Antiterrorist Policing in New York City after 9/11: Comparing Perspectives on a Complex Process

Human Organization, Spring 2005 by Bornstein, Avram

Discussion

The historic increases in policing activities should be examined through a combination of logics including the rational-Enlightenment, the power, and the psycho-cultural paradigms. Whether consultants to security professionals or as political activists in the civil liberties movement, anthropology may provide important insights into the cultural dynamics at work in a given time and place. Anthropologists can explain how fears of ethnic or racial difference create legitimizing discourses for a variety of practices that undermine security and liberty.

For those concerned primarily with security, anthropologists can summarize and translate community perspectives, such as the civil liberties narrative and unconscious psycho-cultural obstacles to law enforcement professionals. For example, recognizing the importance of police-community relations, police managers have been correct to respond to today's profiling problems with racial sensitivity training. Observations here, however, suggest that the problems are deep and management must monitor stops of Muslims and Arabs more carefully, perhaps by including a South Asian or Middle Eastern option on the UF-250 form that officers fill out when they stop, question, search and release a civilian. The UF-250 requires officers to check a box recording the race of the individual: black, white, Hispanic, Asian and other. The racial description is recorded primarily for investigative purposes, but it can also serve to track profiling and patterns of racial disparity. Furthermore, given the fear of cooperation with the Federal government, the old INS, and new DHS in particular, some form of a confidentiality policy could make immigrants feel safer coming forward to cooperate with police.

For those concerned with civil liberties, an anthropology of policing documents the processes that transfer government resources toward more social control through policing and incarceration. Cultural analysis lays bare how a fearful public passively endorses such measures because terrorist images allow ordinary people to detach themselves from the pain of their scapegoats by defining them as less than human. Descriptions of these prejudices presumably unmask the "false consciousness" that sees policing as either rational or for a greater good. Ethnographers writing for the defense of civil liberties may also describe the suffering of those targeted by state security forces in order to heighten sympathy for them and inhibit actions against them.

For either audience, this article explains that policing activities emerge from rational-Enlightenment and power motives, as well as from complicated psycho-cultural dispositions. Discrete acts may be better explained by reference to one of these schools of thought, but to reduce the larger process to a single driving force is usually narrow-minded. Instead, this ethnography of the process indicates a plurality of causes. The goal here has not been to decide which paradigm trumps the others as much as it has been to show how multiple paradigms are simultaneously relevant.