The politics of policing a pandemic panic

Abstract

This essay was completed in early April 2020 and begun during the first week of the official pandemic panic in Canada. The world-wide plague caused by the COVID-19 virus precipitated the first global police event presenting an occasion for researchers and scholars to apply existing theory and empirical understanding to extra-ordinary circumstances. Consideration of the politics of the police during the plague reveals a tectonic shift in the world system. The transnational and comparative study of police and policing reveals the contours of the emerging system of world power all the more clearly in a moment of crisis. The pandemic panic presents an historical moment during which, figuratively speaking, policing power crystalizes and can be seen clearly. On the global stage, in response to the pandemic panic authoritarian and totalitarian policing practices are demonstrated alongside those in putative democracies. Emerging and observable practices of rule by law are antithetical to democratic policing in the general social interest, and rule of law rhetoric justifying militarized law enforcement action in many places continues to bring police into further disrepute. The coming era will continue to be a time where, in most places “the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must”—as the ancient historian Thucydides observed in the aftermath of the fratricidal Peloponnesian War more than two millennia ago. The pandemic panic shows in the starkest statistical numbers that, where social justice is achieved, the outcome of the politics of the police is not the command of the sovereign.