Police Abuse in Contemporary Democracies.

• Author: McSherry, J. Patrice

Bonner, Michelle D., Guillermina Seri, Mary Rose Kubal, and Michael Kempa, eds. Police Abuse in Contemporary Democracies. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

The ambitious theoretical goal of this book is to deepen and complicate narrow, procedural political science concepts of democracy by incorporating the phenomenon of police abuse. Analysis of such abuse, the editors argue, is absent in most of the discipline's literature on democracy. But police abuse can corrode democratic regimes and enforce exclusionary concepts of citizenship, impoverishing the nature of democracy. Police and police abuse are a form of governance, the book shows: they define and delimit the rule of law at the ground level and impact the lived experience of democracy for large populations. Moreover, the editors contend, police abuse is not solely a legacy of authoritarian states. It is present in democratic regimes and is not simply an "aberration" that can be overcome through better training or technical fixes. The book locates policing at the center of processes "through which the state imposes order and governs the population's access to rights" (11). The editors introduce three major categories that are identified with democracy but are profoundly affected by policing and police abuse: citizenship, accountability, and socioeconomic (in) equality.

The editors point out that "police officers make discretionary decisions by distinguishing between citizens deserving protection and others perceived as suspect and as a threat to the former" (14). Populations made up of the marginalized or the poor, ethnic or racial minorities, immigrants, or anti-government protesters may find themselves "dismissed, criminalized, or subjected to violence" (14). The book's linkage of socioeconomic stratification and structural analysis with the function of policing is a particularly welcome contribution. As author M. M. Miiller puts it, "Even in 'consolidated' democracies, the main function of the police has always been the (re)production of order--including its underlying divisions along class and ethnic lines" (224). Several other chapters add solid case studies that substantiate this theoretical link, analyzing police violence against "the dangerous classes" as a means of preserving and advancing the political and economic interests of the state and the upper classes.

The authors analyze a range of case studies in France, the United States, South Africa, Canada, India, Chile, Brazil...