Doctoral Dissertation Research: Community Policing Preparedness and the State

Brown University, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

The research supported by this award investigates changing linkages between local communities and the nation state in the contemporary United States. As distributor of welfare, administrator of bureaucracy, provider of security, and in many other ways, the state is critical for local life. But the nature of that relationship is dynamic, shifting over time and place in ways that change our understanding of what a government is at all levels of scale. This project asks, What are the key new elements of that relationship now? And what are their local effects? Noting how central discussions of security have become in recent years, the researcher approaches these questions through the lens of local policing and the increased use of equipment once reserved for the military. What does this apparent blurring of state and community lines tell us about the local impact of the nation state today? The research will be carried out in the Washington/Baltimore area by Brown University doctoral student, Jessica Katzenstein, under the supervision of Dr. Catherine A. Lutz. She will focus on how this equipment is made available and why police departments choose to obtain it; how personnel are trained in its use; and how its availability affects their sense of responsibility for threat response and their relations with local citizens. To gather data, she will employ a range of anthropological research methods including: interviews, participant observation in trainings and ride-alongs, and spatial analysis of equipment movements. Findings from this project will provide important insight into what militarization signifies about the contradictions and shifts in state influence in a historical moment in which community police have more effective resources and yet more limited room to use those resources without public challenge, and where they are called upon to serve as homeland defense against a broadening array of threats. This information will help to build new social scientific understanding of new aspects of what the nation state now means for local communities.