Lecture 2 Defining Police in a liberal democrocy

hi everyone and uh welcome to our first lecture and i'll come back to our tv room i guess i'll i put this mouse down here so i thought today we can start off by something very simple we can just talk about what do we mean by police at least give a cursory definition of police you know as time goes on you'll find that uh i have a habit of making very simple questions complicated i think that's our job as scientists isn't it our job is to sort of look at a situation and go what are

some of the details does it have to be this way that's what this class is really all about so what do we mean when we say police well you can look at police as a noun right policeman can mean order and governance in a very sort of level way police can mean control of the church the state education system the political system uh the workforce please can mean [Music] more sort of uh establishment of ways of doing things at least enforcement of ways of doing things police can also be a science it can be a

science of prevention and detection of crime and also a science of serving the community providing the service keeping order in good society other than that police can be a obviously in a sort of a lower level scale it can mean state institution you know it can be uh i mean it doesn't have to be the police system right by the state institution i mean it can be even the health department the uh sort of child protective service is police and obviously policing the staff you know people who do police that's what we mean when we

say police in an adjective in a noun way you know it could mean order and governance it could mean a science of doing policing could mean sort of state institution it could mean sort of the people who do police now here's the thing about this class i'm not going to spend too much time uh sort of talking about each one of the theoretical discussion that exists out there in the literature because you have taken a couple courses on theory so far but i'm going to point some things out as ways of kind of thinking through

how do we apply some theoretical perspective here right so if we do a functionless argument we carry the dave and we're talking about police as a noun a functions argument would say that the job of police is to keep society coherent to keep that social glow together to keep that moral bounds of society together so this is what uh people like durkheim talk about right uh my functions argument you mean kind of this idea that the job of the government as an institution is to keep us all together give us some coherence protect some kind

of morality some kind of moral code of you however please can be used as an adjective you know police doesn't have to be a thing let me talk about police we don't have to be able to touch it police can be an idea know and police is an idea isn't it we see it down uh sort of on the streets every day pick your error pick your year and you know pick a name uh that brought people into the streets uh sort of protesting police use of forcing one person look at any social media and

you will see you know uh both those who are defending the police and those who are retractors so in other words police means something to us beyond just sort of the very fact of existence of police and this is sort of that symbolic contractionist argument right that labeling argument that will react to worst thing based on labels and definitions that we have associated with those things these definitions are the result of our interactions our experiences our sort of involvement in community so when we say police as an adjective the first thing that we have to

ask ourselves is who is doing the imagining let me say for example if i said to you what does police mean to you i can almost guarantee that depending on what gender you are what race you are uh what socioeconomic background you have if you're a recent or a non-recent immigrant to canada you on average the particular view of police that is different than other groups it's not for nothing that you know some of us look at police as protectors as our friends as those whom we would run to if we need help and there

are those of us from whom the police is the enemy the police is the perpetrator of violence the police is the problem themselves it was true up until 10 years ago that police enjoyed relatively quite a bit of uh sort of support amongst the population we have seen that support the underlying in the previous years even in the past few months we have seen a massive shift in support for police you know serious political candidates presidents of of candidates for presidency of the united states are can members of parliament members of senate in canada people

seriously involved in the government are not talking about restructure of police we're thinking police we imagine now how we think about the police depends on certain factors beyond just race and ethnicity and political dimension it depends on the police as well how politicized how connected we feel polices to the political system determines how we think about it the more we think police is in cahoots with the political system the less legitimate police becomes for us the less we like them in countries where police and the political system are looked at as one and the same

thing for example dictatorial countries police doesn't enjoy too much support amongst the populous and that's that's one good reason why in canada would go out of our way to separate police from our political structure from our political system in other words for example the head of the rcmp the head of the opp these are not political appointees obviously politicians are involved in their appointments but they act in an arms length distance from the political institution from the political organization they're not really devoted to conservatives or to liberals or to ndp's or the green party or

pick your party have i left anyone out if i have i apologize pick your partner now here's one thing that we're going to spend quite a bit of time talking about in this class and that's police use of force you see the question that becomes what police uses force and we're going to talk quite a lot about what we mean by force but in general how police use this first determines what we think about police those people who haven't seen police use physical force some people look at police in a much more favorable way than

those who have seen it happen not those who have been the subject of police use of force but those who have just simply been witness to please use now however way the [ __ ] we define police highway we look at police there's one thing we can all agree upon and that's that police is the agent of social control police is the enforcer of social rules of norms of conduct police is the enforcer of the collective morality that exists in society that's the general idea of police right and we're going to talk much more about

