1 00:00:00,300 --> 00:00:01,110 Society. 2 00:00:01,950 --> 00:00:09,360 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. 3 00:00:10,620 --> 00:00:16,440 Now, before I go into the paper, I just want to spend a few minutes situating it within my bigger project. 4 00:00:17,670 --> 00:00:23,670 So I'm currently writing a book manuscript that has been contracted with financiers that you paint. 5 00:00:24,510 --> 00:00:35,730 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. 6 00:00:37,740 --> 00:00:41,130 Now to explain this bigger project in a little bit more depth. 7 00:00:41,550 --> 00:00:49,560 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. 8 00:00:50,160 --> 00:00:55,020 And I was initially inspired to study how the New Labour Government's anti-social 9 00:00:55,020 --> 00:00:59,700 behaviour policies were experienced by people at the receiving end of these policies. 10 00:01:01,040 --> 00:01:04,139 And to do this, I've singled out a number of council estates, 11 00:01:04,140 --> 00:01:12,240 all in the same town where I knew that the local authority had been quite keen to implement and enforce these policies. 12 00:01:12,970 --> 00:01:19,560 And what I didn't expect to find, perhaps naively when I started doing my research, 13 00:01:19,560 --> 00:01:25,830 was the extent to which people on the estates seem to be expressing their support for these policies. 14 00:01:25,830 --> 00:01:30,450 So preventing the ask for harsh punishment of offenders, they wanted more policing. 15 00:01:31,050 --> 00:01:34,410 And a lot of people complained that the law had become too lenient. 16 00:01:35,400 --> 00:01:40,139 And what struck me about that was that people were expressing these sort of sentiments, 17 00:01:40,140 --> 00:01:46,020 despite the fact that many had very negative experiences and views of the criminal justice system and the state more broadly. 18 00:01:46,200 --> 00:01:49,379 So there's a lot of antagonism with regards to the state. 19 00:01:49,380 --> 00:01:53,310 I'm going to talk about that later. So for me, that's a puzzle. 20 00:01:53,460 --> 00:01:56,200 Right. So people on the one hand support punitive policies. 21 00:01:56,220 --> 00:02:02,430 On the other hand, they don't actually trust the states to have legitimacy, at least not in their own eyes. 22 00:02:03,450 --> 00:02:07,109 And my book really is an attempt to make sense of this puzzle. 23 00:02:07,110 --> 00:02:17,129 And it does so by posing a value, by revisiting some fundamental questions that I think bring anthropology in conversation with criminology, 24 00:02:17,130 --> 00:02:27,540 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 25 00:02:27,540 --> 00:02:33,029 even show support for policies and state practices that we can say are oppressive, 26 00:02:33,030 --> 00:02:37,649 according to some scholars, even anti-democratic. And more recently, I should say, 27 00:02:37,650 --> 00:02:46,080 as I've been going back to the field and sort of been living through a couple of general elections and Brexit as well, 28 00:02:46,080 --> 00:02:50,790 I sort of become interested to understand how these experiences of the state 29 00:02:50,790 --> 00:02:54,570 also impact on people's relationships and the use of democracy more broadly. 30 00:02:55,720 --> 00:03:01,350 And now I approach these questions in the book through in some graphic analysis of everyday 31 00:03:01,350 --> 00:03:06,060 encounters between citizens and the state across a range of different areas of the state. 32 00:03:06,070 --> 00:03:10,620 So I talk about the welfare system, how people experience that, the criminal justice system, 33 00:03:10,620 --> 00:03:14,670 obviously, but also their interactions with housing and local democracy. 34 00:03:16,080 --> 00:03:19,680 And one of the things that I write about in my book and I think about a lot, 35 00:03:19,680 --> 00:03:28,020 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. 36 00:03:30,180 --> 00:03:38,400 For example, people in the state often use the criminal justice system as an arena in which to pursue personal disputes. 37 00:03:38,700 --> 00:03:45,520 It's an arena where loyalties and commitments acted out that law enforcement officials might not even be aware of or care about. 38 00:03:45,990 --> 00:03:54,090 Women learn to play the benefits system, such as subvert the system to protect their family members, their commitments and their loved ones. 39 00:03:54,390 --> 00:04:01,560 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. 40 00:04:02,850 --> 00:04:08,819 And so my central argument in the book is that these sort of daily acts of joining the state into 41 00:04:08,820 --> 00:04:14,940 people's daily lives are best understood as bottom up attempts to personalise the powers of the state. 42 00:04:15,190 --> 00:04:20,750 And what I mean by that is that there sort of attempts to domesticate what residents know to be a hostile, 43 00:04:20,790 --> 00:04:26,429 repressive system by trying to subjected to the logic of their own daily struggles for security 44 00:04:26,430 --> 00:04:30,840 and survival and the social relationships that are important to them in their daily lives. 45 00:04:32,220 --> 00:04:40,350 And I argue that these personalities of the state really identify the need to further unpack what we actually mean when we talk about 46 00:04:40,350 --> 00:04:50,370 to activism by drawing attention to the ways in which citizens expectations of the state are bound up with a whole host of political, 47 00:04:50,370 --> 00:04:54,180 social and economic inequities that they face in their everyday lives. 48 00:04:55,140 --> 00:04:59,930 So really at the core of my book then is a sort of attempt to develop a theoretical account of state. 49 00:05:00,070 --> 00:05:05,170 Citizen relations that brings anthropology to bear on criminology and social theory. 50 00:05:07,420 --> 00:05:16,750 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. 51 00:05:17,770 --> 00:05:21,280 But what I'm hoping is that the paper with inner strength, 52 00:05:21,370 --> 00:05:31,239 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, 53 00:05:31,240 --> 00:05:35,910 is to address one particular aspect of state citizen relations that is central to, 54 00:05:36,190 --> 00:05:40,660 although by far not exhaustive of the daily encounters that people have with the state. 55 00:05:42,070 --> 00:05:47,500 And that is the kind of everyday relations that people have with the police and law enforcement officials. 56 00:05:50,820 --> 00:05:57,629 And the starting point for this paper that theories of punishment that have made sense of popular opinion 57 00:05:57,630 --> 00:06:04,560 to wisdom in terms of matters of ideological insecurity and the return of the contemporary leviathan. 58 00:06:04,680 --> 00:06:10,530 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. 59 00:06:11,610 --> 00:06:15,569 How does an essay and graphic assessment of everyday uses of law and order amongst 60 00:06:15,570 --> 00:06:20,130 marginalised groups complicate the standard narrative of the penis of public? 61 00:06:20,910 --> 00:06:26,490 What happens if we start from the assumption that the state is not a generative source of order, 62 00:06:26,700 --> 00:06:30,870 at least not if judged from the perspectives of some of laws and subjects. 63 00:06:31,760 --> 00:06:35,600 And what are the broader implications of such a view for theorising the relationship 64 00:06:35,600 --> 00:06:39,500 between the public on the one hand and the criminal justice system on the other? 65 00:06:40,540 --> 00:06:49,030 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. 66 00:06:50,200 --> 00:06:56,950 Local residents on the estate often express demands for more policing, have already set this in harsher punishment for local offenders. 67 00:06:56,950 --> 00:07:04,180 And yet to interact with these courts for law and order is evidence of a sort of straightforward, popular desire for authority. 68 00:07:04,480 --> 00:07:12,250 What mean to miss what I think is an important point, and that is that residents appropriate the state into their daily lives, 69 00:07:12,250 --> 00:07:19,720 sometimes in ways that align with the law, but often also for purposes that escape the official representatives of law and order. 