ICPOC was created, in part, to be a forum in which members of the community could discuss issues of public safety in order to provide recommendations that can ensure better-informed Council decisions. However, if ICPOC is not systematically included in that process, its potential to achieve its purpose is undermined. It is my understanding of ICPOC’s founding charter that any item City Council votes on, or City Administration plans to make a decision on, that pertains, generally, to public safety, or, specifically, to Ann Arbor PD and its resources, should go before ICPOC. It is my understanding that this was not the case for CA-24, nor for any number of other recent items, such as, on this agenda, CA-23 and CA-10, both of which also directly bear on the allocation of police resources.

If City Council is voting on it, if it pertains to public safety and the allocations of resources therein, ICPOC should be allowed to offer a chance to host a public discussion of it and provide recommendations to Council on it.

On a separate but related issue, I am looking forward to the report on unarmed public safety being prepared by the City Administration. As a member of the Coalition for Re-envisioning our Safety, a diverse coalition of community members who care deeply about transformative justice and building care-based safety in our community, I have witnessed directly the value of a community-led engagement on these issues. This has resulted concretely in our recent proposal for how such a plan might work. To date, over 500 people have endorsed our plan. I am greatly encouraged by the enthusiasm displayed by our community to explore an unarmed non-police service that can connect people to the resources they need, when they need them, without exposing them to additional risks. For that reason, I do hope that ICPOC has been given a substantive role in shaping the City’s recommendations—as the initial resolution says it should– and that it will be brought before ICPOC as part of a public meeting prior to any conclusions about the feasibility of such a program being offered or decisions about how to proceed with a potential program are made.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00031224211056966

As a way to measure the political efficacy of public protest as a mode of civic engagement, she examines the likelihood of protests against police killings resulting in the establishment of a civilian review board (CRB) & then then compares the effects on counts of fatalities. She claims her findings support two hypotheses: (1) cities with more protest against police brutality are significantly more likely to establish a CRB, and (2) protest against police brutality reduces officer-involved fatalities for African American and Latino individuals. However, she concludes “the establishment of CRBs does not reduce fatalities, as some have hoped”

This is interesting work, and I’ll have to sit with it some more to have a firm understanding of the methods & data upon which the above conclusions are drawn. HOWEVER I think two points are important here. FIRST, this is only one study. Identifying any kind of causal framework that can explain police killings is extremely hard, making it tricky to take as complex ad varied a phenomenon as CRB & make clear causal arguments about them based on aggregated data

For example, here in Washtenaw County alone we have 5 major CRB’s, but they each have very different charters, membership, authorities, goals, etc. This formal variety is even more dramatic when taking into account large cities and more rural areas. But without that specificity, without understanding or accounting for the important substantive differences in what CRB can mean, it’s lumping apples and oranges and bananas etc all together in a bowl, giving it all one name, & saying “it doesn’t look like fruit does anything”. Which, of course, may in fact be creating noise covering up the fact that specific *types* of fruit–or, to emerge from the metaphor, CRB–might actually be capable of producing the desired effect

SECOND, although I agree that some proponents of CRB’s may support them for the narrow hope that they may lead to fewer killings–as I also hope they do–it is not clear that this narrow metric is an appropriate one to measure the success of CRB’s in general. Examples of other potential metrics for assessing the “effectiveness” of CRB’s: how about assessing their effect on police violence (including non-lethal types) in general? How about their effects on arrest rates? On unsubstantiated stops? On racial disparities? Importantly for me, CRB’s may have the potential to provide institutional authority to many voices that are sidelined in discussions of public safety; voices of people who are paradoxically often the most targeted by such policies

The point is that we can't understand whether CRB's *work* until we have a better sense of what the people protesting for, & then working on & with, CRB's *hope* they can do. At least to this point in my research, "reduce police killings" seems too narrow to capture that /end

Originally tweeted by Dr. Kevin Karpiak (@kevinkarpiak) on December 4, 2021.

I recently gave a “Lunch and Learn” talk for the Washtenaw County League of Women Voters on the topic of “Policing, Justice, and Community: An Anthropological Perspective” in which I outline why I think anthropological studies of policing can be helpful for thinking through some of the larger issues associated with policing today

Dear CM _____,

I am writing to you now—not representing any particular group or organization, but as a concerned Ann Arbor resident—in response to the Ann Arbor City Work Session of February 8th, 2021. Specifically, I was disappointed to see the Ann Arbor Police Department’s failure to participate in the general civic obligation to re-examine its funding. This was particularly striking given the current state of municipal finances, but also a national climate in which progressive police reform means above all considering whether it is possible to reallocate funds previously earmarked for law enforcement towards services and programs that more clearly and directly impact citizen well-being.

