Reconceptualizing How Policing Works

Abstract

This chapter seeks to redefine policing by resituating law enforcement as subordinate to the police power manifest in other areas of society besides criminal justice. It redefines policing as a sociohistorical process of implementing and reproducing the modern world’s structure of antiblackness. In so doing, this chapter demonstrates how racism is policing’s other name, and as such, is foremost an act of sexual violence that produces the punishment of “race.” The antiblack police power, therefore, saturates the society in ways large and small, and reveals an anxiety about the threatening specter of black liberation that is both foundational and persistent to social organization at all levels. This reconceptualization of the police power will be crucial for apprehending how it works through medical science and public health, especially during these pandemic times.