70 00:07:20,740 --> 00:07:24,970 And what's more, where the state fails to provide people with the protection they want. 71 00:07:25,300 --> 00:07:33,850 Residents fall back onto informal violence that then gets condemned as unlawful or vigilante violence by the state's non-state actors. 72 00:07:37,060 --> 00:07:43,330 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. 73 00:07:43,810 --> 00:07:44,560 I think first, 74 00:07:44,560 --> 00:07:51,970 it sort of suggests that dominant theories of punishment have adopted an understanding of order that is probably too narrowly focussed on the state. 75 00:07:53,110 --> 00:08:01,120 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 76 00:08:01,120 --> 00:08:07,820 the way we think through the relationship between criminal justice and democracy or the democratic public more broadly. 77 00:08:07,900 --> 00:08:10,120 And again, I'm going to come back to this point later, 78 00:08:13,780 --> 00:08:20,229 just a few words on data and methodology and all that kind of stuff and what should be a state itself, 79 00:08:20,230 --> 00:08:28,900 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. 80 00:08:29,170 --> 00:08:38,170 But in the 1950s, initially to accommodate the workers of a nearby situated car factory, like most other states in the country, 81 00:08:38,170 --> 00:08:45,159 it was relatively affluent, working class state in the post-war decades, largely populated by white British people. 82 00:08:45,160 --> 00:08:48,790 But there's always a sizeable minority of citizens of Afro-Caribbean descent. 83 00:08:50,350 --> 00:08:55,089 Over the years, the state's population has grown to just over 11,000 people today. 84 00:08:55,090 --> 00:09:02,140 So that actually counts amongst the largest estates in the country since the 1980s. 85 00:09:02,200 --> 00:09:07,630 Again, just like many other states in the country, it has heavily been affected by industrial decline. 86 00:09:08,440 --> 00:09:16,450 Neoliberal policies in the economy, but also the housing sector, all of which have meant that today the estate is quite a deprived area. 87 00:09:16,450 --> 00:09:24,339 And certainly the people that I ended up doing most of my research with have all encountered problems with 88 00:09:24,340 --> 00:09:30,190 sort of long term unemployment or at least drifting in and out of extremely insecure and flexible employment, 89 00:09:30,430 --> 00:09:35,350 welfare dependence. And also what I'm going to talk about later in the paper, crime and violence. 90 00:09:36,520 --> 00:09:40,059 Since 2011, matters have only gotten worse for people, 91 00:09:40,060 --> 00:09:48,760 which is obviously a direct consequence of the austerity politics that have been implemented by the coalition and the Conservative governments. 92 00:09:48,760 --> 00:09:51,400 Again, I can talk about that more later if anyone's interested. 93 00:09:52,150 --> 00:09:58,360 And in terms of my own research, I've carried out research by means of participant observation. 94 00:09:58,370 --> 00:10:00,340 So my dphil was in anthropology. 95 00:10:02,680 --> 00:10:12,309 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. 96 00:10:12,310 --> 00:10:19,600 So I stayed with a total of, I think four or five families and volunteering in a local community centre on a daily basis. 97 00:10:19,900 --> 00:10:26,590 And since then I've been going back lots with follow up trips and in my research I've, I've done, 98 00:10:28,540 --> 00:10:32,739 I've followed people in their daily lives in a sort of classical anthropological fashion. 99 00:10:32,740 --> 00:10:42,190 I guess I participated in their relationships. I was childminding kids, I went out drinking with people, I went with them to welfare offices. 100 00:10:42,190 --> 00:10:46,600 I try help to help them with any kind of bureaucratic matters they had. 101 00:10:47,350 --> 00:10:55,720 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, 102 00:10:56,110 --> 00:11:01,569 but as someone who lived with them. You know, someone who was a resident of sorts and paid for, 103 00:11:01,570 --> 00:11:07,420 sort of started taking me in as as a friend, as a resident, sometimes also sort of fictive kin member. 104 00:11:08,830 --> 00:11:13,959 And it was through those kinds of relationships of trust that I think I was able to then 105 00:11:13,960 --> 00:11:18,700 sort of gain access to some of the experiences and views that I'm going to present today. 106 00:11:19,870 --> 00:11:29,540 Now, I'm well aware that sort of in the wake of the controversy around Alice Governments book on the one participant observation, 107 00:11:29,560 --> 00:11:33,940 it's something that has been debated a lot and the sort of ethical and legal challenges 108 00:11:34,630 --> 00:11:38,800 that come with doing research and particularly in marginalised communities and. 109 00:11:39,850 --> 00:11:43,419 I'm not going to talk about that in the presentation because I don't have time. 110 00:11:43,420 --> 00:11:49,540 But again, something we can talk about later of anyone is interested to you to ask me more questions about that. 111 00:11:51,160 --> 00:11:57,310 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. 112 00:12:01,470 --> 00:12:03,690 Okay. So theories of punishment. 113 00:12:05,820 --> 00:12:13,860 Now, the public's presumed vulnerability is something that has become a central reference point in contemporary criminal justice discourse. 114 00:12:14,790 --> 00:12:19,859 And in the U.K., this is perhaps best illustrated in the politics of law and order that became central to 115 00:12:19,860 --> 00:12:24,270 the New Labour government's electoral campaign in the lead up to the 1997 elections. 116 00:12:25,290 --> 00:12:28,529 After 18 years out of government and four electoral defeats in a row, 117 00:12:28,530 --> 00:12:35,790 New Labour basically sought to mobilise popular support by actively repositioning itself as a party that was getting tough on crime, 118 00:12:35,790 --> 00:12:42,479 tough on the costs of crime. And I mean, I'm sure this is all kind of known to you in this room. 119 00:12:42,480 --> 00:12:48,660 But just to say very briefly, you know, the government argued that the criminal justice system had been driven for too long 120 00:12:48,660 --> 00:12:54,570 by an elitist culture and had basically ignored the suffering of ordinary citizens. 121 00:12:55,740 --> 00:13:01,530 And that in order to put this right, the balance of the criminal justice system would have to be restored, 122 00:13:01,680 --> 00:13:06,570 swinging away from the rights of criminal offenders towards those of law abiding citizens. 123 00:13:07,470 --> 00:13:14,100 A view of rights was endorsed that came to see the victim of crime as the new idealised citizen in need of state protection. 124 00:13:15,690 --> 00:13:22,589 Now the policies that were implemented amounted to a sort of wholesale rethinking of the criminal justice system away from the sort of, well, 125 00:13:22,590 --> 00:13:27,569 first ethos of the post-war decades that had been gathered by what the latest court, 126 00:13:27,570 --> 00:13:31,200 the liberal guardians, towards a more punitive and populist stance. 127 00:13:32,250 --> 00:13:35,940 Again, the details of that process don't really concern me today, 128 00:13:35,940 --> 00:13:44,339 but just to say very briefly that they happened in as they happened sort of on different levels. 129 00:13:44,340 --> 00:13:47,240 So first, within the area of policing, you know, 130 00:13:47,250 --> 00:13:53,190 there were massive reforms implemented under the New Labour Government and the ban of community and neighbourhood policing. 131 00:13:53,670 --> 00:14:00,930 The police were required to implement permanent neighbourhood policing schemes or teams and to improve high visibility on the streets. 132 00:14:01,730 --> 00:14:05,500 And second, there were also changes within the local authorities themselves. 133 00:14:05,500 --> 00:14:12,600 So local authority bodies were required to take on an active role in basically policing anti-social behaviour and low level crime. 134 00:14:12,670 --> 00:14:19,020 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 135 00:14:20,130 --> 00:14:26,550 bodies that historically would have been associated more with the welfare state such as housing associations, 136 00:14:27,330 --> 00:14:35,250 social services, he services were required to take on an active role in policing problem populations. 