Ferguson effects: libidinal geographies of “police disengagement” and late fascist urbanism

Since the rise of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, a prominent form of pro-police backlash has emerged, one that claims the BLM movement has caused police to “disengage” from interventions with Black and other racialized people and caused a corresponding increase in crime rates. This supposed effect of BLM protests has been termed the “Ferguson effect” or simply “police disengagement.” While the “police disengagement” thesis has been criticized on empirical grounds, this article takes a different approach by drawing on scholarship influenced by psychoanalytic theory to analyze five major qualitative studies of so-called police disengagement. This approach makes it possible to see “police disengagement” as a libidinal-geographic crisis produced by Black-led movements and their demands for major constraints on police power. While police power has not been constrained, the mere demand for such constraints registers in the police psyche as a crisis – an imagined restriction on police recourse to violence against Black people and spaces that feels like complete powerlessness and emasculation. More broadly, these fantasies of constraint produce a political alignment between police officers and a range of “late fascist” political currents that see unbridled police power as the instrument of a new and terrifying form of city-making.