Society. It's a paper that is about the relationship between punishment and state failure as viewed from the perspective of people who live at the margins. Now, before I go into the paper, I just want to spend a few minutes situating it within my bigger project. So I'm currently writing a book manuscript that has been contracted with financiers that you paint.
And the book basically brings together my Ph.D. research, which I finish in 2013 and work I have done since completing my dphil at Oxford. Now to explain this bigger project in a little bit more depth. The book basically starts off as an awesome graphic study of how citizens on a council estate in England experience the state in their everyday lives.
And I was initially inspired to study how the New Labour Government's anti-social behaviour policies were experienced by people at the receiving end of these policies. And to do this, I've singled out a number of council estates, all in the same town where I knew that the local authority had been quite keen to implement and enforce these policies.
And what I didn't expect to find, perhaps naively when I started doing my research, was the extent to which people on the estates seem to be expressing their support for these policies. So preventing the ask for harsh punishment of offenders, they wanted more policing. And a lot of people complained that the law had become too lenient.
And what struck me about that was that people were expressing these sort of sentiments, despite the fact that many had very negative experiences and views of the criminal justice system and the state more broadly. So there's a lot of antagonism with regards to the state. I'm going to talk about that later. So for me, that's a puzzle. Right. So people on the one hand support punitive policies.
On the other hand, they don't actually trust the states to have legitimacy, at least not in their own eyes. And my book really is an attempt to make sense of this puzzle. And it does so by posing a value, by revisiting some fundamental questions that I think bring anthropology in conversation with criminology,
theories of punishment and social theory more broadly. And those are questions about why and how it is that people come to engage with and even show support for policies and state practices that we can say are oppressive,
according to some scholars, even anti-democratic. And more recently, I should say, as I've been going back to the field and sort of been living through a couple of general elections and Brexit as well, I sort of become interested to understand how these experiences of the state also impact on people's relationships and the use of democracy more broadly.
And now I approach these questions in the book through in some graphic analysis of everyday encounters between citizens and the state across a range of different areas of the state. So I talk about the welfare system, how people experience that, the criminal justice system, obviously, but also their interactions with housing and local democracy.
And one of the things that I write about in my book and I think about a lot, is that the way residents use the state in their daily lives doesn't really fit in neatly with the states and categories of order. For example, people in the state often use the criminal justice system as an arena in which to pursue personal disputes. It's an arena where loyalties and commitments acted out that law enforcement officials might not even be aware of or care about.
Women learn to play the benefits system, such as subvert the system to protect their family members, their commitments and their loved ones. And privates, even to a limited extent, take over state powers themselves when the state failed to provide them with the protection that they need. And so my central argument in the book is that these sort of daily acts of joining the state into people's daily lives are best understood as bottom up attempts to personalise the powers of the state.
And what I mean by that is that there sort of attempts to domesticate what residents know to be a hostile, repressive system by trying to subjected to the logic of their own daily struggles for security and survival and the social relationships that are important to them in their daily lives.
And I argue that these personalities of the state really identify the need to further unpack what we actually mean when we talk about to activism by drawing attention to the ways in which citizens expectations of the state are bound up with a whole host of political, social and economic inequities that they face in their everyday lives. So really at the core of my book then is a sort of attempt to develop a theoretical account of state.
Citizen relations that brings anthropology to bear on criminology and social theory. Okay. All of that sounds a bit heavy. So what I want to do now is move on to the paper that I've written because, well, at least that's the hope.
But what I'm hoping is that the paper with inner strength, some of the bigger ideas that I'm sort of exploring in more depth in the book and what I want to do today also in light of the audience I have, is to address one particular aspect of state citizen relations that is central to, although by far not exhaustive of the daily encounters that people have with the state. And that is the kind of everyday relations that people have with the police and law enforcement officials.
And the starting point for this paper that theories of punishment that have made sense of popular opinion to wisdom in terms of matters of ideological insecurity and the return of the contemporary leviathan. I explain that in a little bit more depth than a minute, but here are some of the basic questions that I'm asking the paper. How does an essay and graphic assessment of everyday uses of law and order amongst marginalised groups complicate the standard narrative of the penis of public?
What happens if we start from the assumption that the state is not a generative source of order, at least not if judged from the perspectives of some of laws and subjects. And what are the broader implications of such a view for theorising the relationship between the public on the one hand and the criminal justice system on the other? Now the case of the cancer states where I work provides a good illustration, I think, for sort of exploring or thinking through these questions.
Local residents on the estate often express demands for more policing, have already set this in harsher punishment for local offenders. And yet to interact with these courts for law and order is evidence of a sort of straightforward, popular desire for authority.
What mean to miss what I think is an important point, and that is that residents appropriate the state into their daily lives, sometimes in ways that align with the law, but often also for purposes that escape the official representatives of law and order. And what's more, where the state fails to provide people with the protection they want. Residents fall back onto informal violence that then gets condemned as unlawful or vigilante violence by the state's non-state actors.