137 00:14:36,060 --> 00:14:38,130 And then finally and probably most obviously, 138 00:14:38,730 --> 00:14:46,350 there were massive changes within the criminal law itself as the New Labour government implemented lots and lots of new policies and penal powers. 139 00:14:46,650 --> 00:14:52,380 Probably the best known example of that at the time was the aspect of the anti-social behaviour, all the sort of criminal, 140 00:14:52,500 --> 00:14:58,920 so the criminal hybrid that allows the criminalisation of behaviour deemed anti-social by a member of the public. 141 00:15:00,540 --> 00:15:10,650 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. 142 00:15:11,250 --> 00:15:18,149 Much he says, I quote here is that it's a paradox whereby criminal justice has been driven into punitive 143 00:15:18,150 --> 00:15:25,350 direction despite or perhaps even because of popular and hence literally democratic support. 144 00:15:27,890 --> 00:15:35,299 Recent narratives have seen this sort of turn towards more anti-democratic policies as evidence of a 145 00:15:35,300 --> 00:15:41,600 broader crisis of legitimacy that governments are confronting in the face of rampant insecurities. 146 00:15:42,320 --> 00:15:47,959 What do these insecurities consist in? Well, different explanations that explanation models have been advanced. 147 00:15:47,960 --> 00:15:57,410 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, 148 00:15:57,710 --> 00:16:03,390 he sort of sees this insecurity as deriving from heightened experiences of crime as a normal social fact. 149 00:16:03,410 --> 00:16:10,400 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, 150 00:16:10,670 --> 00:16:18,770 as well as a whole, whole host of changes in their lifestyle that are experiencing, you know, a form of ontological insecurity, 151 00:16:18,770 --> 00:16:25,730 which basically predisposes them to be more punitive towards strangers, outsiders and criminals, others. 152 00:16:26,510 --> 00:16:33,710 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. 153 00:16:34,880 --> 00:16:39,050 And what he would say is that the sort of punitive upsurge that we've seen in the 154 00:16:39,050 --> 00:16:43,490 U.K. and in the U.S. and certain other countries should be understood as part 155 00:16:43,490 --> 00:16:48,049 of a political project of the remaking of the state in light of civil disorder 156 00:16:48,050 --> 00:16:52,640 and insecurities that themselves were unleashed by decades of neoliberal rule. 157 00:16:53,900 --> 00:17:02,180 Now, I think, obviously, that important differences in the sort of cultural, political, economic metanarrative of the punitive term, 158 00:17:02,660 --> 00:17:09,290 but they do tend to agree on a central point, or at least a point that is central to my analysis, 159 00:17:10,010 --> 00:17:14,720 and that is that academics and I think we can probably at policymakers, 160 00:17:15,020 --> 00:17:22,310 tend to depict a view of citizens who are in need of authoritative reassurance in the face of their own vulnerability. 161 00:17:23,840 --> 00:17:27,079 It comes as no surprise that the figure of the Leviathan looms large in. 162 00:17:27,080 --> 00:17:32,360 Peter Ramsey points out that punitive shifts in criminal justice and I quote him here, 163 00:17:32,600 --> 00:17:40,520 seem to raise the themes of Thomas Hobbes as account of an absolute a sovereignty inaugurated by an insecure population. 164 00:17:42,010 --> 00:17:45,069 Now comes the Kardashian advice and is, of course, well known. 165 00:17:45,070 --> 00:17:51,040 Right. It's the idea that people leave the state of nature, which is governed precisely by insecurity and fear, 166 00:17:51,040 --> 00:17:59,799 to subject themselves to centralised authority that then promises to protect them and people's property houses via state laws, 167 00:17:59,800 --> 00:18:05,080 based then on an assumption that societies only function in the presence of a centralised authority 168 00:18:05,230 --> 00:18:12,219 that maintains and enforces order and I think applies the contemporary context of criminal justice. 169 00:18:12,220 --> 00:18:19,660 The argument that's made here is that widespread feelings of insecurity at the turn of the 21st century have produced something 170 00:18:19,660 --> 00:18:27,160 that's akin to the state of nature against which the states emerge as once more as an authoritative source of order. 171 00:18:29,480 --> 00:18:37,820 Now this sort of metanarrative of the return of a contemporary leviathan has been challenged on a number of different levels. 172 00:18:37,820 --> 00:18:42,530 And I want to mention that very briefly here, because I do owe, I guess, 173 00:18:42,530 --> 00:18:47,930 a great deal of intellectual debt to to to the work that's already been done in that area. 174 00:18:49,160 --> 00:18:53,809 That has, on the one hand, been the sort of institutional critique of this metanarrative. 175 00:18:53,810 --> 00:18:58,520 I'm thinking of the work of people like Nikki Lacy, Vanessa Bach, but also Delia Gallagher, 176 00:18:58,520 --> 00:19:06,590 who've sort of looked at the institutional dynamics that can mitigate the more punitive lawmaking impulses that politicians may otherwise follow. 177 00:19:07,730 --> 00:19:11,750 They're also scholars who've sort of criticised this metanarrative on the level of political 178 00:19:11,750 --> 00:19:18,260 ideologies and political cultures or sociology has argued for the need to identify, 179 00:19:18,260 --> 00:19:26,720 I think, the political ideologies, ideologies that inform thinking and action around crime beyond a sort of single analysis of law and order. 180 00:19:27,860 --> 00:19:35,329 And then finally, on the level of citizens. What people have argued is that actually the idea of a uniformly punitive public breaks 181 00:19:35,330 --> 00:19:39,979 down when we listen more closely to the views and experiences of actual people. 182 00:19:39,980 --> 00:19:47,299 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, 183 00:19:47,300 --> 00:19:52,190 right, as we take into account sort of more nuanced arguments and processes. 184 00:19:53,180 --> 00:20:00,320 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. 185 00:20:02,830 --> 00:20:07,610 And what I want to do is ask the question of how the portrayal of the return as an advice 186 00:20:07,610 --> 00:20:13,430 and can be complicated if the perspective of people at the margins is brought into focus. 187 00:20:14,600 --> 00:20:18,860 And my starting point for this analysis is the security gaps. 188 00:20:18,860 --> 00:20:24,110 This is a term I borrowed from Lisa mILLAR and the fact that marginalised citizens, 189 00:20:24,620 --> 00:20:30,440 that is to say people who live in part of minority dominated neighbourhoods tend to experience both 190 00:20:30,860 --> 00:20:37,610 high rates of victimisation and insufficient or repressive police responses in their day to day lives. 191 00:20:39,020 --> 00:20:44,629 And what I want to argue is that an ethnographic analysis and anthropological account of everyday uses of 192 00:20:44,630 --> 00:20:51,290 law enforcement officials in these kinds of neighbourhoods ultimately exposes the weaknesses of the states. 193 00:20:51,290 --> 00:20:58,790 In fact, the authority and in doing so, calls for a reassessment of the relationship between democratic politics and criminal justice. 194 00:20:59,750 --> 00:21:02,420 So I'm going to develop this argument in three steps. 195 00:21:02,420 --> 00:21:08,420 I'm going to talk a little bit more about what I mean by the security gap with reference to maps and traffic data. 196 00:21:09,440 --> 00:21:16,880 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. 197 00:21:16,940 --> 00:21:21,230 I'm going to look at how they sometimes draw them in and then expel them again from their daily situations. 198 00:21:21,620 --> 00:21:28,360 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. 199 00:21:32,450 --> 00:21:37,639 Okay. I'm now finally turning to the SABC. I am great. 