Activity: External talk or presentation › Invited talk
Description
Policing is conventionally understood and mythologised as a crime-fighting institution that exists to ensure public safety. Contrary to such rosy, misleading and factually inaccurate portrayals of what policing is and does, this presentation approaches the historical mission and function of policing as fundamentally cultural. Drawing on a political understanding of culture, policing will be reintroduced as an instrument for suppressing Black cultural expression throughout the African diaspora, from the era of colonial slavery to the present day. Such rethinking of policing as a governing logic of state-sanctioned, racial(ised) criminalisation, encourages a decolonial approach to police scholarship and recasts the police as guardians of a social and political order that is marked by racial hierarchies, whose roots lie in the imperial-colonial ideology that created racism, “race” and policing in the first place.