I think the actual graphic study that I'm going to present to you really suggests two points that I'm going to come back to in the conclusion. I think first, it sort of suggests that dominant theories of punishment have adopted an understanding of order that is probably too narrowly focussed on the state.
And second, I want to suggest that we ought to rethink what we mean by popular opinion to this and the implications that this has for the way we think through the relationship between criminal justice and democracy or the democratic public more broadly.
And again, I'm going to come back to this point later, just a few words on data and methodology and all that kind of stuff and what should be a state itself, where I would say the bulk of my research was carried out actually in a single state, which is a fairly typical sort of post-industrial council state.
But in the 1950s, initially to accommodate the workers of a nearby situated car factory, like most other states in the country, it was relatively affluent, working class state in the post-war decades, largely populated by white British people. But there's always a sizeable minority of citizens of Afro-Caribbean descent. Over the years, the state's population has grown to just over 11,000 people today. So that actually counts amongst the largest estates in the country since the 1980s.
Again, just like many other states in the country, it has heavily been affected by industrial decline. Neoliberal policies in the economy, but also the housing sector, all of which have meant that today the estate is quite a deprived area. And certainly the people that I ended up doing most of my research with have all encountered problems with sort of long term unemployment or at least drifting in and out of extremely insecure and flexible employment,
welfare dependence. And also what I'm going to talk about later in the paper, crime and violence. Since 2011, matters have only gotten worse for people, which is obviously a direct consequence of the austerity politics that have been implemented by the coalition and the Conservative governments. Again, I can talk about that more later if anyone's interested. And in terms of my own research, I've carried out research by means of participant observation. So my dphil was in anthropology.
And what that meant is that I spent an initial period of about 19 months, 19 or 20 months living with families in social housing. So I stayed with a total of, I think four or five families and volunteering in a local community centre on a daily basis. And since then I've been going back lots with follow up trips and in my research I've, I've done, I've followed people in their daily lives in a sort of classical anthropological fashion.
I guess I participated in their relationships. I was childminding kids, I went out drinking with people, I went with them to welfare offices. I try help to help them with any kind of bureaucratic matters they had. And it was gradually over time that people sort of trusted began to trust me more much relate to me not so much as a researcher,
but as someone who lived with them. You know, someone who was a resident of sorts and paid for, sort of started taking me in as as a friend, as a resident, sometimes also sort of fictive kin member. And it was through those kinds of relationships of trust that I think I was able to then sort of gain access to some of the experiences and views that I'm going to present today.
Now, I'm well aware that sort of in the wake of the controversy around Alice Governments book on the one participant observation, it's something that has been debated a lot and the sort of ethical and legal challenges that come with doing research and particularly in marginalised communities and. I'm not going to talk about that in the presentation because I don't have time. But again, something we can talk about later of anyone is interested to you to ask me more questions about that.
What I want to do for now, let's move on to the series of punishment that form the backdrop of my paper, and then I'm going to come to myself. Okay. So theories of punishment. Now, the public's presumed vulnerability is something that has become a central reference point in contemporary criminal justice discourse.
And in the U.K., this is perhaps best illustrated in the politics of law and order that became central to the New Labour government's electoral campaign in the lead up to the 1997 elections. After 18 years out of government and four electoral defeats in a row, New Labour basically sought to mobilise popular support by actively repositioning itself as a party that was getting tough on crime, tough on the costs of crime. And I mean, I'm sure this is all kind of known to you in this room.
But just to say very briefly, you know, the government argued that the criminal justice system had been driven for too long by an elitist culture and had basically ignored the suffering of ordinary citizens. And that in order to put this right, the balance of the criminal justice system would have to be restored, swinging away from the rights of criminal offenders towards those of law abiding citizens.
A view of rights was endorsed that came to see the victim of crime as the new idealised citizen in need of state protection. Now the policies that were implemented amounted to a sort of wholesale rethinking of the criminal justice system away from the sort of, well, first ethos of the post-war decades that had been gathered by what the latest court, the liberal guardians, towards a more punitive and populist stance.
Again, the details of that process don't really concern me today, but just to say very briefly that they happened in as they happened sort of on different levels. So first, within the area of policing, you know, there were massive reforms implemented under the New Labour Government and the ban of community and neighbourhood policing. The police were required to implement permanent neighbourhood policing schemes or teams and to improve high visibility on the streets.
And second, there were also changes within the local authorities themselves. So local authority bodies were required to take on an active role in basically policing anti-social behaviour and low level crime.
You know, and you had a situation where and I find that quite astonishing and I write about that a lot in the book where bodies that historically would have been associated more with the welfare state such as housing associations, social services, he services were required to take on an active role in policing problem populations.
And then finally and probably most obviously, there were massive changes within the criminal law itself as the New Labour government implemented lots and lots of new policies and penal powers. Probably the best known example of that at the time was the aspect of the anti-social behaviour, all the sort of criminal, so the criminal hybrid that allows the criminalisation of behaviour deemed anti-social by a member of the public.