To me, a prime example of this was the request for a community engagement officer. While the desire to find more effective forms of police-citizen collaboration is laudable, as with the police data analyst position approved in last year’s budget, this seems to invert the appropriate valence of our community resources. Rather than further bloating police budgets through more executive leadership positions, so that police may have more resources to perform public relations and image-management in the guise of “community engagement,” this money could be more justly allocated to positions that allow the community to engage with police on a more level field. How, for example, does the $158,458 reoccurring cost for this position compare to the overall budget of Independent Community Police Oversight Commission? If there is a need for “engagement” between communities and the police, might not those resources be better placed under the control of a civilian body?

I have similar questions about other elements of the AAPD budget, which I hope City Council does its due diligence in exploring. For example, how appropriate is it for the vast majority of budget reduction for the fiscal year in question to be hypothetical reductions in FTE’s through voluntary retirements? Was this reduction projected over the fiscal year in question, or is it more long term in nature? Is there no other area of AAPD’s budget that can be targeted to meet the concrete and immediate needs of our municipality’s fiscal crisis? If not, how can we start working to ensure that in the future the resources of AAPD can be allocated in a way that is responsive to the needs and responsibilities of civilian governance? And what role does thinking about the budgeting play in that long-term goal of a more flexible and responsive police institution?

I also have several questions about the “bomb dog” budget item. It is my understanding that AAPD already employs at least one K-9 unit; is that correct? Has AAPD adequately justified the need for an additional such unit now, in the middle of the COVID pandemic in which the large public gatherings typically understood as the target of such interventions, are non-existent? If AAPD has justified to City Council’s satisfaction the need for this new unit, has it adequately detailed its efforts at finding more cost-effective means of funding it (for example, through County-wide programs such as fund other specialist units)? I notice that the $50k for this budget item is listed as a one-time cost. Are there no recurring budgetary obligations for the continued care and training of the dog and its human partner?

But the target of my most pointed concern, as it touches on research I have conducted over the last twenty years, is the budget item related to a re-investment in TASER technology. Research on the use of “non-lethal” devices suggests that while they may be useful in circumstances in which the only other alternative was the use of deadly force, there are also many potential disadvantages of their adoption into police force arsenals. For one, the research suggests that while TASERs may reduce the number of deadly incidents, they actually increase the probability of the use of traumatic force. The upshot of this is that in situations where the necessity to consider deadly force is relatively rare (as it is in Ann Arbor), the inclusion of TASERS into police toolkits may actually increase the number of traumatic incidents without working to substantially ameliorate an existing problem. All of this leaves several questions which I hope City Council pursues in due diligence before approving this budget item: Has the Ann Arbor PD weighed these problems, and communicated to the public why—despite the apparent drawbacks—they chose to request such devices? Or is the request for this renewal the outcome of institutional inertia without critical reflection on the changing demands of public safety? Has the AAPD calculated the number of lethal use of force incidents they anticipate TASERS will help avoid? Have they calculated the number of increased traumatic incidents they will create?

Another concern I have over this budget item is that it locks the City into a long-term predatory contract. Axon Corporation, the maker of TASER technology, typically requires Departments commit to long-term contracts in which Departments agree to purchase a set number of new charge cartridges on an annual basis despite the specific needs or use-patterns of the Department in question. These contracts also frequently include clauses in which Axon is awarded exclusive authority to offer ongoing officer training in the use of non-lethal devices. I personally participated in an Axon certified TASER training program when it was implemented at my home institution. It involved a rather loosely scheduled evening in which “Instructors” (members of the police department who have gone through the Training program, as part of the contract) then were given “resources” to further train their fellow officers. These resources involved a few pre-printed handouts and a PowerPoint presentation provided by Axon Corporation. This presentation consisted largely of illustrative video examples of TASER use taken (in a non-critical manner!) from the television show COPS.

All of this, again, raises several questions which I hope City Council performs its due diligence in exploring: Has city council, the city administrator, or some other qualified external body, been able to assess this contract? Has the long-term financial obligation to the City been evaluated? To what degree does the contract commit the City to a set of technologies and patrolling practices that, when put under public scrutiny, civilians may which to divest from? Has the AAPD provided, and City Council been able to assess, the nature and content of the training AAPD officers will receive in associated with these tools? Has the quality and cost associated with that training been weighed against other potential training initiatives such as the Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement (ABLE) Project, recently adapted by the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office? Again, returning to the budget, has the AAPD demonstrated that any potential benefit from TASERS is merited by the sustained financial investment it will require? For example, might not public safety and wellness be more greatly affected by using those same funds elsewhere?

