1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Chapter 10 Protesting police Paul Mutsaers and Tom van Nuenen “Ordered you?” he said. “He ordered you. Dammit, white folk are always giving orders, it’s a habit with them. Why didn’t you make an excuse? Couldn’t you say they had sickness—smallpox—or picked another cabin? Why that Trueblood shack? My God, boy! You’re black and living in the South—did you forget how to lie?” (Dr. Bledsoe in Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison, 1952) Introduction Inequality typically constitutes the relationship between police and policed. Without undue distortion we can apply Becker’s (1967) notion of the “hierarchy of credibility” to understand this relationship. Police and the public are part of a system of ranked groups and this system allocates to members of the highest groups the right to deine a situation—to tell relevant others what “really” hap- pened. It is also a relationship that is nonreciprocal. Tongue in cheek, Becker writes that “no one proposes that addicts should make and enforce laws for policemen” (1967, 241). Those subjected to police intervention are usually also denied the luxury of what Scott (1990) calls “negative reciprocity”; that is, trading a slap for a slap, an insult for an insult. What’s more, police work is invested with certain responsibilities that are incumbent on an oficer’s station, and no matter how many rules and regulations conine police oficers in their work, a certain degree of discretionary authority always remains inviolable (see also Martin’s chapter in this volume). Having in mind these qualiications of police work—hierarchy, nonreci- procity and discretion—it is no wonder that criminologists recently called for a theory of police punishment, which we can understand with Goldstein as “the imposition by the police, acting under the color of law, of sanctions prior to conviction as a means of ultimate punishment, rather than as a device for the invocation of criminal proceedings” (1960, 580; see also Zedner 2004, 134). In an article that was awarded the British Society of Criminology’s Brian Williams Prize, Harkin (2015) argues that we should complicate the strictly legal deinition of punishment as a business of courts and prisons only, by 10 585 Anthropology ch10.indd 153 21/2/18 14:37:58