Now Nikki Lacey and the prisoner's dilemma has described the expansion of criminal justice in the UK and beyond as the central democratic paradox. Much he says, I quote here is that it's a paradox whereby criminal justice has been driven into punitive direction despite or perhaps even because of popular and hence literally democratic support.
Recent narratives have seen this sort of turn towards more anti-democratic policies as evidence of a broader crisis of legitimacy that governments are confronting in the face of rampant insecurities. What do these insecurities consist in? Well, different explanations that explanation models have been advanced.
And I'm not going to go into detail here. But just to say very briefly, Sir David Garland in his famous work, The Culture of Control, he sort of sees this insecurity as deriving from heightened experiences of crime as a normal social fact.
So one of the things he says in the book is that as citizens are coming to deal with the predicaments that are posed by daily threats of crime, as well as a whole, whole host of changes in their lifestyle that are experiencing, you know, a form of ontological insecurity, which basically predisposes them to be more punitive towards strangers, outsiders and criminals, others.
And I'm thinking of people like Louis Van Horn have criticised Garland basically for paying too much emphasis on the cultural conditions of modernity. And what he would say is that the sort of punitive upsurge that we've seen in the U.K. and in the U.S. and certain other countries should be understood as part of a political project of the remaking of the state in light of civil disorder and insecurities that themselves were unleashed by decades of neoliberal rule.
Now, I think, obviously, that important differences in the sort of cultural, political, economic metanarrative of the punitive term, but they do tend to agree on a central point, or at least a point that is central to my analysis, and that is that academics and I think we can probably at policymakers, tend to depict a view of citizens who are in need of authoritative reassurance in the face of their own vulnerability. It comes as no surprise that the figure of the Leviathan looms large in.
Peter Ramsey points out that punitive shifts in criminal justice and I quote him here, seem to raise the themes of Thomas Hobbes as account of an absolute a sovereignty inaugurated by an insecure population. Now comes the Kardashian advice and is, of course, well known.
Right. It's the idea that people leave the state of nature, which is governed precisely by insecurity and fear, to subject themselves to centralised authority that then promises to protect them and people's property houses via state laws, based then on an assumption that societies only function in the presence of a centralised authority that maintains and enforces order and I think applies the contemporary context of criminal justice.
The argument that's made here is that widespread feelings of insecurity at the turn of the 21st century have produced something that's akin to the state of nature against which the states emerge as once more as an authoritative source of order. Now this sort of metanarrative of the return of a contemporary leviathan has been challenged on a number of different levels.
And I want to mention that very briefly here, because I do owe, I guess, a great deal of intellectual debt to to to the work that's already been done in that area. That has, on the one hand, been the sort of institutional critique of this metanarrative. I'm thinking of the work of people like Nikki Lacy, Vanessa Bach, but also Delia Gallagher, who've sort of looked at the institutional dynamics that can mitigate the more punitive lawmaking impulses that politicians may otherwise follow.
They're also scholars who've sort of criticised this metanarrative on the level of political ideologies and political cultures or sociology has argued for the need to identify, I think, the political ideologies, ideologies that inform thinking and action around crime beyond a sort of single analysis of law and order.
And then finally, on the level of citizens. What people have argued is that actually the idea of a uniformly punitive public breaks down when we listen more closely to the views and experiences of actual people. So on all of these different levels, you know, we can see that this sort of metric kind of of this leviathan begins to crumble a bit, right, as we take into account sort of more nuanced arguments and processes.
And what I want to do really for the remainder of the paper is build on these criticisms and extend them from an anthropological point of view. And what I want to do is ask the question of how the portrayal of the return as an advice and can be complicated if the perspective of people at the margins is brought into focus. And my starting point for this analysis is the security gaps.
This is a term I borrowed from Lisa mILLAR and the fact that marginalised citizens, that is to say people who live in part of minority dominated neighbourhoods tend to experience both high rates of victimisation and insufficient or repressive police responses in their day to day lives. And what I want to argue is that an ethnographic analysis and anthropological account of everyday uses of law enforcement officials in these kinds of neighbourhoods ultimately exposes the weaknesses of the states.
In fact, the authority and in doing so, calls for a reassessment of the relationship between democratic politics and criminal justice. So I'm going to develop this argument in three steps. I'm going to talk a little bit more about what I mean by the security gap with reference to maps and traffic data. Then I'm going to look at how people use law enforcement officials in their daily lives and how they don't use them as well.
I'm going to look at how they sometimes draw them in and then expel them again from their daily situations. And then I'm going to turn to the conclusion and sort of set it up a bit, broaden it out a bit to some of the more theoretical points. Okay. I'm now finally turning to the SABC. I am great. Thank you. You see? Yeah. Okay. So the first section of this paper, first ethnographic section, is entitled The Security Gap.
During my fieldwork, I became close to Linda and Tony, a couple in their early thirties who were living alongside Linda's two daughters in a small, two bedroom, socially rented house on the edges of the estate. One day I was walking across the estate with Alice, who was Linda's 14 year old daughter, from the house to the bus stop. And as we were walking along, Alison have started telling me spontaneously about the places that we're passing around us.
