This is why a radical understanding of the police, as agents of the ruling classes, is imperative now. The ruling classes are tightening their iron grip over society by criminalizing minorities through means of coercion and direct violence, the police being a primary one. For instance, in India, extra-judicial killings are called “encounters”, a term made popular by Bollywood films.Īs the neoliberal crisis deepens across the globe, with the climate crisis being its horizon, the vast majority of the working population of the world are being minoritized (while remaining the numerical majority). Such acts are often glorified via media representations as examples of the bravado, honour, and patriotism of the police. The state acquires impunity for its extra-judicial actions, justifying them in the name of identity, order, and/or national security. Thus, policing functions to impose a perpetual “state of exception”, in which the state has the right to kill, arrest, imprison, maim, and violate.

In addition to this, neoliberalism has propelled the expansion of the police state, wherein models of security and incarceration followed in the United States are being replicated in other countries. The role of the police is essentially tied to the protection of private property. The neoliberal project of regulation involves a top-down approach to policing in which the ruling elite is responsible for who, how, and what to police. Mass media representations support the security state by creating paranoia and fear, which makes it seem that stringent and pervasive policing, with its role of “fighting crime”, is necessary and natural. The police specifically targets those groups that the state deems “deviant”, including racial, religious, sexual, and caste minorities. In the proposed journal section, we attempt to understand if, and how, media and popular culture legitimize the role of the police as a state apparatus in the governance of subjects. Similarly, the present-day policing of black and brown people’s bodies in North America, institutionalized in the prison-industrial complex, is a direct legacy of the measures of control and coercion that were applied during slavery, as Michelle Alexander argues in her book, The New Jim Crow (2010). Muslims in India), racialized (indigenous tribes), and gender and sexual minorities, remains intact, and its colonial-era techniques of governance are used to subjugate the population of postcolonial South Asia to this day. For instance, after Indian soldiers revolted against the East India Company in 1857 for violating their religious beliefs, the British colonial state crushed the rebellion and the Police Act of 1861 was instated as a response. Significantly, the control of the populations by the police has always followed identitarian lines of race, caste, gender, and ethnicity. Furthermore, modern day policing practices in the neoliberal era, though transformed, seem like a return to the age of unbridled capitalism of the 19th century with its characteristic use of brute force for ensuring compliance of the working-classes. We understand policing to be an essential feature of capitalism and the resultant colonial and imperial expansion across the globe. The incident was an example of caste-based atrocities that occur with regularity in India, in which the police often collude with upper-caste perpetrators of the crime, making sure that they are not punished. The local police forcibly cremated the body of the young woman, without the consent of the family, in what was seen by many as a hurried attempt to destroy evidence. ★ In September 2020, a 19-year old Dalit woman was gangraped by four upper-caste men in Hathras district in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. The Black Lives Matter movement coalesced around Floyd’s death, highlighting the dire need for radical policing reforms across the United States, and spearheaded various movements that questioned the absolute power of the police state around the globe. ★ In May 2020, the murder of an African American man, George Floyd, by a white police officer in Minneapolis, United States became a lightning rod for a wave of protests against police brutality and the policing of black bodies.

Special Section of Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media Call for papers: Media and the Police StateĮditors: Soumik Pal and Namrata Rele Sathe

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