200 00:21:37,640 --> 00:21:43,219 Thank you. You see? Yeah. Okay. 201 00:21:43,220 --> 00:21:49,040 So the first section of this paper, first ethnographic section, is entitled The Security Gap. 202 00:21:52,330 --> 00:21:59,799 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, 203 00:21:59,800 --> 00:22:03,340 two bedroom, socially rented house on the edges of the estate. 204 00:22:04,810 --> 00:22:10,780 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. 205 00:22:11,530 --> 00:22:18,010 And as we were walking along, Alison have started telling me spontaneously about the places that we're passing around us. 206 00:22:19,050 --> 00:22:22,260 At the corner of a street. A neighbour was stabbed last year. 207 00:22:22,770 --> 00:22:27,990 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. 208 00:22:28,890 --> 00:22:33,950 Adam had been coming home from school that day when she'd seen the street blocked off by police tape. 209 00:22:35,570 --> 00:22:40,370 A bit further along the main roads and as pointed out that a van had gone on fire. 210 00:22:41,090 --> 00:22:48,260 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. 211 00:22:49,250 --> 00:22:51,380 And it turned out that it was an asthma attack. 212 00:22:52,370 --> 00:22:57,439 Then again, as we were walking along, she sort of pointed over to the other side of the estate and she said, 213 00:22:57,440 --> 00:23:00,080 look, this is the part that I avoid going to all together. 214 00:23:00,290 --> 00:23:07,340 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. 215 00:23:07,580 --> 00:23:11,330 He'd stolen her mother's dog and sold it to another resident on the estate. 216 00:23:11,990 --> 00:23:14,809 Alison Her family would sometimes still see the dog around, 217 00:23:14,810 --> 00:23:19,880 but as the mother feared that he might get violent and say, nobody wants to do anything about it. 218 00:23:21,300 --> 00:23:24,900 Lots of stuff is happening around here, she said. I don't know why people still come out. 219 00:23:27,650 --> 00:23:31,980 Now, Allison's work spoke of a sort of like the topology of danger. 220 00:23:32,450 --> 00:23:37,550 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, 221 00:23:37,790 --> 00:23:46,610 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. 222 00:23:47,630 --> 00:23:55,490 And as I sort of discovered over time, as I sort of became closer to people around me, Alison's experiences were not unusual. 223 00:23:55,520 --> 00:24:03,200 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. 224 00:24:03,230 --> 00:24:05,120 Lots of stuff is happening around here. 225 00:24:06,500 --> 00:24:11,780 And I think what's important to understand is that Alice's words were not just a statement about victimisation. 226 00:24:11,780 --> 00:24:15,890 Right? That she feared at the hands of a neighbour, a group of men or her mother's ex-partner. 227 00:24:16,370 --> 00:24:23,870 It was crucially also a reflection, I think, of the police's inability to keep residents safe from crime and violence. 228 00:24:25,100 --> 00:24:27,110 Take the example of local drug dealers. 229 00:24:27,800 --> 00:24:33,560 Many residents on the estate felt the police were failing to do anything about local drug dealers who were trading 230 00:24:33,560 --> 00:24:40,190 heroin and crack cocaine on street corners and from certain houses which people referred to as drug dens, 231 00:24:40,910 --> 00:24:46,430 exposing nearby residents to the threat of street violence and the politics of intimidation and fear. 232 00:24:48,890 --> 00:24:57,020 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, 233 00:24:57,320 --> 00:25:01,969 he explained to me that the Mad Man had been a local drug dealer who many residents on the street 234 00:25:01,970 --> 00:25:07,340 had repeatedly complained about to the authorities but wanted to get him evicted from his house. 235 00:25:07,400 --> 00:25:12,500 He was living in a social tenancy. The authorities hadn't done anything about it, 236 00:25:12,500 --> 00:25:17,209 and the authorities failure to intervene in this particular case was evidence of 237 00:25:17,210 --> 00:25:20,660 the police's lack of interest in the neighbourhood and the people lived in it. 238 00:25:21,140 --> 00:25:25,790 They don't care. They don't care about us. Here was a sentence I frequently heard people use. 239 00:25:28,300 --> 00:25:34,480 Now, people's complaints about the lack of adequate policing might come as a surprise, 240 00:25:34,510 --> 00:25:40,540 given what I just said about the New Labour Government's initiatives and the kind of tough on crime agenda. 241 00:25:42,220 --> 00:25:50,640 And I just want to explain this briefly, because the police were a highly visible actor on the stage in the early 2000, 242 00:25:50,650 --> 00:25:54,910 the permanent police station had opened up at the heart of the estate right next to the 243 00:25:54,910 --> 00:25:59,020 main purpose of the palace on the one side and the community centre on the other side. 244 00:25:59,020 --> 00:26:03,339 And the shops are just sort of opposite the police station and that was a big change. 245 00:26:03,340 --> 00:26:07,959 So, you know, people would tell me, you know, back in the olden days, you know, to see a blue light flash, 246 00:26:07,960 --> 00:26:11,050 to see a police car meant that something really, really bad must have happened. 247 00:26:11,050 --> 00:26:14,440 And these days they're just everywhere. And it's true. They were everywhere. 248 00:26:14,440 --> 00:26:22,990 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. 249 00:26:23,260 --> 00:26:30,760 But I first saw helicopters, police helicopters, you know, sort of hovering over the estate several nights a week. 250 00:26:31,210 --> 00:26:44,350 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, 251 00:26:44,530 --> 00:26:50,290 well, they let out a high pitched sound that only young people were meant to hear because that is a more sensitive to them. 252 00:26:50,290 --> 00:26:55,990 And the idea of is that it basically deters young people from congregating in public places. 253 00:26:56,320 --> 00:27:02,440 So, you know that the kind of presence of law and order was very much felt on the estate on a daily basis. 254 00:27:03,220 --> 00:27:06,010 But and this is what residents told me, 255 00:27:06,400 --> 00:27:14,920 what they saw that most of the police's attention was disproportionately focussed on local youth aspects were given to young men, 256 00:27:14,920 --> 00:27:17,980 both black and white, on account of their disorderly behaviour, 257 00:27:18,220 --> 00:27:22,600 and they were often subject to curfews, injunctions, orders and random stuff and searches. 258 00:27:22,600 --> 00:27:25,930 I mean, this is something that other people have wept about. So this is a nice story. 259 00:27:27,070 --> 00:27:37,090 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. 260 00:27:37,780 --> 00:27:41,710 And the 15 year old was regularly stopped and sometimes searched by the police. 261 00:27:42,310 --> 00:27:47,920 The police would tell him that he was getting it, getting an injunction order for acting like he was in a gang. 262 00:27:48,400 --> 00:27:55,840 I quote times, that is to say that walking around with a group of teenage friends in ways that appeared threatening to the authorities 263 00:27:56,890 --> 00:28:02,049 now tyrant's own explanation of what was going on there was that it was down to them wearing their heads up, 264 00:28:02,050 --> 00:28:05,170 which meant that their faces couldn't easily be seen by the police. 265 00:28:06,340 --> 00:28:13,150 Tyree knew that an injunction order would restrict his movements in the neighbourhood and his freedom to associate with others, 266 00:28:13,360 --> 00:28:17,440 crucially with his closest friends and potentially also his family members. 267 00:28:18,070 --> 00:28:23,469 And what's more, a potentially criminal record would place his family's tenancy at risk as it 268 00:28:23,470 --> 00:28:28,780 constituted a valid ground for evicting a family from a socially rented property. 269 00:28:29,260 --> 00:28:35,560 Three. So for many reasons, then the police are sort of lack of care, 270 00:28:35,740 --> 00:28:42,050 at least as they experienced it didn't refer, I think, to an outright absence of law and order. 271 00:28:42,100 --> 00:28:49,780 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. 