At the corner of a street. A neighbour was stabbed last year. He'd been followed by a group of young men from different parts of town, and he'd been killed just in front of his house. Adam had been coming home from school that day when she'd seen the street blocked off by police tape. A bit further along the main roads and as pointed out that a van had gone on fire. And she explained to me that her stepfather's ex-wife had heard the explosion when it happened and she'd sort of come out to watch.
And it turned out that it was an asthma attack. Then again, as we were walking along, she sort of pointed over to the other side of the estate and she said, look, this is the part that I avoid going to all together. And I asked her why, and she said, well, her baby sister's father left there, but the family was estranged from him two years ago. He'd stolen her mother's dog and sold it to another resident on the estate.
Alison Her family would sometimes still see the dog around, but as the mother feared that he might get violent and say, nobody wants to do anything about it. Lots of stuff is happening around here, she said. I don't know why people still come out. Now, Allison's work spoke of a sort of like the topology of danger.
And I know that sounds a bit pretentious, but I couldn't think of a better way of putting it, a sort of look away, sort of geographical way of mapping out danger or risk that she associated with the neighbourhood that she'd lived in almost her entire life. And as I sort of discovered over time, as I sort of became closer to people around me, Alison's experiences were not unusual.
So young girls and boys growing up on the estate learn that the place that they lived in was full of hidden dangers, as Alice put it. Lots of stuff is happening around here. And I think what's important to understand is that Alice's words were not just a statement about victimisation. Right? That she feared at the hands of a neighbour, a group of men or her mother's ex-partner. It was crucially also a reflection, I think, of the police's inability to keep residents safe from crime and violence.
Take the example of local drug dealers. Many residents on the estate felt the police were failing to do anything about local drug dealers who were trading heroin and crack cocaine on street corners and from certain houses which people referred to as drug dens, exposing nearby residents to the threat of street violence and the politics of intimidation and fear.
For example, when I asked her and Alice's stepfather about the stabbing that had occurred on his street, described to me on that walk we had, he explained to me that the Mad Man had been a local drug dealer who many residents on the street had repeatedly complained about to the authorities but wanted to get him evicted from his house.
He was living in a social tenancy. The authorities hadn't done anything about it, and the authorities failure to intervene in this particular case was evidence of the police's lack of interest in the neighbourhood and the people lived in it. They don't care. They don't care about us. Here was a sentence I frequently heard people use.
Now, people's complaints about the lack of adequate policing might come as a surprise, given what I just said about the New Labour Government's initiatives and the kind of tough on crime agenda. And I just want to explain this briefly, because the police were a highly visible actor on the stage in the early 2000, the permanent police station had opened up at the heart of the estate right next to the main purpose of the palace on the one side and the community centre on the other side.
And the shops are just sort of opposite the police station and that was a big change. So, you know, people would tell me, you know, back in the olden days, you know, to see a blue light flash, to see a police car meant that something really, really bad must have happened. And these days they're just everywhere. And it's true. They were everywhere. On a daily basis, you'd see police officers patrolling the streets by foot, by car, sometimes even horses, which I thought was really strange.
But I first saw helicopters, police helicopters, you know, sort of hovering over the estate several nights a week. CCTV cameras were stored in major public places and mosquitoes as well, which is the name given to to these devices that basically that that meant, well, they let out a high pitched sound that only young people were meant to hear because that is a more sensitive to them. And the idea of is that it basically deters young people from congregating in public places.
So, you know that the kind of presence of law and order was very much felt on the estate on a daily basis. But and this is what residents told me, what they saw that most of the police's attention was disproportionately focussed on local youth aspects were given to young men, both black and white, on account of their disorderly behaviour, and they were often subject to curfews, injunctions, orders and random stuff and searches.
I mean, this is something that other people have wept about. So this is a nice story. Early on, I became privy to what that meant in practice in my first host family, which was a sort of a white English family with four children. And the 15 year old was regularly stopped and sometimes searched by the police. The police would tell him that he was getting it, getting an injunction order for acting like he was in a gang.
I quote times, that is to say that walking around with a group of teenage friends in ways that appeared threatening to the authorities now tyrant's own explanation of what was going on there was that it was down to them wearing their heads up, which meant that their faces couldn't easily be seen by the police.
Tyree knew that an injunction order would restrict his movements in the neighbourhood and his freedom to associate with others, crucially with his closest friends and potentially also his family members. And what's more, a potentially criminal record would place his family's tenancy at risk as it constituted a valid ground for evicting a family from a socially rented property.
Three. So for many reasons, then the police are sort of lack of care, at least as they experienced it didn't refer, I think, to an outright absence of law and order. What's rather a reflection of the police's failure to deal with pressing problems of crime as residents experience them in their day to day lives. They criminalise kids for being kids, and meanwhile they do nothing about serious crime was something that Manzi once said to me in frustration.
