The Legal Violence of Police Calls for Service: Toward New Community Safety Infrastructure

In this article, we return to the scene of the police call in the United States to conceptualize the basic needs and structural forces animating calls for service and their relationship to a jurispathic form of legal violence. We do so by revisiting the perennial question of why people call the police, analyzing how conditions of organized abandonment drive the call. We follow how police reports reveal the bureaucratic and administrative legal violence of policing itself, extending police logics and power into all social problems/response, obstructing the political capacity to imagine—and demand—the most basic of nonpunitive life-supporting infrastructure. Against this dominance, many are searching for more direct and meaningful ways to respond to crisis, making the police call a contested site for municipal politics and community resources through jurisgenerative abolitionist-like practices grounded in the empirical conditions of ordinary people’s lives.