The Welfare Police

Abstract This article investigates the role of Danish police not as enforcers of sovereign order, but as ambassadors of the welfare state—more specifically an image of the welfare state as a benign, caring, and ‘intimate’ kind of polity. Focusing on a recent police reform, the article shows how the emic Scandinavian concept of nærhed (proximity) works as the ideational basis for the ‘welfarization’ of the police by mobilizing a nostalgic image of small-town sociality as a symbolic reservoir for the welfare state writ large. This political project—while drawing from deeply embedded imaginaries of what constitutes a ‘good state’—also points to ongoing negotiations of the boundaries of the Danish welfare state as an affective community.