State police authority is challenged in urban margins

Urban policing is today shaped by the production of internal borders in the worlds growing cities - borders that divide the urban space into rich and poor areas and into safe and unsafe zones. This spatial bordering of cities is caused by rapid urbanization, heightened wealth inequalities and growing insecurity. One result of this bordering is a pluralization of policing, whereby the state police increasingly share space and authority with private security companies (in wealthy areas) and civilian policing actors (in poor areas).

This article by DIIS senior researcher Helene Maria Kyed, explores what the urban pluralization of policing means for state police authority in a poorer, crime-ridden neighborhood in Maputo (Mozambique). Based, on 10 months fieldwork among state police officers and civilian community police actors, Kyed argues that the authority of the state police is provisional and continuously challenged. Police officers must constantly rely on civilian actors as they are incapable of combating crime on their own, but this also undermines their own authority, as civilian policing actors become powerful in the local arena. The police officers also constantly face conflicting demands: between adhering to the law and responding to ordinary people’s preferences for immediate justice. This draws the officers to often act informally and against the demands of the law, so as to achieve some form of popular legitimacy, but in the process, they also undermine the legal foundations of their authority. Faced with these dilemmas, the police officers engage in continuous bordering practices to try to re-assert their authority in the crime-ridden neighborhood.

By applying ‘bordering’ as an analytical lens to understand police authority, the article adds to the growing literature on plural policing and also makes a novel contribution to studies of urban insecurity.

The article is part of a special issue in the journal Environment and Planning D: Society and Space on urban policing and bordering practices, guest-edited by DIIS senior researcher Peter Albrecht and Maya Mynster Christensen, which will be fully published in 2020.