this when we talk about history of policing and where police came from one thing to keep in mind is that that's really the job of the police the job the place not just to catch criminals but the job of the police has throughout history but enforcement of the social order of a way of doing things at the end of it it was the police that kept the blocks out of white neighborhood that kept the blacks out of white uh schools that kept the blacks out of whites uh segregated restaurant it was the police that kept

the native community where they are it was the police that has created urban ghettos in which we control a large number of people now don't get me wrong i don't mean the police as individuals i don't even police men to do it radical police enforced a political will a political social order and that's the key yeah they have to understand about police this is not always a bad thing for example part of social control can be that you have to be respectful to each other you can't go around beating each other up we can't go

wrong stealing things from each other maybe we're not even okay with someone for example urinating on the street or being too loud when it's 2 a.m we call the police those social orders so social orders will not always have to be negative doesn't always have to happen but nonetheless police becomes an oppressive institution and that place oppresses what it is that you would like to do instinctually i will talk a lot more about this in the next lecture but nonetheless since we agree that there is a negative social control and positive social control that social

control is two sides of the same coin that yeah we can have social control don't be shut up be nice to each other be respectful of each other be respectful of each other's bodies rights possessions but the other side of it can be don't drink alcohol don't go off with your boyfriend you got to put on a scarf here we are then so police doesn't always have to exist in a legitimate society please can exist in various types of society police doesn't even always have to be non-deviant i don't mean by that i mean you

can have delinquent enforcement of social rules in order in other words police doesn't always have to be connected to some established governmental institution police if you define police as the enforcers of social order then there is a delinquent in enforcement you might be standing there going like it's a muslim what do you mean well don't say dr mistake say amir it sounds much better let's go with that you might say what do you mean by delinquent any of you had bullies in school the kid who would tell you how things are done that's delinquent enforcement

in it nothing bigger what an organized crime something like the mafia as a casa nostra you know how about them don't they enforce social order of course they do look at any mafia neighborhoods you say you can't just go around committing crime willy-nilly an organized crime keeps an eye on who's committing a crime hi it's happening so let's take a step back what do we mean by enforcement of social order well before we get to that before we get to discussing what we mean by providing protection security first thing we need to do is discuss

what do we mean by protection and security oftentimes we use that in a synonymous way you know they go you have protection and security here we are but they're not the same thing aren't they security literally like pay attention to the word break the board down sit means you know lack of you know uh means sort of uh without and curite means worries you know so security literally means lack of worries kind of hakuna matata whereas protection comes from a latin word that literally meant to give shelter to so these are two different words something

i mean by that let's imagine that uh you know the provincial government or the federal government justin trudeau or doug ford decide that you and i are in need of some protection and they sent tanks down the street and soldiers with massive machine guns and you wake up in the morning and outside of your house are filled with soldiers with big guns and tanks and you know your house is surrounded by these people and they go don't worry you are protecting your house oh they're right your house is very well protected at this point do

you have security do you feel a lot of worries can we honestly say that if i look outside even if there are 10 you know tanks protecting my house if i don't feel secure i'm worried i'm much more worried than when the brain tanks out so when we talk about delinquent enforcement really we're talking about protection yeah right we're not talking about security delinquent enforcement doesn't really provide security it doesn't provide a lack of worries but it does provide protection and so does police uh police doesn't have to provide right and uh as we talked

about it earlier there are those who imagine police as not their friends police showing up doesn't necessarily make them feel better it doesn't even have to be you know it could be the same person i have to do a little bit of a sit down lecture now i'm getting old i'm hitting my mid 30s and here we are i can't do a whole stand-up lecture you guys part of it have to be a sit-down lecture so that's why i have this thing right over here so what do we mean by this well imagine if you

were getting your ass and someone screamed police is coming you'd be a very happy person now a couple of weeks later you find the guy who was beating you up and you're beating him up you're kicking him and someone screams police is coming at that point you're not a happy person you gotta run away so we're the same person police can mean two different things but in general oftentimes police has a constant meaning that meaning often provides some kind of protection even if i'm very anti-police even if i'm very uh sort of anti-uh police at

least as an institution even if i find them to be sexist racist classes whatever even if i'm the biggest critic of police and society if i go wrong i'm gonna call the police if someone is trying to break into my house i'm gonna call the police so i am going to call the police for protection but i'm not going to call the police for security okay so okay so let's put security aside for a minute let's talk about protection are five aspects of protection that we need to talk about the first question is what kind

