The Challenge of Policing Minorities in a Liberal Society

If you are looking for something longer to read over the weekend, permit me to draw your attention to the publication of my article, “The Challenge of Policing Minorities in a Liberal Society,” which recently appeared in the Journal of Political Philosophy. I’ve been interested in policing for a long time, as an extension of my philosophical work on the executive branch of the state, along with my particular interest in the issue of discretion in the exercise of executive power. I discussed policing a bit in my book, The Machinery of Government, but when suddenly everyone got interested in policing in 2020 I decided it would be an idea to write a stand-alone piece.

Writing about policing for a philosophical audience is challenging because most people, including most academics, have an empirically false understanding of what the police actually do most of the time (because most of what we think we know about policing comes from watching television shows or reading legal theory). Most academics at elite institutions have also had very few interactions with the police (e.g. they have never been in the back seat of a police cruiser), so they have no first-hand knowledge to draw upon. Finally, there is a specific problem in philosophy, which is that many people working in my field read shockingly little, and in many cases read nothing outside their narrow disciplinary specialization. As a result, most of the empirical social science literature on policing (including such ethnomethodological classics as John van Maanen’s “The Asshole”) is unfamiliar to philosophers.

I came to the topic with two very slight advantages over my peers. First, having had an ever-so-slightly wayward youth, I’ve actually interacted with the police on numerous occasions. I’m talking about low-level public order stuff here (I’ve never actually been arrested), but nevertheless in every single instance I was surprised by the way that the police dealt with me. In other words, I found that police behaviour consistently confounded my expectations. This made me receptive to the idea that there was a lot that I didn’t understand about policing. Second, coming from a smaller Canadian city, class stratification was less prominent, and so I grew up being socially acquainted with various police officers. I can recall having been, at times, appalled at how thuggish they could be, but also, at other times, humbled by the reminder that they spent most of their days dealing with bullshit so that you and I don’t have to. (In particular, one of my mom’s friends was a Saskatoon police officer who was the go-to guy on domestic violence calls, and I have very distinct memories of not envying him his job.) As a result, I found myself having no trouble at all believing that there is a lot of internal heterogeneity in police forces, as well as a moral complexity in the work they do.

On the other hand, I have no first-hand experience of the interactions that are the headline subject of my article, which is police-minority relations. Nevertheless, it was not difficult to see that a lot of normative claims that get made in this area are based on empirical misunderstandings of the police role. This posed something of a challenge, when it came to writing a philosophy paper, because “drawing people’s attention to important social science literature, so that they don’t make empirically misinformed normative claims” is not considered a legitimate contribution to the philosophical literature. (I can recall Michael Blake once expressing a similar frustration to me with respect to the philosophical debate over global justice. Scratch the surface of the various normative positions, he said, and what you’ll find are completely different views about economic development – in some cases completely mistaken ones. Unfortunately, there was no forum in which one could debate the empirical presuppositions of the different normative views, and so people were destined to talk past one another.) In order to get around this problem, I had to find a sufficiently philosophical way to frame what I wanted to say, which took me some time. (And even then I was only partially successful. I received a desk reject from the first journal that I sent this paper to, with a condescending suggestion from the editor that I send it to a sociology journal.)

Also, I should mention that despite the paper having been precipitated by events in the U.S., I don’t spend a great deal of time talking about the situation in that country. There are several reasons for this, perhaps the most important being that many of the problems of policing in the U.S. are specific to the U.S., and could be vastly improved just by adopting best practices from other jurisdictions. As is usually the case, you don’t need a PhD in critical theory to figure out what’s wrong in the U.S., you just need to pick up a newspaper. (The PhD does become more useful if you start trying to figure out why Americans have such difficulty fixing any of these problems, even when they’re obvious to everyone.) For example, most Americans massively underestimate the importance of gun control to solving their problems with policing, and fail to appreciate the extent to which their problems cannot be solved without some kind of comprehensive gun control (for anyone who doubts this, I recommend the following article, which could be entitled “Why we can’t have nice things”). But obviously this problem is specific to the U.S. (and, to a lesser degree, the country that shares a long, undefended border with the U.S.):

Philosophically, therefore, the question that I find most interesting is why other liberal democratic countries, in which policing is not a complete shitshow (e.g. the U.K., France, Canada, Australia), continue to encounter such persistent difficulties with the policing of minorities. The theory that I present is just that, a theory. I try though to present it in a way that draws closely from the empirical literature, in the hope that those who choose to engage with the normative questions in the future will feel some obligation to familiarize themselves with the social science. (For what it’s worth, my top recommendations from this would be anything by van Maanen or Egon Bittner, Michael Lipsky’s Street-Level Bureaucracy, and in Europe Peter Waddington’s Policing Citizens and Didier Fassin’s Enforcing Order. There is also a lot of new philosophical literature coming out, the best of which I think is Brandon del Pozo’s The Police and The State.)

The tone of my article is pretty bloodless, which is on purpose. In particular, I don’t talk a lot about police racism, but that’s because the term racism is now used in so many different ways that it’s become an obstacle to clear thinking. One ambiguity in particular has become particularly counterproductive, in that the term is sometimes used to identify forces that can play an explanatory role (e.g. attitudinal prejudice), but other times in a way that is non-explanatory (e.g. to describe outcome disparities). So when I do use the term I usually take time to make it clear in which sense I am using it, which is cumbersome. For this and other reasons, those who come to the paper hoping for a lot of moralizing condemnation of police behaviour will be disappointed. But it’s not because I don’t think the problem is serious, it’s that I think a lot of the rhetoric that has emerged around the problem has become counterproductive.