Introduction

Abstract

The contemporary age is marked by what criminologist Robert Reiner has called “police fetishism,” or “the ideological assumption that the police are a functional prerequisite of social order so that without a police force chaos would ensue” (Reiner 2010, 3). This is, perhaps, unsurprising given the prominent place police occupy in the modern state-mediated social order. Indeed, as sociologist Allan Silver noted several decades ago, “Some modern nations have been police states; all, however, are policed societies” (Silver 2005, 10). So accustomed are we to living in a “policed society,” so accepted are the police as a fact of life, that we all too often forget the novelty of the institution and find it difficult to understand why the emergent police forces of the late nineteenth century might have “struck contemporary observers as remarkable” (ibid.). Similarly, police are so commonplace that it is often difficult not to see their development as somehow inevitable, the product of some social or political destiny. This poses a distinct challenge to anyone—particularly scholars—attempting to think critically about police and policing in the contemporary world. “Thinking about the history of police,” Michael Ignatieff has written, “requires a certain mental struggle against one’s sense of their social necessity” (Ignatieff 2005, 25). Police fetishism of this sort is rooted in the more general idea that state-based “law and order” is the only bulwark against the chaos and violence that would otherwise exist—a position, of course, that states themselves are often at pains to promulgate (Sarat and Kearns 1996, 2, cited in Goldstein 2003, 25).