of protection is provided you know is this protection uh provided in a legitimate reasonable way is it a type of protection that also carries with its security or is it a protection against particular harms that might even come from you you know for example mafioso can walk into my store and say mirror you have to give me five thousand dollars a month and i'll protect your store from getting burned i'll say well who's planning to commit arson and he might say well me well he is providing protection but he provides protection against himself isn't it

so is that's not a very legitimate type of production well the next question then is who provides the protection well i guess a better question to ask is are those because you know a similar type of people are providing a protection can you really make a difference between like a mafia enforcer or undercover police officer even a uniform police officer you know if godfathers to be believed mafias have their own life right gaudy three-piece suit things like that double pressed it things like that so then the question becomes sort of who's doing the sort of

uh who's providing the protection is doing the protection but mafia aren't the only ones who force us to accept their protection are they police can force us to police at times provides reasonable potential but at times police can force us to accept their protection i don't mean just through corruption of course prairies can be cropped like priests can come to me and say give me two thousand dollars a month or uh and i'll make sure your restaurant doesn't get shut down if you don't give me that two thousand dollars a month i'm gonna shut your

restaurant then please give me corruption that way but in a non-corrupt way police can force israel into society into neighborhoods into communities there's a book uh called rocks and mods and rockers uh that sort of traces the process of creation of a problem through moral panic what do i mean by that that was a large jargon i don't really like usage what we mean is this is what police say you see here is we are in certain 1990s england and texarism is shaping i know you guys don't know margaret thatcher but you know she was

sort of the beginning of this new form of new liberal government she was a new era of conservatives she brought in a new era of conservatives that became known as thatchers at least in british circles and that actually isn't very important united states got important to canada um mike harris became a good example of sort of that tetris idea stephen harper example anyhow here we are in margaret thatcher era and here we are with police and police recognizes and there was this recognition amongst police that they do not really have an among sort of particular

type of people in society that there is a lack of control by social forces in several neighborhoods that police is not really involved in certain neighborhoods so what happened was that the government said there is created a moral panic at least this is how the book traces it right the government created a moral panic by saying that there is huge amount of robberies going on in particularly black neighborhoods at the same time this is the era in michigan used a massive migration of jamaican immigrants from jamaica into united kingdom uh for their own political and

social economic reasons so there was this fear of in and there was a huge migration of people from middle east into the united kingdom from india into united kingdom this is sort of the late 80s early 90s is when people start making some money middle classes on the rise so the united kingdom is seeing a massive uh multiculturals there's this fear that the british way of doing things is being lost who say yeah there is massive amount of theft and robbery and pickpocketing happening in these neighborhoods therefore we have to insert police into these neighborhoods

this is sort of you know we're talking in the 80s well they this massive amount of police comes into our neighborhood what happens when you have massive enforcement public massive presence of police confrontational police amongst people who don't see police as their friends well eventually there is going to be a confrontation of some kind eventually a police is going to beat up some kid that's going to piss off the neighbor and then when the neighborhood gets pissed they're going to have a riot on their head when you have a riot on their hand you've got

to have right please show up or maybe it's other way around maybe you bring in the riot police first and then the riot happens that's what's happening in the united states right now you know we see that there there is a surge of violence in the cities when riot places presence when riot police leaves when federal government and federal agencies leave a particular city like seattle violence and sort of violent protesting drop stress if you don't have a bunch of police looking like storm troopers are standing in front of you pushing back you have no

reason to push you have no reason to throw it off if you do the few instigators are often times uh arrested by just police that's on the street and are pointed out and subdued by the protesters themselves so there is this massive argument that when police brings in force it actually destabilizes excessive force it actually destabilizes the situation so what happened was that through the creation of moral panic then police inserted itself into these communities kept saying well look we're having riots we're having these problems police was creating these problems with the creation of a

problem and we know that because when we look at the numbers 10 years later there was no increase in pickpocket there was no increase in crime crime rates were exactly the same as they have ever been in those neighborhoods for the past 30 years we didn't require more police in fact crime rates didn't decrease and they haven't in a lot of those neighborhoods of course go to camden same thing another way we can look at protection is the consumers of production in other words who is being offered protection well between both mafia and police i

guess difference becomes what type of police in theory places providing protection for everybody good police forces providing protection for everybody but in practice a bad police force is only providing protection to those who can afford it to the rich to the powerful you know it would be naive to say that for example uh the rogers family in toronto or those living on bridal path are getting the same type of protection and homeless guy down the street from me is getting that's all i'm saying the same is true obviously of the mafia monthly only provides protected