272 00:28:50,350 --> 00:29:00,249 They criminalise kids for being kids, and meanwhile they do nothing about serious crime was something that Manzi once said to me in frustration. 273 00:29:00,250 --> 00:29:03,580 Now, Mandy was a local resident in her thirties, late thirties, 274 00:29:04,450 --> 00:29:12,310 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. 275 00:29:13,240 --> 00:29:18,580 Just to explain the story very briefly, what had happened to her is sort of a few months earlier, 276 00:29:18,580 --> 00:29:24,280 Mandy and her neighbours had called the police about a drug den on her street and Mandy 277 00:29:24,280 --> 00:29:28,220 was basically worried that her teenage son would get involved with like a drug dealing 278 00:29:28,240 --> 00:29:32,889 activities because he'd sort of started spending lots of time in and around the flats 279 00:29:32,890 --> 00:29:36,700 and was sometimes in the company of people that she didn't consider to be trustworthy. 280 00:29:37,600 --> 00:29:43,510 The police didn't really do anything about the drug den, but meanwhile, her fears became true. 281 00:29:44,260 --> 00:29:51,880 So one night Mandy had a knock on her door and when she opened, she was dragged into a car by two masked men. 282 00:29:52,240 --> 00:29:57,300 And it turned out that her son had an outstanding debt with the drug dealer. 283 00:29:57,310 --> 00:30:01,560 So one of the masked men was a drug dealer and he was unable to pay his debt. 284 00:30:01,570 --> 00:30:09,490 So instead of a son, Mandy was now driven to a cash machine and forced to withdraw £200 for Mandy. 285 00:30:09,490 --> 00:30:15,700 The police's failure to do anything about the drug dealing before things could escalate was evidence of the police's hypocrisy. 286 00:30:16,150 --> 00:30:22,840 It stood in stark contrast to the heavy handed approach to young people who she and others related to as their sons, 287 00:30:22,840 --> 00:30:25,240 their children's friends and their next door neighbours. 288 00:30:26,920 --> 00:30:33,700 So I hope you can sort of see what I'm trying to get at when I talk about this sort of security gap. 289 00:30:33,970 --> 00:30:40,750 It's really just the idea that residents like Mandy Tarrant and Ennis are vulnerable first to being the victims 290 00:30:40,750 --> 00:30:47,050 of quite serious crime and violence just by being or living in a neighbourhood where crime is commonplace, 291 00:30:47,290 --> 00:30:52,180 as well as to becoming the targets of potential police harassment and police control. 292 00:30:53,650 --> 00:30:55,540 And so it comes as no surprise, I think, 293 00:30:55,540 --> 00:31:01,900 that many people speak about the police and the kind of criminal justice system more broadly in very negative terms. 294 00:31:02,140 --> 00:31:03,850 They say that they're anti-police. 295 00:31:03,850 --> 00:31:11,229 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. 296 00:31:11,230 --> 00:31:18,730 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 297 00:31:18,730 --> 00:31:25,060 and events where they sort of turned up and they invited residents to come and report issues of anti-social behaviour and crime, 298 00:31:25,330 --> 00:31:32,290 sometimes in partnership with other local authorities. And these were extremely badly attended events. 299 00:31:32,290 --> 00:31:39,430 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. 300 00:31:39,490 --> 00:31:43,060 Well done. You know, it was not their job to do to grass up in their neighbours. 301 00:31:45,040 --> 00:31:49,630 But I think what's important and this is where I'm coming, that's the second part of my paper, 302 00:31:49,900 --> 00:31:54,850 these sorts of negative attitudes towards the police didn't actually preclude 303 00:31:54,850 --> 00:31:58,780 residents from engaging with the police on their own terms and the country. 304 00:31:59,110 --> 00:32:01,120 As I got to know people more closely, 305 00:32:01,390 --> 00:32:10,299 I also became aware of the various ways in which residents appropriated local officials into daily disputes with their family members, 306 00:32:10,300 --> 00:32:15,190 neighbours and friends. And sometimes these were the very same people who'd said to me, You know, we're anti-police. 307 00:32:15,190 --> 00:32:18,970 We wouldn't, you know, when we're not going to call the police, we're not going to collaborate with the police. 308 00:32:20,140 --> 00:32:29,530 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, 309 00:32:29,740 --> 00:32:36,790 which gives a sort of ethnographic discussion of the way in which people do draw the police into these daily situations. 310 00:32:38,460 --> 00:32:52,040 I came. In a predominantly African-American neighbourhood in Philadelphia. 311 00:32:52,220 --> 00:32:54,200 Alice Goffman, in her book On the Run, 312 00:32:54,530 --> 00:33:03,439 has recently shown that shift towards more punitive policing styles has also created what she calls a social fabric in which family members, 313 00:33:03,440 --> 00:33:06,890 girlfriends and neighbours deploy the police's power to suit. 314 00:33:07,220 --> 00:33:13,340 And they use the threat of police arrest and incarceration itself to exercise 315 00:33:13,340 --> 00:33:18,020 pressure and social control and control over people who are close to them. 316 00:33:20,040 --> 00:33:28,499 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 317 00:33:28,500 --> 00:33:34,200 also created a social arena in which people could engage them in the pursuit of personal goals. 318 00:33:36,180 --> 00:33:41,520 And I was first made aware of this while listening to a conversation that took place between two women. 319 00:33:41,520 --> 00:33:49,650 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. 320 00:33:50,010 --> 00:33:55,139 And Tracy was running a successful informal drop in centre at the community centre 321 00:33:55,140 --> 00:33:58,890 that offered informal advice and assistance to residents on a range of matters. 322 00:33:59,940 --> 00:34:04,590 And on the day in question, Kate recounted an episode from when her son Luke, 323 00:34:04,800 --> 00:34:08,560 who's a 15 year old, had turned her life into what she called a living [INAUDIBLE]. 324 00:34:09,270 --> 00:34:12,480 And this is what she told us. So one day, Luke, her son, 325 00:34:12,720 --> 00:34:18,959 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. 326 00:34:18,960 --> 00:34:22,920 And I think he actually proceeded then to try to do damage to the TV. 327 00:34:23,550 --> 00:34:28,200 And the two had stopped arguing in the house. And Kate described how she'd finally lost it with them. 328 00:34:28,200 --> 00:34:31,379 And she said to them, If you want to fight, you and me can do it. 329 00:34:31,380 --> 00:34:34,680 We'll do it in the street. And she'd and she'd sort of dragged him out of the house. 330 00:34:35,710 --> 00:34:40,300 In the meantime, I don't quite know how, but in the meantime, Bluetooth headphones, nine, 331 00:34:40,300 --> 00:34:44,950 nine, nine, the police emergency number claiming domestic violence because he was scared. 332 00:34:45,610 --> 00:34:52,240 Kate said that she would beat him up. When the police turned up, the two had indeed been fighting on the streets. 333 00:34:52,870 --> 00:34:59,320 Kate told the police that she wanted to get him done for criminal damage, presumably because he'd smashed up her TV. 334 00:35:00,790 --> 00:35:04,720 She told me that the police took the boy to the police station, but no charges were issued. 335 00:35:06,250 --> 00:35:11,950 Kate recorded a record. After that, he went to live with his dad for two years, and now he's a lucky boy. 336 00:35:11,960 --> 00:35:17,920 We get on so well now. Kate was telling Tracy this story by way of giving her advice. 337 00:35:18,640 --> 00:35:23,080 Tracy at the time was herself experiencing problems with her own teenage son. 338 00:35:23,710 --> 00:35:30,010 He dropped out of college, he started drinking, and he sort of failed to contribute rent payments to his mother's house. 339 00:35:30,430 --> 00:35:34,930 And that really was a problem for Tracy because she she herself wasn't low income. 340 00:35:34,930 --> 00:35:39,610 And the fact that her son had dropped out of college meant that certain benefits had been stopped. 