Policing Shit, Or, Whatever Happened to the Medical Police? (original) (raw)
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Medical police and the history of public health
Medical history, 2002
These hovels were in many instances not provided with the commonest conveniences of the rudest police; contiguous to every door might be observed the dung heap on which every kind of filth was accumulated .
Radical Philosophy, 2020
Cops forcibly removing someone from a bus for not wearing a face mask, arresting people for failure to socially distance on a crowded subway platform, moving people on if they look like they are socialising in excessive numbers, determining who can attend a public event. This is the new reality of policing the virus. The street-level enforcement of social distancing during the lockdown is just the start. Governments the world over have started rolling out new surveillance schemes and testing regimes in the name of public health. In the timid new world of the present and the brave new world of the future, policing meets health head-on. Medical policing is back. But did it ever stop? For some, the gravity of the new conjuncture finally and decisively inaugurated by the Covid-19 pandemic suggests that revolution is now thinkable. 1 Yet it also means certain features of the class and racial dynamics of the modern capitalist system are set in stark relief.
Folklore of Operational Banality: Medical Administration, Health, and Everyday Violence
Environmental Humanities, 2020
This article explores the reductive workings of policy that lead to intimate everyday forms of violence within US-based medical administration. Using the framework of folklore of operational banality (“FOOB”), the article examines a geodata-driven way of addressing uncompensated medical care that targets “superusers” of the US health care system. The case scrutinizes the operative truths, procedural rationalities, and absurd reductions performed by this administrative system that sorts people in terms of cost and risk. It shows how such administrative strategies result in further bureaucratized inequities and harm, even as they claim to support life by ontologizing cost efficiency and cost-benefit thinking, accumulating biological data for geosurveillance and biosecurity, and treating risk and vulnerability as the property and responsibility of certain individuals/bodies and spaces rather than as the result of social-environmental problems. A parodic counterfigure appears in the case to amplify criticism of the individualized management of life/risk and the reliance on technocratic methods and biomedical models to define and allocate health care as separate from environmental and justice-oriented concerns. The figure of Health Coach App renders absurd the power relations of health interventions that exclude broader social etiologies of disease and illness and shows that collaborative approaches between environmental and medical humanities are needed to reveal banal administrative violence and to advocate for better policies.
Biopower and the Militarization of the Police Function Dominic Corva
Acme an International E Journal For Critical Geographies, 2009
In Multitude, Hardt and Negri explain imperialism, in the context of Empire, as part of the globalization of war as biopower. They note that the police function and the war function are increasingly indistinguishable in the context of Empire, and then proceed to analyze the biopoliticization of the war function. This review examines instead the transnational militarization of the police function through the U.S. war on drugs in the Americas, arguing that the widespread consent to this U.S.-catalyzed process may shed more light on the globalization of war as biopower, and possibilities for its resistance. Introduction: War as a regime of biopower in Multitude Multitude has two intersecting yet distinct tasks. One is to follow up Hardt and Negri's theory of Empire by more fully theorizing its subject of resistance, the Multitude. The other task is to explain how the emergence of sovereign power, in the form of U.S. imperialism, fits into, rather than changes, the hegemony of biopower that characterizes Empire. It is with this latter task, which occupies the first third of the book, that this engagement concerns itself.
Liquid Materialities, 2010
Farnham: Ashgate ISBN: 9780754679219 (hbk) and 9780754698197 (e-book), 334pp, http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754679219 Chapter 7
The Role of the Police Power in 21st Century Public Health
Sexually Transmitted Diseases, 1999
The police power is the right of the state to take coercive action against individuals for the benefit of society. The companion article by Potterat et aJ., "Invoking, monitoring, and relinquishing a public health power: the health hold order," is a classic use of the police power in the control of a communicable disease, yet one that is increasingly controversial. Reaching an acceptable balance between the rights of society and tho e of individuals is the central issue facing public health in the next millennium, and the police power is at the center of this balance. This article reviews the constitutional basis of the police power, its historical use in public health, and the structural reasons why health departments preoccupied with personal health care cannot effectively use the police power to carry out public health enforcement.
The recent explosion of post-apocalyptic visions of zombie outbreaks, plague, and bio-engineered super viruses reveals the preoccupation that exists about the potential for future disaster and its link to our conceptions of health, the body, and the public good. Born from this same historical conjuncture, The New York State Public Health Manual: A Guide for Attorneys, Judges, and Public Health Professionals, published in 2011, outlines the powers of the state of New York during a time of catastrophe; i.e. plague, outbreak, natural disaster. This particular legal guide demonstrates a current manifestation of biopower and the affective potential States hope to capture and control that emanate from the collision and interaction of bodies. States harness affect through various ways, and in this particular study, through a text that mobilizes fear and the ever-present potential of a threat, ultimately justifying draconian social measures in the name of “public safety”. Written texts provide a rich context in which to critique and better situate State policies within larger frameworks of discipline and control. States and bodies are inextricably connected to each other, and analyzing public policies help better contextualize these links specifically.
Review of Disease and Crime: A history of social pathologies and the new politics of health
When a society is faced with a contagion, the sense of disarray, panic, and confusion stains the social fabric. Similarly, although in different terms, when crime occurs and becomes rampant, a sense of hysteria can also rupture social life. When either of these two phenomena envelops society, the insecurity it brings demands immediate action to restore equilibrium. It is thus not surprising that the ways we make sense of these events have caught the interest of academics, especially those working in the fields of history and the social sciences. Separately, the writing of the history of diseases (a theme in the field of history of medicine) as they are experienced across time and that of the history of criminality are already daunting tasks on their own, requiring one to harness perspectives from various fields. In the former, one has to contend with the challenge of bridging the fields of medicine and history to make sense of the impact of disease on the micro and macro levels. For the latter, one has to make sense of a phenomenon that brings together aspects of law, social psychology, and sociology, to name a few. The two fields, however, also have similarities. Both themes grapple with events that involve state-society relations; and both, in varying degrees, deal with discourses of how the sick and sickness, as well as the criminal and criminality, are defined and dealt with in different contexts. When carried out, the writing of such narratives could yield data that could help form theoretical perspectives that hopefully, could enrich our understanding of societies throughout history. As disease and crime present dilemmas worthy of scholarly pursuits, what happens then when these two become conflated either in the discursive level or in both the discursive level and lived experience? This is one of the broad questions that Robert Peckham's edited compendium Disease and Crime: A History of social pathologies and the new politics of health, tries to unpack.