Now, Mandy was a local resident in her thirties, late thirties, who felt that the police's failure to intervene with problems of drug dealing on her street ended up having horrendous consequences on her life.
Just to explain the story very briefly, what had happened to her is sort of a few months earlier, Mandy and her neighbours had called the police about a drug den on her street and Mandy was basically worried that her teenage son would get involved with like a drug dealing activities because he'd sort of started spending lots of time in and around the flats and was sometimes in the company of people that she didn't consider to be trustworthy.
The police didn't really do anything about the drug den, but meanwhile, her fears became true. So one night Mandy had a knock on her door and when she opened, she was dragged into a car by two masked men. And it turned out that her son had an outstanding debt with the drug dealer. So one of the masked men was a drug dealer and he was unable to pay his debt. So instead of a son, Mandy was now driven to a cash machine and forced to withdraw £200 for Mandy.
The police's failure to do anything about the drug dealing before things could escalate was evidence of the police's hypocrisy. It stood in stark contrast to the heavy handed approach to young people who she and others related to as their sons, their children's friends and their next door neighbours. So I hope you can sort of see what I'm trying to get at when I talk about this sort of security gap.
It's really just the idea that residents like Mandy Tarrant and Ennis are vulnerable first to being the victims of quite serious crime and violence just by being or living in a neighbourhood where crime is commonplace, as well as to becoming the targets of potential police harassment and police control. And so it comes as no surprise, I think, that many people speak about the police and the kind of criminal justice system more broadly in very negative terms. They say that they're anti-police.
That's a term often heard in a and anti-police here and that they would never collaborate with the police, something that I also witnessed. So one of the things that the police did quite a lot when I was doing my first fieldwork was they sort of did public sort of surgeries and events where they sort of turned up and they invited residents to come and report issues of anti-social behaviour and crime,
sometimes in partnership with other local authorities. And these were extremely badly attended events. You know, people just wouldn't want to come and collaborate with the police saying that they wouldn't want to do the police's job. Well done. You know, it was not their job to do to grass up in their neighbours.
But I think what's important and this is where I'm coming, that's the second part of my paper, these sorts of negative attitudes towards the police didn't actually preclude residents from engaging with the police on their own terms and the country. As I got to know people more closely, I also became aware of the various ways in which residents appropriated local officials into daily disputes with their family members,
neighbours and friends. And sometimes these were the very same people who'd said to me, You know, we're anti-police. We wouldn't, you know, when we're not going to call the police, we're not going to collaborate with the police. And so just to sort of unpack this a little bit more, I'm now going to turn to the next part of my paper, which I call Personal Uses of Law and Order, which gives a sort of ethnographic discussion of the way in which people do draw the police into these daily situations.
I came. In a predominantly African-American neighbourhood in Philadelphia. Alice Goffman, in her book On the Run, has recently shown that shift towards more punitive policing styles has also created what she calls a social fabric in which family members, girlfriends and neighbours deploy the police's power to suit. And they use the threat of police arrest and incarceration itself to exercise pressure and social control and control over people who are close to them.
In a similar manner on the estates where I works, the presence of criminal justice agents and their repressive presence in people's lives has also created a social arena in which people could engage them in the pursuit of personal goals. And I was first made aware of this while listening to a conversation that took place between two women. I call them Tracy and Kate. Now, Tracy and Kate were local women in their thirties who'd raised their teenage sons as single mothers.
And Tracy was running a successful informal drop in centre at the community centre that offered informal advice and assistance to residents on a range of matters. And on the day in question, Kate recounted an episode from when her son Luke, who's a 15 year old, had turned her life into what she called a living [INAUDIBLE].
And this is what she told us. So one day, Luke, her son, had started swearing in front of his six year old brother and being rude to his mother and even threatened to smash up her TV. And I think he actually proceeded then to try to do damage to the TV. And the two had stopped arguing in the house. And Kate described how she'd finally lost it with them. And she said to them, If you want to fight, you and me can do it.
We'll do it in the street. And she'd and she'd sort of dragged him out of the house. In the meantime, I don't quite know how, but in the meantime, Bluetooth headphones, nine, nine, nine, the police emergency number claiming domestic violence because he was scared. Kate said that she would beat him up. When the police turned up, the two had indeed been fighting on the streets. Kate told the police that she wanted to get him done for criminal damage, presumably because he'd smashed up her TV.
She told me that the police took the boy to the police station, but no charges were issued. Kate recorded a record. After that, he went to live with his dad for two years, and now he's a lucky boy. We get on so well now. Kate was telling Tracy this story by way of giving her advice. Tracy at the time was herself experiencing problems with her own teenage son. He dropped out of college, he started drinking, and he sort of failed to contribute rent payments to his mother's house.
And that really was a problem for Tracy because she she herself wasn't low income. And the fact that her son had dropped out of college meant that certain benefits had been stopped. So she was left with not enough money to pay her rent. So it was a very serious situation to us encountering. Now, Kate's advice choice was firm. She said kick him out of the house and call the police if he comes back a few weeks after the conversation between the two women had taken place.