341 00:35:39,610 --> 00:35:43,960 So she was left with not enough money to pay her rent. 342 00:35:44,500 --> 00:35:49,910 So it was a very serious situation to us encountering. Now, Kate's advice choice was firm. 343 00:35:49,930 --> 00:35:58,870 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. 344 00:35:59,200 --> 00:36:06,690 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. 345 00:36:06,700 --> 00:36:11,110 She reported him for vandalism. Her son left before the police arrived. 346 00:36:11,290 --> 00:36:15,550 I don't know. I think the police might have been involved the next day and her son had left by then. 347 00:36:16,240 --> 00:36:19,870 But Tracy was satisfied that she'd managed, as she said, to shut him up. 348 00:36:21,500 --> 00:36:30,649 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, 349 00:36:30,650 --> 00:36:36,230 situations with their children, their kin members, their lovers, and their next door neighbours. 350 00:36:37,070 --> 00:36:43,130 Sometimes these kinds of engagements with the police operated merely in the realm of threats. 351 00:36:43,400 --> 00:36:48,979 So what I mean by that is that a woman might threaten, for example, the father of her children, 352 00:36:48,980 --> 00:36:53,000 that she reported him to the police for handling stolen goods or for drug dealing. 353 00:36:53,270 --> 00:37:02,839 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, 354 00:37:02,840 --> 00:37:10,160 the threat was actualised or acted upon, like in the situations I've just described, and there are many more situations I encountered. 355 00:37:10,640 --> 00:37:16,160 I can talk about them later where it wasn't just mothers accusing the police in relation to their own teenage sons, 356 00:37:16,160 --> 00:37:19,520 but teenage children in relation to their parents as well. 357 00:37:20,180 --> 00:37:22,580 Lovers or neighbours doing it to one another. 358 00:37:25,780 --> 00:37:36,669 Now these sorts of examples might seem perhaps silly or petty from the outside, and this is certainly how the police beat them. 359 00:37:36,670 --> 00:37:41,290 So I did interviews with members of the neighbourhood policing team who are willing to be interviewed, 360 00:37:42,340 --> 00:37:49,419 and they tended to see these sorts of incidents as evidence of broken communities and apathy and, 361 00:37:49,420 --> 00:37:53,880 you know, the decline of, you know, social order really amongst residents. 362 00:37:53,890 --> 00:37:59,800 For them, the situation was a distraction from what they consider to be their real policing priorities. 363 00:38:00,070 --> 00:38:03,580 And some officials mentioned that they were a waste of police time. 364 00:38:06,320 --> 00:38:09,590 I think a different perspective is also possible. Right. 365 00:38:09,770 --> 00:38:18,260 A perspective which starts from the assumption that the objective of these encounters was not to enforce any kind of idea of legalistic order, 366 00:38:18,650 --> 00:38:22,970 which is, I think, what the police assuming when they complain about it being a waste of police time. 367 00:38:23,480 --> 00:38:30,470 Granted, residents did invoke often in these situations a sort of official or legalistic language, 368 00:38:30,680 --> 00:38:35,750 so they would use the language of vandalism or criminal damage or breach of bail conditions. 369 00:38:36,470 --> 00:38:39,620 But when they were sort of making phone calls to the police. 370 00:38:40,040 --> 00:38:47,659 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 371 00:38:47,660 --> 00:38:55,790 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. 372 00:38:56,390 --> 00:39:03,140 What they then cared about were the everyday relations, the loyalties that they felt they had towards loved ones, 373 00:39:03,140 --> 00:39:08,990 towards family members and neighbours, and the commitments that had been broken in particular situations. 374 00:39:11,040 --> 00:39:20,309 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 375 00:39:20,310 --> 00:39:28,650 pursuit of these sort of daily social relations that don't quite map onto what the state thinks law and order is all about. 376 00:39:30,560 --> 00:39:38,020 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, 377 00:39:38,020 --> 00:39:46,540 I want to turn to a further set of social constellations that also don't sit quietly with the states and understanding of order. 378 00:39:46,900 --> 00:39:50,080 And these are situations of more serious threat of violence. 379 00:39:50,080 --> 00:39:54,370 The kinds of situations that I started my paper with when I talked about the security gap 380 00:39:54,760 --> 00:39:59,710 in which residents often expel officials from the conflicts that they're experiencing. 381 00:40:00,490 --> 00:40:06,100 And then I'm going to come to some conclusions. So this ethnographic section is called state failure. 382 00:40:08,860 --> 00:40:12,430 Okay. Let me begin by giving you an example again. 383 00:40:14,730 --> 00:40:20,400 Vera was a woman of Afro-Caribbean descent in her early forties with three children. 384 00:40:21,240 --> 00:40:27,120 I met her when one day she came into the community community centre where I've been volunteering for over a year. 385 00:40:27,150 --> 00:40:35,130 By that time we got chatting and after a while she started telling me about an incident she'd experienced a few months earlier. 386 00:40:36,110 --> 00:40:44,030 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. 387 00:40:44,540 --> 00:40:50,750 The owner of the dog was a local teenager called Dane, who was well known to the police for his anti-social behaviour. 388 00:40:51,050 --> 00:40:53,120 That is to say, his involvement in petty crime. 389 00:40:53,450 --> 00:40:59,090 Although many residents also believe that he was a local drug dealer, something that the police didn't really focus on. 390 00:41:00,320 --> 00:41:04,459 There are subsequently agreed to give a witness statement in court that resulted in 391 00:41:04,460 --> 00:41:08,600 Dane receiving an aspect that banned him from entering certain places of the estate, 392 00:41:08,600 --> 00:41:17,419 including where some of his own family members lived. The day after the court hearing and they are described to me how residents had 393 00:41:17,420 --> 00:41:21,800 stopped her on the streets when she was on her way to do her daily shopping. 394 00:41:21,810 --> 00:41:26,450 She said, It took me out to do my shopping because everyone congratulated me for speaking out. 395 00:41:28,120 --> 00:41:31,740 However, the tables turned when Veera left for a short holiday. 396 00:41:31,750 --> 00:41:37,720 In her absence, her house and the front yard were vandalised and someone had spray painted grass on the front door. 397 00:41:39,310 --> 00:41:44,230 Neighbours confirms their suspicion when she got back that the attack had come from Dane's family. 398 00:41:44,230 --> 00:41:48,190 Remember, Dane was banned from seeing some of his family members on the estate. 399 00:41:50,390 --> 00:41:57,050 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. 400 00:41:57,260 --> 00:42:00,889 And when she was talking to me about it, she explained, I don't want to do nothing. 401 00:42:00,890 --> 00:42:03,590 I'm scared. I just don't want to call the police anymore. 402 00:42:05,650 --> 00:42:11,140 Now, in this particular instance, Vera decided to abandon police involvement halfway through the process, 403 00:42:11,500 --> 00:42:16,660 as the dispute with her neighbour took on more threatening dimensions as his family had become involved. 404 00:42:16,870 --> 00:42:21,850 Her trust in the police, his ability to act as an ally and to protect her had faded. 405 00:42:23,440 --> 00:42:31,839 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, 406 00:42:31,840 --> 00:42:40,930 I spoke about them earlier, was sort of a decision that I saw that residents adopted in these kinds of situations, 407 00:42:42,040 --> 00:42:45,300 but not everyone chose that course of action in courts. 408 00:42:46,090 --> 00:42:52,450 In fact, sorry. As people let me into their lives, I frequently encountered that the opposite could also be encouraged. 409 00:42:52,900 --> 00:43:01,750 For example, one day I saw Tracy. He was running the community centre giving advice to paint an older resident in his sixties who, 410 00:43:01,780 --> 00:43:08,140 for reasons that he said were unknown to him, had become prey to the vicious behaviour of his next door neighbours. 