Abstract:

Critics of policing often utter the phrase ‘to protect and serve,’ in order to point out the gap between discourses of ethical policing and practices of punitive policing in black communities. However, the present analysis asserts that a more appropriate representation of the policing function is ‘to protect and serve whiteness.’ Drawing ethnographic observations, the Ferguson Report and Officer Darren Wilson’s Grand Jury Testimony, I shift the locus of critique away from the putative problems of ‘police brutality,’ ‘excessive force,’ and ‘police militarization.’ I argue that these critiques naturalize the forms of psychic violence, dehumanization and dispossession inflicted in routine and professional encounters between police and black people. Instead, I argue that anti-blackness is imbricated in policing itself. Then, by examining the ways in which modern policing and ‘order maintenance’ approaches developed from southern slave patrols, I assert that policing in the United States is always already racialized policing. It plays a foundational role assigning of racial meanings, helping to produce whiteness as a subject of protection and blackness an object of regulation.