![]() As my interviews revealed, however, the everyday practices of policing are much more contingent, and the adoption of truth machines represents less a well thought-out strategy than a set of varying conditions that render these techniques pragmatically chosen tactics. A Weberian conception of the bureaucratic state posits a unified, state-sanctioned police institution, with intentionally created rules of investigation. The police then become an important site where state power is formed and state violence realized.ĭrawing from the new police science and from a critique of the Weberian conception of the police as a bureaucracy, I analyze the use of truth machines, which promised to replace physical torture during investigations. Īs Markus Dubber and Mariana Valverde write, “Police works as a sort of temporal-hinge word, allowing the governance of the past to be articulated with the governance of the future.” Valverde further notes that, for Foucault, police power constitutes an important part of the state framework as “practices of power-knowledge” and the state represent the “coagulations of practices.” The new police science thus points to how state practices and techniques in the everyday operations of government become significant, meriting critical study. The police have a role not only in punishment for acts already committed but also in prevention as, for example, in public health or zoning. A significant theoretical insight from the new police science is that policing is multifaceted. Insights from the new police science invite us to think about the “actual operation of government” and the “everyday participants in the institutions of state government.” Mark Neocleous further distinguishes between the new and old police science by explaining that the former is much more critical in its approach to understanding the “mechanisms through which police powers operate” as opposed to a way to improve how the police work. Ī focus on everyday police practice thus becomes essential for revealing the underlying processes of policing. Yet it is through these governing processes delivered through these apparatuses that exclusion thrives.” This assumption of a neutrally functioning bureaucracy can allow the state to attribute excessive violence to such conditions as inadequate training and can obscure the violence accommodated in the process of governing. As Guillermina Seri elaborates, “Together with a dismissal of the governing aspects of police, political scientists tend to treat both the police and bureaucratic state apparatuses as politically neutral and as at least normatively subjected to the law. Scholars often uncritically embrace this formulation. In his famous essay on bureaucracy, Weber considers rules a major function of modern officialdom: “The authority to give the commands required for the discharge of these duties is distributed in a stable way and is strictly delimited by rules concerning the coercive means…” ![]() As Weber famously explained, “ Legal coercion by violence is the monopoly of the state.” In everyday practice, of course, the police, though not the only state institution, are closely associated with violence and are, for most people, “the most visible symbol of the authority of the State.” A common assumption, however, is that the police, like other bureaucratic institutions, are restrained by a set of rules. The police have claimed that lie detectors, brain scans, and narcoanalysis (the use of “truth serum,” Sodium Pentothal) represent a paradigm shift away from physical torture.Ī major feature of the Weberian, rational bureaucratic state is its monopoly over legitimate violence.
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