UNRAVELLING THE “THIN BLUE LINE”: POLICING AS AN ENGINE OF DISPOSSESSION
Topics: Feminist Geographies
, Socialist and Critical Geographies
, Immigration/Transnationalism
Keywords: policing, disposession, carcearl studies, absence
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 56
Authors:
Geoffrey Alan Boyce, Earlham College
Vanessa Anne Massaro, Bucknell University
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Abstract
A great deal of research has demonstrated how, rather than ameliorating routine patterns of disinvestment and insecurity, policing contributes to and helps to drive these patterns. In this paper, we focus on the collective dimensions of these outcomes. We do so by drawing on two distinct research projects: one on the household financial losses that follow arrests by immigration officials in Tucson, AZ and the second on the everyday costs of policing and incarceration absorbed by residents of Philadelphia, PA. The data collected illuminates how resulting patterns of financial loss exhaust resources from expansive networks of care and support. To theorize these outcomes, we turn to the heuristic of the “thin blue line.” To date, scholars have critiqued the “thin blue line” as a coded symbol for white supremacy, in which police are imagined to occupy a fragile threshold between “good” and “evil,” “civilization” and “savagery.” Yet we also see in the heuristic of the “thin blue line” a powerful metaphor for and articulation of the logic by which state actors disseminate conditions of safety and security, on the one hand, and racialized patterns of material dispossession and abandonment on the other. In this way, policing reproduces important aspects of earlier iterations of the color line, from colonial conquest and dispossession to 20th century exclusionary zoning, redlining and urban renewal. This observation suggests a need for closer research scrutiny attending to how resulting patterns of dispossession accumulate across various scales, sites, rhythms and collectivities.
UNRAVELLING THE “THIN BLUE LINE”: POLICING AS AN ENGINE OF DISPOSSESSION
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Virtual Paper Abstract
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