those who can afford it so in a society in which police is non-democratic and which police is non-legitimate protection is not provided to everyone where are the objects of protection now that's interesting right because it both type of there are two types of things that need protected one is rather simple me and my things my house me my car my dog my children i don't have trouble all those things need protected but there is something bigger that government protects and that's relationships oh that's important that's very important the entire capitalistic system is based on the

protection of relationship between people you know you talk about housing bubbles bubbles are not new bubbles are very old read about the mississippi bubble which brought down the entire kingdom of france for all practical purposes i don't want to get into telling you the whole story if you're more interested kind of give me a call we can chat but in short what happened was that the french king started kind of selling these fake bonds for mississippi that was this sort of barren land that couldn't really produce anything and uh sort of after a while when

people started asking for their money back the king of france couldn't pay him back so he just executed a bunch of people which sort of led to downfall francis as a sort of accrediting organizations credited country and then led to the french revolution but the point that i'm trying to make is that number one job of the government and where louis 16 while louis xiv fell was that he failed to protect the relationship between investors and the company this is key the sort of job of the government is to protect my relationship my business relationship

with yours when i bought my house i went and got a lump sum of money from the bank in the form of a check but nonetheless i got a piece of paper from the bank that said i promise you we have this money here when you come and need it and i took this and went and gave it to some dude who happened to be a lawyer he gave me a key and a piece of paper and said that house is yours go to it in a month from now why did we all trust each

other why did i trust the bank and i gave them a lot of money and they gave me a piece of paper that said your money is here then i took this piece of paper check gave it to a lawyer who said here's a key that house over there a month from now it's yours and here's a piece of paper that says why did i believe them because the government says amir i will protect your relationship between you and that lawyer between you and the bank between bank and the lawyer between you and the person

who previously owned the house between you and the person you want to sell the house to in the future or protect all these relationships you rest easy mafia that's the same thing doesn't it mafia kind of protects deals if you don't follow through with your deal you get your knees broken or shot in the head or whatever the case might be so that is a job of any sort of police then there's to certain extent protect those relationships right let me say government protects my relationship i mean that eventually they send police after the person

who has broken their promise that's the key right last thing we need to know is from whom are we being protected you know in a dictatorial country police is not really protecting us against harm police might be the agent of heart similarly to the mafia to go back to our earlier discussion of protection versus security mafia really provides protection whereas in police in a legitimate state provides security now don't get me wrong mafia can be looked at as a state although a dictatorial you know for example theft becomes seizure of goods is it not what

a state does is that theft or seizure how about violence well state hands up punishment please use this force how about extortion well state collects taxes and threatens us if we don't pay it isn't that extortion no it's taxes now mafion police do differ in their ends different to what it is they want to achieve the end the result of policing in a legitimate society is provide provision of security of provision of ease of mind and i said that's not the end result of mafia the end result of the mafia is actually very self-serving it

should increase their power so okay well there is a difference between police and the mafia but then again doesn't police do the same thing don't police forces police chiefs don't they go around telling us no i need that extra 10 i need that extra 5 million i need extra 20 million don't they do that and don't they create problems just to increase their budget or can't they i'm not saying they all do i'm saying it is legitimate to think that some do and we know for a fact that some dude in fact you know for

a fact that most that's one of the hard things about doing research on police for example you can change the definition of a particular action and uh thus change a simple sort of misdemeanor to a violent assault really depends on how the chief of police wants to define that not really what it comes down to so police can create problems that can destroy them just by stroking up a pen while not doing actually policing in the street and that is a very big problem with data keeping employees means of police in all aspects so is

use a force and you might say well i mean not really a lot of time that police doesn't use force on us there's a lot of time a place just shows up tells us please you know move along and we do or just their presence alone is good enough to sort of shape us up but isn't that user force we'll talk about this they have a whole class dedicated to use of course we'll talk about that what do we mean let me say police use a force a place at all time is using force it

is oppressed [Music] in the operations well illegitimate policing the operation is quite visible we know who's doing the policing they have names they have tags they have all these things but um police even in a democratic society like cars or in the united states or in england doesn't have to be visible police operate in quite a bit of secrecy too they put a police tape around so you can't go see what's going on not that they're doing anything bad i'm going to have their own reasons for doing it i don't protect crime scene and all

those things but you rarely see police do its work they ask you to move along at least in the name of your protection so police and you know police which one of you haven't heard of you know blue coat of silence blue wall of silence and obviously mafia has its own code of silence right snitches get stitches and all that trump said something similar to that organizationally they're very similar very top-down very sort of even in fact mafia kind of use wars like captains soldiers things like that there is a way that we can think