Tracy did ring the police when her son came home in the early hours of the morning and was banging on her front door and he was very drunk. She reported him for vandalism. Her son left before the police arrived. I don't know. I think the police might have been involved the next day and her son had left by then. But Tracy was satisfied that she'd managed, as she said, to shut him up.
Now. Over the following months, I became aware of the ways in which residents use law enforcement officials in various ways to handle daily disputes, situations with their children, their kin members, their lovers, and their next door neighbours. Sometimes these kinds of engagements with the police operated merely in the realm of threats.
So what I mean by that is that a woman might threaten, for example, the father of her children, that she reported him to the police for handling stolen goods or for drug dealing. If he doesn't provide her with payments towards the children or if he doesn't do certain things she wants him to do in other situations, the threat was actualised or acted upon, like in the situations I've just described, and there are many more situations I encountered.
I can talk about them later where it wasn't just mothers accusing the police in relation to their own teenage sons, but teenage children in relation to their parents as well. Lovers or neighbours doing it to one another. Now these sorts of examples might seem perhaps silly or petty from the outside, and this is certainly how the police beat them.
So I did interviews with members of the neighbourhood policing team who are willing to be interviewed, and they tended to see these sorts of incidents as evidence of broken communities and apathy and, you know, the decline of, you know, social order really amongst residents. For them, the situation was a distraction from what they consider to be their real policing priorities. And some officials mentioned that they were a waste of police time.
I think a different perspective is also possible. Right. A perspective which starts from the assumption that the objective of these encounters was not to enforce any kind of idea of legalistic order, which is, I think, what the police assuming when they complain about it being a waste of police time. Granted, residents did invoke often in these situations a sort of official or legalistic language, so they would use the language of vandalism or criminal damage or breach of bail conditions.
But when they were sort of making phone calls to the police. But I think what was going on here is that this sort of official legalistic language was a way of framing personalised disputes as they sought to punish an unruly son to exercise control of an ex-partner or to take revenge on a parent whose behaviour one didn't approve of.
What they then cared about were the everyday relations, the loyalties that they felt they had towards loved ones, towards family members and neighbours, and the commitments that had been broken in particular situations. So in short, then what I'm trying to say is that I think we can sort of see a picture emerging where the state is used as an arena for the pursuit of these sort of daily social relations that don't quite map onto what the state thinks law and order is all about.
And what I want to do now is sort of take this thought a little bit further and say for the final ethnographic part of this paper, I want to turn to a further set of social constellations that also don't sit quietly with the states and understanding of order. And these are situations of more serious threat of violence. The kinds of situations that I started my paper with when I talked about the security gap in which residents often expel officials from the conflicts that they're experiencing.
And then I'm going to come to some conclusions. So this ethnographic section is called state failure. Okay. Let me begin by giving you an example again. Vera was a woman of Afro-Caribbean descent in her early forties with three children. I met her when one day she came into the community community centre where I've been volunteering for over a year. By that time we got chatting and after a while she started telling me about an incident she'd experienced a few months earlier.
And during this incident, she caught the police. And this happened basically after her pet cat had been taken and killed by a fighting dog. The owner of the dog was a local teenager called Dane, who was well known to the police for his anti-social behaviour. That is to say, his involvement in petty crime. Although many residents also believe that he was a local drug dealer, something that the police didn't really focus on.
There are subsequently agreed to give a witness statement in court that resulted in Dane receiving an aspect that banned him from entering certain places of the estate, including where some of his own family members lived. The day after the court hearing and they are described to me how residents had stopped her on the streets when she was on her way to do her daily shopping. She said, It took me out to do my shopping because everyone congratulated me for speaking out.
However, the tables turned when Veera left for a short holiday. In her absence, her house and the front yard were vandalised and someone had spray painted grass on the front door. Neighbours confirms their suspicion when she got back that the attack had come from Dane's family. Remember, Dane was banned from seeing some of his family members on the estate.
Now. Vera never obtained official proof of this, whether it was true or not, but she just decided for herself that she wouldn't go back to the police. And when she was talking to me about it, she explained, I don't want to do nothing. I'm scared. I just don't want to call the police anymore.
Now, in this particular instance, Vera decided to abandon police involvement halfway through the process, as the dispute with her neighbour took on more threatening dimensions as his family had become involved. Her trust in the police, his ability to act as an ally and to protect her had faded.
Ferris decision in this situation to withdraw and to keep her head down as she said something that was also the way residents like Alice, Amanda, I spoke about them earlier, was sort of a decision that I saw that residents adopted in these kinds of situations, but not everyone chose that course of action in courts. In fact, sorry. As people let me into their lives, I frequently encountered that the opposite could also be encouraged.
For example, one day I saw Tracy. He was running the community centre giving advice to paint an older resident in his sixties who, for reasons that he said were unknown to him, had become prey to the vicious behaviour of his next door neighbours. Tracey, who felt sorry for Pete, advised that he call the police, but quickly added, But if they failed to protect him or to help him.
