Professor Alves asserts "How does one account for police violence when policing is not only the repressive branch of the state but also, in Michel Foucault's terms, “a project for governing territory”? In this article, I look at the broad discursive and economic practices that policing mobilizes to govern urban life. While I am mindful that bringing together an expansive understanding of policing (as multiple tactics of territorial governance and as officers' coercive practices) may raise objections from some readers, in this article I take both the work of the police and the rationality for governing that policing provides as objects of inquiry to understand how race is mobilized in what William Garriott has crafted as the police-as-governance-governance-as-police paradigm. How does a focus on race help to understand the broad political-economic work police do?
This question is particularly important within the Colombian transitional context--following the 2016 peace deal between the insurgent FARC guerrilla and the state--where the army has been deployed to “pacify” urban peripheries. Adding to the community policing approach called policia por cuadrante (policing by block), the city government and international donors have funded projects to integrate “trouble” youth in the city's service economy and educate them around notions of civic engagement and a “culture of peace.” Nevertheless, the same areas targeted by these soft projects are undergoing enduring forms of police violence and army occupation, which suggests a peculiar feature of state sovereignty in dealing with racialized bodies: brutal and raw violence that can be translated into abandonment, incarceration, and death. Thus, without denying other converging projects of urban governance, a focus on the police as a rationality of state-making may help to unveil its hidden work in racialized contexts where “power is experienced close to the skin”.
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