411 00:43:09,390 --> 00:43:16,860 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. 412 00:43:17,070 --> 00:43:22,770 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. 413 00:43:23,100 --> 00:43:24,600 If the Lord finish them off, 414 00:43:24,600 --> 00:43:29,970 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. 415 00:43:32,260 --> 00:43:35,020 Now. I think Tracy was driving when she said this, 416 00:43:35,440 --> 00:43:42,219 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, 417 00:43:42,220 --> 00:43:44,650 the community centre and in running the local pub. 418 00:43:46,090 --> 00:43:53,440 But underlying that joke was the reality where the use of informal networks was routinely mobilised in situations of danger. 419 00:43:54,160 --> 00:43:59,770 And similar to the moral economy of violence that has been described by CANTINAS et al. 420 00:44:00,160 --> 00:44:09,100 In a poor neighbourhood in Philadelphia. What I encountered was that residents expected their friends and can't act as allies against threats, 421 00:44:09,460 --> 00:44:13,810 and these expectations could be instrumentalized in the pursuit of illegal force. 422 00:44:15,610 --> 00:44:22,930 For example, Ray was a local resident in his fifties who'd fall out with this next door neighbour of a local drug dealer. 423 00:44:23,560 --> 00:44:28,360 Ray decided not to call the police after his neighbour had threatened his wife and his kids on 424 00:44:28,360 --> 00:44:33,280 numerous occasions because he suspected that his neighbour worked as an informant for the police. 425 00:44:33,640 --> 00:44:42,010 Now the word informant was used by residents quite loosely to refer to people who they considered to be immune from police intervention, 426 00:44:42,220 --> 00:44:49,150 presumably because they had been bought off by the police in exchange for information that they'd given them. 427 00:44:51,070 --> 00:44:55,140 On this particular occasion, Ray instead mobilised. 428 00:44:55,180 --> 00:45:01,389 This makes all the blokes, he said to me to come round one evening and to threaten his neighbour with their presence, 429 00:45:01,390 --> 00:45:06,480 including threats with a baseball bat. I could have gone to prison for it, he told me. 430 00:45:06,780 --> 00:45:09,420 But at least I would have known that my family is safe. 431 00:45:09,960 --> 00:45:16,620 So then, the risk of criminalisation was counterbalanced against the protections that he needed to offer to keep his family safe. 432 00:45:18,600 --> 00:45:22,770 That's the pride to emphasise this, that it's precisely in these sorts of situation. 433 00:45:22,770 --> 00:45:28,860 I think that the state's ability to inflict violence becomes a desirable quality as it is imagined, 434 00:45:28,860 --> 00:45:31,860 as a threat that can be used as a leverage against an enemy. 435 00:45:32,940 --> 00:45:40,110 For example, there are and many of the residents with the opinion that Aspo selects teeth, the threat of corporal punishment, 436 00:45:40,110 --> 00:45:46,440 boot camps and forced them would all be more adequate forms of deterrence than a simple civil injunction order. 437 00:45:47,960 --> 00:45:51,950 Residents also frequently complain in this context that they wanted more policing. 438 00:45:52,400 --> 00:45:58,470 Sometimes, and I think this is quite interesting demands for more punitive measures could also take on 439 00:45:58,490 --> 00:46:03,830 the form of collective action and mobilise pre-existing networks of neighbourhood relations. 440 00:46:04,910 --> 00:46:11,300 And this is perhaps best illustrated in the example of a local grassroots movement that I've written about in another article. 441 00:46:11,310 --> 00:46:14,420 So I'm not going to focus about an index here. 442 00:46:14,420 --> 00:46:19,219 But just to say very briefly, in the early 2000 onwards, the estates, 443 00:46:19,220 --> 00:46:27,380 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. 444 00:46:28,130 --> 00:46:29,900 And this party was led by Cheney. 445 00:46:30,200 --> 00:46:37,520 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. 446 00:46:38,120 --> 00:46:45,919 And what Tony and his friends had done in the early 2000 is that basically decided that 447 00:46:45,920 --> 00:46:50,690 because the local authorities were failing to police these quite serious situations of threat, 448 00:46:50,930 --> 00:46:58,759 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, 449 00:46:58,760 --> 00:47:07,280 sometimes for 24 hours at a time, collecting their own CCTV evidence and patrolling the streets and threatening suspects. 450 00:47:08,360 --> 00:47:18,080 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, 451 00:47:18,410 --> 00:47:26,219 anti and anti-democratic. Cheney herself, who was one of the local councillors for the party. 452 00:47:26,220 --> 00:47:31,709 When he was commenting on these activities, he said to me, Oh, well, this was why you do a get done. 453 00:47:31,710 --> 00:47:35,310 If we don't do it to them, they do it to us. We live in that kind of world. 454 00:47:35,880 --> 00:47:40,290 But the people in law, they don't understand that you can't solve a problem by being wishy washy. 455 00:47:40,620 --> 00:47:46,730 Middle class liberalism, it's the bane of our lives. Okay, I'm just it's 20 past. 456 00:47:46,740 --> 00:47:57,150 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. 457 00:47:59,280 --> 00:48:06,990 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. 458 00:48:07,590 --> 00:48:16,440 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, 459 00:48:16,440 --> 00:48:21,450 although I think there is some ethnographic evidence from other places that suggests similar kinds of engagements. 460 00:48:22,380 --> 00:48:31,200 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 461 00:48:31,200 --> 00:48:37,470 of departure citizens own understandings of the authorities and what role they perform in their day to day lives. 462 00:48:38,690 --> 00:48:40,319 I think what my analysis has shown, 463 00:48:40,320 --> 00:48:46,469 what I hope my analysis has shown that people appropriate the state in their daily justice with neighbours can love 464 00:48:46,470 --> 00:48:55,530 us and children in ways that don't easily align with what the law considers rightful or lawful of its officers. 465 00:48:56,850 --> 00:49:02,430 And then there are other cases where officials are expelled from disputes, especially in situations of more serious threat. 466 00:49:02,670 --> 00:49:10,260 Residents tend to withdraw from official interventions, sometimes in favour of mobilising their own informal networks of collective violence. 467 00:49:11,040 --> 00:49:18,930 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. 468 00:49:18,940 --> 00:49:24,329 Maybe they didn't want to engage with this. They tended to describe the former case of the situation where people draw the 469 00:49:24,330 --> 00:49:29,490 police into their daily lives as a situation of civilians wasting police time. 470 00:49:29,640 --> 00:49:31,020 Whereas the latter case, 471 00:49:31,020 --> 00:49:38,970 where people withdraw from police support in these most serious situations of threat and then describe described as vigilante or anti-democratic. 472 00:49:39,960 --> 00:49:45,540 I think what an F in traffic analysis can do is really sort of mitigate against these labels by 473 00:49:45,540 --> 00:49:51,720 uncovering people's own logic for using or rather not using the authorities in any given situation. 474 00:49:53,670 --> 00:49:57,250 Having said that, I do think that the picture presented here poses a puzzle. 475 00:49:57,270 --> 00:50:03,599 It doesn't fit with dominant narratives of the leviathan in contemporary theories of punishment that see the state 476 00:50:03,600 --> 00:50:09,690 as a generative source of order that citizens draw upon for their protection and the protection of their property. 477 00:50:10,620 --> 00:50:13,079 From the perspective of dominant theories of punishment, 478 00:50:13,080 --> 00:50:19,140 it seems illogical to say that citizens on the margins may involve the police in less serious dispute situations, 479 00:50:19,380 --> 00:50:25,140 but mistrust the forces of law and order where threats to their safety may be more serious and acute. 