He should come back to her. And then she added with a smile, which was directed at Kate, who happened to be in the room. If the Lord finish them off, we will go round the house and tell them that we're from the big families on the estate and they can't [INAUDIBLE] with us.
Now. I think Tracy was driving when she said this, although she did take pride in the fact that she was from a very well-known Afro-Caribbean family whose members were active in the local church, the community centre and in running the local pub. But underlying that joke was the reality where the use of informal networks was routinely mobilised in situations of danger. And similar to the moral economy of violence that has been described by CANTINAS et al.
In a poor neighbourhood in Philadelphia. What I encountered was that residents expected their friends and can't act as allies against threats, and these expectations could be instrumentalized in the pursuit of illegal force. For example, Ray was a local resident in his fifties who'd fall out with this next door neighbour of a local drug dealer.
Ray decided not to call the police after his neighbour had threatened his wife and his kids on numerous occasions because he suspected that his neighbour worked as an informant for the police. Now the word informant was used by residents quite loosely to refer to people who they considered to be immune from police intervention, presumably because they had been bought off by the police in exchange for information that they'd given them. On this particular occasion, Ray instead mobilised.
This makes all the blokes, he said to me to come round one evening and to threaten his neighbour with their presence, including threats with a baseball bat. I could have gone to prison for it, he told me. But at least I would have known that my family is safe. So then, the risk of criminalisation was counterbalanced against the protections that he needed to offer to keep his family safe. That's the pride to emphasise this, that it's precisely in these sorts of situation.
I think that the state's ability to inflict violence becomes a desirable quality as it is imagined, as a threat that can be used as a leverage against an enemy. For example, there are and many of the residents with the opinion that Aspo selects teeth, the threat of corporal punishment, boot camps and forced them would all be more adequate forms of deterrence than a simple civil injunction order. Residents also frequently complain in this context that they wanted more policing.
Sometimes, and I think this is quite interesting demands for more punitive measures could also take on the form of collective action and mobilise pre-existing networks of neighbourhood relations. And this is perhaps best illustrated in the example of a local grassroots movement that I've written about in another article. So I'm not going to focus about an index here.
But just to say very briefly, in the early 2000 onwards, the estates, a local independent party had become active on this day and managed to mobilise a modest amount of electoral success in the local town hall. And this party was led by Cheney. He was the stepfather of Alice, with whom I started my presentation, and he was a bus driver, and he previously worked in the car factory.
And what Tony and his friends had done in the early 2000 is that basically decided that because the local authorities were failing to police these quite serious situations of threat, it was time to take the law into their own hands. So they'd gone tougher on local criminals by organising pickets outside individuals houses, sometimes for 24 hours at a time, collecting their own CCTV evidence and patrolling the streets and threatening suspects.
Now, this had given the party the reputation for being a reputation for being vigilantes and low society bodies were accusing them of being extremist, anti and anti-democratic. Cheney herself, who was one of the local councillors for the party. When he was commenting on these activities, he said to me, Oh, well, this was why you do a get done. If we don't do it to them, they do it to us. We live in that kind of world.
But the people in law, they don't understand that you can't solve a problem by being wishy washy. Middle class liberalism, it's the bane of our lives. Okay, I'm just it's 20 past. I'm just going to come to conclusions now, and I'm just going to mention three main points that I think are sort of raised by this presentation. First, the paper I have presented is intended as an ethnographic portrayal of everyday uses of law and order on a council estate in England.
And it doesn't try to be exhaustive of all kinds of police citizen interactions, nor do I claim that it's necessarily our sense of other places, although I think there is some ethnographic evidence from other places that suggests similar kinds of engagements. Rather, what I've tried to do is to ask the question of what kind of picture of the state emerges when we take as our point of departure citizens own understandings of the authorities and what role they perform in their day to day lives.
I think what my analysis has shown, what I hope my analysis has shown that people appropriate the state in their daily justice with neighbours can love us and children in ways that don't easily align with what the law considers rightful or lawful of its officers. And then there are other cases where officials are expelled from disputes, especially in situations of more serious threat.
Residents tend to withdraw from official interventions, sometimes in favour of mobilising their own informal networks of collective violence. Now, in speaking to police officers and other local authority bodies, and my sense was that they sort of struggle to make sense of the situation. Maybe they didn't want to engage with this. They tended to describe the former case of the situation where people draw the police into their daily lives as a situation of civilians wasting police time.
Whereas the latter case, where people withdraw from police support in these most serious situations of threat and then describe described as vigilante or anti-democratic. I think what an F in traffic analysis can do is really sort of mitigate against these labels by uncovering people's own logic for using or rather not using the authorities in any given situation. Having said that, I do think that the picture presented here poses a puzzle.
It doesn't fit with dominant narratives of the leviathan in contemporary theories of punishment that see the state as a generative source of order that citizens draw upon for their protection and the protection of their property.
From the perspective of dominant theories of punishment, it seems illogical to say that citizens on the margins may involve the police in less serious dispute situations, but mistrust the forces of law and order where threats to their safety may be more serious and acute.