of the difference between police and mafia and police in a way yeah we mean that police in a democratic state there is a way to think about that that really makes the crux of the difference between police and an organized gay and that's the ethos you see protection can be looked at as a way of domination a dominating parent for example would say you're not allowed to go out every night you have to be home at 6 00 pm for your own protection it's dangerous to be out it's dangerous to be with these people out

here don't go to this party because it's dangerous that's one way to look at it is oh karen man my way is so dominating so protection also follow through with domination what does it always have to be you see if yes you and this is a very big if i get it i get it that this is a very big if but we do live in a democratic society so we have to take it seriously if we assume that each of us are free members of society that we live in a society of equals then

protection becomes a right [Music] then security becomes a right security of a person is no longer a privilege but a right because for me to exercise my rights as an individual in this society i require security and protection both at the same time for me to be able to have freedom of speech for press to be able to be free for uh women to be able to exercise their rights for members of lgbtq community to be able to exercise their rights as free members of society they need security and protection in a society of equal

so no longer protection is offered by people that look at themselves above us a rather protection and security the job of the police becomes another job amongst many in a society of equals in which we have a division of labor you see in our society you have a division of labor don't we you don't all do the exact same thing this is what durkheim calls uh organic solidarity right we depend on each other to survive i depend on you you depend on me just imagine how many people were involved to make sure that you and

i can chat right now well never mind that i needed someone to you know raise chickens so i can have some eggs so i can have some breakfast cut down trees so i can have paper and turn into paper so i can have it make some pens my pen was made in china probably it's a cheap pen so someone needed to put on a boot bring it all the way here so i can use it and that's just so i can write down my thoughts right after breakfast never mind that millions of cables millions of

miles of cables that are going under the sea that satellites that are up in the sky and all of these things involved now which one of them is more important than the other you can say in a clogs of machines no clog is more important than the other one so then police and provisional protection becomes part of this division of labor in a democratic society now that we agree to that let's see sort of what it is we should do in this class going forward so just to summarize police can be a noun it could

mean sort of order and governance it could mean provision of commune science of how to provide security and establish order it could mean sort of state institution or it could mean people who do police police can also be an adjective police can mean different things with different people based on time and space in other words places contextual and temporal definition of police is contextual and temporal but nonetheless police is an agent of social control that enforces particular kinds of morality then we sort of talked about what do we mean by enforcement of morality and we

sort of compared police to mafia organizations similarly what separates police from the mafia from an organized gang i think what we decided on is that really the only difference between police and the mafia organization police in a democratic society is legitimate if police loses legitimacy it loses everything that's really the crux of this whole course the crux of this whole course is to evaluate the relationship between police and society and the way that we define this relationship is we definitely through police legitimacy we define it through how we define police how legitimate is police and

its actions in our society or in particular sessions okay that's what this whole course is about so to do that first thing we need to do is talk about sort of what we mean by a legitimate democratic society and that's going to be our next lecture you know next lecture we're going to talk about sort of what do we mean by a democratic state how do we define kind of rules of law how do we define social control the social control that place is here to enforce how do we come up with what this social

control is that's how we're going to begin the next lecture and we're going to get through it then we're going to discuss birth of policing we're going to talk about history of policing in the western world i understand it's a little bit eurocentric but i'll tell you guys why on the day when we do this uh we're gonna trace history of policing in france in england and how they got imported into united states canada after the discussion of history of policing we're going to talk about policing within capitalistic system because when we talk about history

of policing let's say that police is born really at the advent of capitalism so police and capitalism seem to go parallel hand in hand therefore we can't leave police in a theoretical sense without talk about policing a capitalist society after that things are going to get a little bit more narrowed down so we're going to circularly broadly theoretically thinking about the police and then we're going to narrow it down we're going to talk about police in uniform within a canadian context what does police force in canada look like what this police service and kind of

look like in many different ways from gender to ethnicity to sort of education to training what does police in uniform in canada look like and then we're going to sort of talk about two important factors in policing and that's how we're going to end the semester we're going to talk about use of force by police and then we're going to end the class by talking about police corruption and when police kind of fails and how we can think about combating police corruption and that's basically going to be the term as i said there is going

to be a couple of sort of videos that i'm going to ask you guys to watch but that's pretty much going to be the term so thank you very much for listening and make sure you check out the interview that i have posted after this lecture as well i'll see you guys soon in the next lecture