policing, this does not imply a fixed
reality. The political order could be governed democratically, and everyday life could
be governed using military logic, for example, during wartime or other emergencies.
Brodeur (2007) and Lutterbeck (2004) acknowledge that military and democratic
policing rationalities have been mixing either through the expansion of military techni-
ques into everyday policing (Brodeur, 2007) or through the appearance/consolidation
of intermediate agencies that use both military and democratic ways of governing
(Lutterbeck, 2004). They try to distinguish said rationalities by generalizing their
targets and goals. Such distinctions do not explain how and why those rationalities of
policing are put into practice.
As Weiss (2011) has shown, attempts to draw a clear line between military and demo-
cratic policing tend to fail because of the ambiguousness of their general definitions.
Instead, Weiss argues that the effort to understand the variety of policing rationalities
should be made through a detailed empirical analysis describing concrete practices.
We agree with Weiss and the literature that says that the presence of military practices
in police forces is a matter of degree rather than a static reality (Koslicki and Willits,
2018; Kraska and Kappeler, 1997; Simckes et al., 2019). Thus, even though the police
tend to be a civil institution for controlling disorder and criminality whose use of force
is tightly controlled, all police forces have some military features. There is no way of
drawing a clear line where military and democratic rationalities begin and end.
Tamayo Arboleda and Valverde365
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