480 00:50:26,400 --> 00:50:34,380 Peter Ramsey has critiqued the image of the Leviathan in debates on the punitive ten for him that policymakers and politicians 481 00:50:34,710 --> 00:50:42,150 admit their own lack of authority when they assume that the last representative citizen is characterised by that vulnerability. 482 00:50:42,540 --> 00:50:50,280 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. 483 00:50:51,550 --> 00:50:57,370 I think my analysis speaks to this point by demonstrating that from the perspective of lost subjects, 484 00:50:57,610 --> 00:51:03,219 the return of a leviathan may be a myth for the return for the residents of the states. 485 00:51:03,220 --> 00:51:12,070 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. 486 00:51:13,360 --> 00:51:22,450 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, 487 00:51:22,720 --> 00:51:31,180 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 488 00:51:31,180 --> 00:51:36,700 the state as an entity that sits above society and that dispenses order from the top down. 489 00:51:37,360 --> 00:51:40,760 Anthropological analysis has mainly focussed on the Global South. 490 00:51:40,800 --> 00:51:45,850 So I'm thinking here of the work of people like Annie Owens work on policing in Nigeria. 491 00:51:46,420 --> 00:51:55,180 But there's also other stuff on South Africa, Brazil, where authors have shown that citizens do draw the state into their daily work, 492 00:51:55,210 --> 00:52:02,470 even if or perhaps especially when the state is known to them to be hostile and repressive. 493 00:52:03,780 --> 00:52:11,669 And I think it's sort of compared to focus on police citizen relations demonstrate that these processes of a naturalisation of personalisation, 494 00:52:11,670 --> 00:52:16,440 as I've called them, are not limited to the case of the Global South residents. 495 00:52:16,440 --> 00:52:22,919 A new case counts the state's question dominant categories of order and disorder, of security and insecurity, 496 00:52:22,920 --> 00:52:30,870 and of legality and vigilante justice that are all too frequently mapped on to catch bits of the state and society, respectively. 497 00:52:31,860 --> 00:52:37,590 In so doing, they also call into question the state's ability, I think, to be the arbiter of these distinctions. 498 00:52:38,340 --> 00:52:44,370 So in short, then I guess what I'm trying to say here is that an ethnographic analysis of state citizen relations 499 00:52:44,670 --> 00:52:51,330 really questions the focus on the primacy of the state in our accounts of law and order or punishment. 500 00:52:53,440 --> 00:52:55,749 Now, if my analysis is correct, 501 00:52:55,750 --> 00:53:03,160 then I think adopting a different view of social order has implications that go beyond the particularities of the case study presented. 502 00:53:03,670 --> 00:53:06,610 And here I want to come to my third and final point. 503 00:53:07,780 --> 00:53:15,130 Ethnographic analysis of everyday use of law and order invites a reassessment of the relationship between the public and criminal justice. 504 00:53:16,030 --> 00:53:23,290 There has been a tendency in recent commentary to seek from no justice and the public as a sort of toxic mix. 505 00:53:23,620 --> 00:53:30,490 Yeah, precisely because the public's punitive system is said to be dangerous to an evenhanded criminal justice system. 506 00:53:30,820 --> 00:53:36,549 What's argued is that sort of interstitial layers of bureaucracy are needed between the public and the criminal 507 00:53:36,550 --> 00:53:42,040 justice decision making process to sort of make sure that the system that we have is evenhanded and democratic. 508 00:53:43,750 --> 00:53:50,650 And I think my sort of analysis cautions against these calls for professionalisation, as we've seen. 509 00:53:51,760 --> 00:53:58,380 I don't think it makes sense to to describe residents as uniformly punitive, or rather, 510 00:53:58,540 --> 00:54:03,970 we need to unpack what we mean when we talk about the punitive public of popular punitive ism. 511 00:54:04,300 --> 00:54:07,870 I think to the extent that people do call for more law and order, 512 00:54:08,080 --> 00:54:16,690 these courts express a reality of high victimisation and the state's failure to address the underlying causes of serious violence and threat. 513 00:54:16,960 --> 00:54:20,410 And this is something that policymakers ought to take very seriously. 514 00:54:21,920 --> 00:54:27,170 I think a more fruitful starting point for the debate may then be to acknowledge that questions about the public, 515 00:54:27,410 --> 00:54:32,569 about the state of authority and its relationship to criminal justice are always bound to be political. 516 00:54:32,570 --> 00:54:39,139 QUESTION And this is a suggestion that Lisa miller makes recently in her new book, 517 00:54:39,140 --> 00:54:44,960 where she argues that paying attention to the views of at risk populations can help to move beyond the crisis. 518 00:54:44,990 --> 00:54:46,130 Optimism alone. 519 00:54:47,240 --> 00:54:56,840 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, 520 00:54:57,140 --> 00:55:04,610 as well as a whole host of other social inequities, including high rates of exposure to state repressive practices. 521 00:55:05,600 --> 00:55:13,850 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. 522 00:55:14,540 --> 00:55:22,460 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. 523 00:55:23,690 --> 00:55:27,050 As Miller suggests, for example, reducing repressive policing. 524 00:55:27,650 --> 00:55:33,050 But I think it's also important for another reason. It's important, I think, if we're interested, 525 00:55:33,980 --> 00:55:43,810 to reinvigorate the public's faith in the authority of the states to the extent that obviously it was ever there. 526 00:55:43,820 --> 00:55:48,320 Now, I think you can ask yourself why this should be important. 527 00:55:48,320 --> 00:55:52,640 Why does it matter if the public, especially much less citizens, has authority in the state? 528 00:55:52,670 --> 00:55:59,390 Is it not enough to just have good policies? I mean, who cares if they attribute legitimacy to these institutions? 529 00:55:59,660 --> 00:56:00,050 Well, 530 00:56:00,470 --> 00:56:10,250 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. 531 00:56:11,270 --> 00:56:13,190 And I think and I'm going to conclude on this note, 532 00:56:13,190 --> 00:56:20,479 this is something that was precisely brought into focus by the EU referendum that happened in June last year that, 533 00:56:20,480 --> 00:56:27,500 as you know, divided the country as people voted to leave the European Union by a small margin. 534 00:56:28,460 --> 00:56:35,060 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, 535 00:56:35,270 --> 00:56:39,920 something that has afforded them much criticism in the press and the liberal media. 536 00:56:41,310 --> 00:56:46,200 What made you even come out on that day? At least the people I've spoken to, my friends and my informants, 537 00:56:46,590 --> 00:56:54,180 plus the fact that they perceive the EU referendum as an opportunity to reject government in a way that an ordinary election cannot. 538 00:56:54,660 --> 00:56:59,910 That is to say, to express what I've called a vote of no confidence in the people who've given them. 539 00:57:00,150 --> 00:57:04,470 And if you don't recognise the realities and the problems that they encounter. 540 00:57:05,980 --> 00:57:09,460 I think anthropologists of crime and criminologists and you know, 541 00:57:09,480 --> 00:57:14,280 in general theorists and academics who are interested in these sorts of issues can make 542 00:57:14,280 --> 00:57:20,520 important interventions to interventions to the debate on democracy and on democracy's future. 543 00:57:21,930 --> 00:57:31,290 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, 544 00:57:31,680 --> 00:57:40,860 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. 545 00:57:42,210 --> 00:57:45,630 Okay. I think I'm going to stop here. Thank you. Yeah. 546 00:57:52,200 --> 00:57:56,980 Perfectly timed spot on. So I'll call them all. 547 00:57:57,630 --> 00:57:58,150 Oh, we.