Peter Ramsey has critiqued the image of the Leviathan in debates on the punitive ten for him that policymakers and politicians admit their own lack of authority when they assume that the last representative citizen is characterised by that vulnerability. Something that helps so as being a central feature of the state of nature that the state was meant to eliminate in the first place.
I think my analysis speaks to this point by demonstrating that from the perspective of lost subjects, the return of a leviathan may be a myth for the return for the residents of the states. At least the state is at best personalised as an ally and at worst appears a sort of public enemy, rather something they want to avoid.
And here I come into my second point. I think a lot of these criticisms, perhaps it's time to adopt a different understanding of social order, one which doesn't start with the primacy of the state, anthropologist of the state and of policing have long questioned the dominant narrative of the state as an entity that sits above society and that dispenses order from the top down. Anthropological analysis has mainly focussed on the Global South.
So I'm thinking here of the work of people like Annie Owens work on policing in Nigeria. But there's also other stuff on South Africa, Brazil, where authors have shown that citizens do draw the state into their daily work, even if or perhaps especially when the state is known to them to be hostile and repressive.
And I think it's sort of compared to focus on police citizen relations demonstrate that these processes of a naturalisation of personalisation, as I've called them, are not limited to the case of the Global South residents. A new case counts the state's question dominant categories of order and disorder, of security and insecurity, and of legality and vigilante justice that are all too frequently mapped on to catch bits of the state and society, respectively.
In so doing, they also call into question the state's ability, I think, to be the arbiter of these distinctions. So in short, then I guess what I'm trying to say here is that an ethnographic analysis of state citizen relations really questions the focus on the primacy of the state in our accounts of law and order or punishment. Now, if my analysis is correct, then I think adopting a different view of social order has implications that go beyond the particularities of the case study presented.
And here I want to come to my third and final point. Ethnographic analysis of everyday use of law and order invites a reassessment of the relationship between the public and criminal justice. There has been a tendency in recent commentary to seek from no justice and the public as a sort of toxic mix. Yeah, precisely because the public's punitive system is said to be dangerous to an evenhanded criminal justice system.
What's argued is that sort of interstitial layers of bureaucracy are needed between the public and the criminal justice decision making process to sort of make sure that the system that we have is evenhanded and democratic. And I think my sort of analysis cautions against these calls for professionalisation, as we've seen.
I don't think it makes sense to to describe residents as uniformly punitive, or rather, we need to unpack what we mean when we talk about the punitive public of popular punitive ism. I think to the extent that people do call for more law and order, these courts express a reality of high victimisation and the state's failure to address the underlying causes of serious violence and threat. And this is something that policymakers ought to take very seriously.
I think a more fruitful starting point for the debate may then be to acknowledge that questions about the public, about the state of authority and its relationship to criminal justice are always bound to be political. QUESTION And this is a suggestion that Lisa miller makes recently in her new book, where she argues that paying attention to the views of at risk populations can help to move beyond the crisis. Optimism alone.
She argues, and I quote, her shifting the focus helps us to redirect our attention to the political demands of those most at risk of violence, as well as a whole host of other social inequities, including high rates of exposure to state repressive practices. Now, I think Miller develops these points with a view of improving the economic, social and political lives of citizens who live at the margins.
And my analysis pushes the point. I think taking people seriously on their own terms is vital if we're interested to come up with better policies. As Miller suggests, for example, reducing repressive policing. But I think it's also important for another reason. It's important, I think, if we're interested, to reinvigorate the public's faith in the authority of the states to the extent that obviously it was ever there. Now, I think you can ask yourself why this should be important.
Why does it matter if the public, especially much less citizens, has authority in the state? Is it not enough to just have good policies? I mean, who cares if they attribute legitimacy to these institutions? Well, I think the reason why it does matter is because questions of state authority and their legitimacy can't be disconnected from democracy writ large.
And I think and I'm going to conclude on this note, this is something that was precisely brought into focus by the EU referendum that happened in June last year that, as you know, divided the country as people voted to leave the European Union by a small margin. Now, many of my friends and informers on the estates count amongst the citizens who came out to vote in favour of leaving the EU, something that has afforded them much criticism in the press and the liberal media.
What made you even come out on that day? At least the people I've spoken to, my friends and my informants, plus the fact that they perceive the EU referendum as an opportunity to reject government in a way that an ordinary election cannot. That is to say, to express what I've called a vote of no confidence in the people who've given them. And if you don't recognise the realities and the problems that they encounter.
I think anthropologists of crime and criminologists and you know, in general theorists and academics who are interested in these sorts of issues can make important interventions to interventions to the debate on democracy and on democracy's future.
I think they can do this by showing how people's views of democracy are wrapped up with that day, the experiences of citizenship as punishment, and also by drawing attention to the broader political, economic and social inequities that need to be addressed if democracy is to have a future. Okay. I think I'm going to stop here. Thank you. Yeah. Perfectly timed spot on. So I'll call them all. Oh, we.