Order Racket

A tremendous amount of interest in the nature of policing, its past and future, has led to an explosion of discussion on the topic, at an intensity only matched by the frequency with which cop media is broadcast. A term with an extensive intellectual history, ‘defund the police’ became a household term a year ago during the uprisings that spread across the world. It refers to, broadly, a program of reallocating funds and responsibilities from police forces to social services. The popular account of the history of the police focuses, in the UK, on the Bow Street Runners and Robert Peel’s founding of the Met, and in the U.S, on slave patrols and militias. Now there is nothing incorrect about this, and as a way of understanding contemporary police forces it is illuminating to identify their roots in these institutions, but the history and nature of police power is much larger than this narrative suggests. Remonstrating against the obvious atrocities committed by police forces or individual officers, without grasping the full extent of police power and the state, will get us nowhere.

We need to think about policing in a much broader way – such is the aim of Mark Neocleous’ recently reissued text, A Critical Theory of Police Power. Originally published by Pluto Press in 2000, this version has had passages re-edited, and a lengthy new introduction added. It is an expansive, nuanced text that addresses the continuities between ‘early’ and ‘modern’ policing, exploring the emergence of ‘police’ after the collapse of feudalism and its modifications by liberalism and police theorists in the 18th century. This is not a book that will allow one to view the police through ‘models’ (an intellectual turn of phrase Neocleous has elsewhere dismissed), that will allow it to be ‘democratised’, ‘diversified’, held ‘accountable’. Neocleous is concerned here with providing a historically based critical theory of police power and administration, which will expand the field of possibilities in the struggle against them, beyond reformist shilly-shallying.

The idea of police originates in 15th century Europe, “denoting the legislative and administrative regulation of the internal life of a community to promote general welfare and the condition of good order”. The collapse of feudalism and the breakup of the authority of the church, concomitant with emergent new forms of living, led to new modes of administration. The remit of police was essentially limitless, “overseeing and administering a necessarily large and heterogenous range of affairs”. Neocleous demonstrates, through intricate readings of Adam Smith and Patrick Colquhoun’s police science treatise, that as capitalism developed, significant changes were made to the formal mechanisms of police. These show how liberalism shaped a process of professionalisation, as the rhetoric of ‘security’ and ‘liberty’ enter the discourse; “the liberal identification of security with liberty and property in fact masks an underlying insecurity at the heart of the bourgeois order – the insecurity of property”. An ingenious tool of order was created – the Vagrancy Act of 1824 allows officers to use their discretion to make arrests and punish people for, among other vagueries, “being idle and disorderly, pretending or professing to tell fortunes; for wandering around”. The point here is clear – the infinite remit of police at its inception continues under capitalism, despite the ideological mystifications. Vagrancy law was primarily used, we learn, to herd people into urban centres and put them to work, eliminating other forms of subsistence outside the wage-form.

The two most pertinent features of contemporary police can be summed up as follows: police power is a form of political administration, encompassing even those bodies created to differentiate themselves from policing – “police power in general remains inscribed in all institutions of the state...[and] is thus identical with the spread of the institutions of political administration”; and police power “fabricates order”, by enforcing the rules of bourgeois society, and restricting alternative models of life and economic subsistence. This is nothing to do with ‘fighting crime’, something that officers do “with the frequency located somewhere between virtually never and very rarely”, it is about making sure things are where they should be. Hence why the grand majority of calls to the police are not to report crimes, they are to state that something is “in a condition of disorder”. In fact, to my delight, on page 177 we find the following: “‘Dirt is matter in the wrong place’, Freud notes. As matter out of place, dirt is essentially disorder”. What is defined as ‘dirty’ is basically limitless, as are the targets of police power.

The legislation currently in parliament – the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill – is but the most recent example of the U.K’s exceptionally authoritarian history of repressing protest and democracy. A whole host of legislation throughout the centuries has enabled police power to criminalise street activity and 'disorderly' groups. If the bill passes, protests will be rendered criminal if they constitute a ‘public nuisance’, and sentences for criminal damage to a memorial will increase from three months to ten years. Existing discriminatory powers would be expanded to further punish the travelling community for daring to live as they wish. And so all shall be put in good order, to gloss over the contradictions of capitalism, because the state demands it and because that is what the police do. Neocleous’ careful, intelligible work is an excellent intervention on the way we understand police and the state, and stands as a fine example of critical theory’s ability to cut through the myths of liberalism and the dross of rightist law-and-order discourse.

Tom Beed is a writer, actor and founding member of Chasing Cow Productions. He has a degree in International Relations and Politics from Oxford Brookes University.