Dr. Kevin Karpiak, PhD

Viewed in this light, policing was to achieve economic efficiency and accountability of action for individual police officers through a series of organizational reforms that rewarded merit as measured through “work.” This could mean ratios of arrests or interpellations per work hour, but also territory covered per shift (as measured through new technologies of GPS tracking), reports written, and complaints cleared. Amid all of this activity and its bureaucratically legible evidence, “social” activities were comparably amorphous and could not, therefore, count toward results. The police de proximité, for Sarkozy, was literally not work. What was needed, he argued, was a strategy to get police officers working—to motivate them to do things. As opposed to the police de proximité, Sarkozy’s program explicitly rejected the terrain of the social as either a legitimate or useful object of policing. Instead, it offered the instauration of a series of high-stakes auditing and actuarial practices in order to reorient police work itself.

Karpiak, K. G. (2020). What is the “Work” in “Police Work”? Society for the Anthropology of Work. https://doi.org/10.21428/1d6be30e.e70cf108

Dear [Insert representative],

Recently Ann Arbor City Council passed a resolution (Resolution in Support of More Substantive Civilian Review of Policing Practices and Incidents) requesting our state representatives to move forward with a request to include citizen police oversight board members within the category of “law enforcement officials” for the purposes of allowing them access to the Law Enforcement Information Network (LEIN).  In my opinion, this was a measured and sound request both in terms of democratic participation and fiscal oversight (because citizens are not allowed access to the database currently, the AAPD has asked for and been granted a $170k/yr FTE so that a sworn officer can respond to oversight data requests.  We could save money, increase transparency, and arguably upgrade the available skill-set of that position if it could be filled by a civilian data analyst.

I was wondering what you are doing to move this issue forward?

In addition, in following the work of Ann Arbor’s Independent Community Police Oversight Commission (ICPOC) I have become aware of the Compulsory Arbitration Of Labor Disputes in Police and Fire Department Act 312 of 1969 and its effects on police reform in the state.  It is my understanding that this act gives police and fire unions a special status whereby an unresolved contract negotiation automatically enters binding arbitration after 30 days.  Whereas such arbiters typically resolve contract disputes by looking at prior examples, this is in essence a retrogressive law that makes it impossible to introduce even the most basic and popular reforms should they be found distasteful to the local police or fire union.  I would (1) urge you to make efforts in changing these onerous aspects of the existing law and (2) alert you to Senate Bill 0832 of 2020 and House Bill 5623 of 2020 which, shockingly, aim to extend these prerogatives to correction officers.  If there is anything I can do to help in these efforts, please let me know.

I’ve finally been reading bits and pieces of Donna Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, which, I’ve been doing as part of a larger project to imagine the end of policing.

I had been meaning to do this for a while, but I was recently inspired her performance as discussant at a double panel at the American Anthropological Association Meetings I was a part of, honoring Aihwa Ong.  There were many wonderful moments there (one tidbit: Haraway, who became mega-famous for her essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” declared that “Aihwa taught me more about cyborgs than anyone else.”  She was especially inspired by the complex entanglements of women and machinery in Ong’s first book, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline) but it was actually one word that she kept using that stuck with me: critter.

Haraway uses the term as a broad tool to talk about life forms.  It’s more inclusive than, say, “animal” or “plant” or even, she argues, “creature”:

Critters is an American everyday idiom for varmints of all sorts.  Scientists talk of their “critters” all the time; and so do ordinary people all over the U.S., but perhaps especially in the South.  The taint of “creatures” and “creation” does not stick to “critters”; if you see such a semiotic barnacle, scrape it off.  In this book, “critters” refers promiscuously to microbes, plants, animals, humans and nonhumans, and sometimes even to machines. (Staying with the Trouble, p. 169, n1)

And Haraway is justified is both tying “critter” to “creature” and then immediately dissecting their semiotic link.  The term “critter” seems to be an early 19th-century U.S. colloquial dialectical variant on the word “creature, which came into English via Old French.

As Hanna Pitkin has shown, such etymologies are seldom innocent; especially when discussing democracy.  In their contemporary use, they are often also arguments about, declared allegiances to, visions of what our collective political existence is and should be.  Pitkin, for example, explores the various imaginaries associated with the Germanically-rooted “freedom” versus the Latinate “liberty.”

What does it mean, therefore, that Haraway finds such purchase on an Americanized rejection of a French Latinate term, one whose origin lies specifically at the moment in which a distinctly American variant of populist liberal democracy is taking root.  “Critter,” for example emerges in the same milieu as Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.  Its rejection–might one even note contempt–for the Latinate might well be read alongside contemporaneous rejections of French Republicanism, for example.

Which makes things… complicated.  French Republicanism has many problems.  But so did, you know, the democratic posturing of populists in the Antebellum South.  Where does this leave us in our own allegiances to Haraway’s term, itself an attempt to get us to think differently about ourselves together in the world?

On the night of Thursday, September 30^th 2004, some young police officers decided to hold a party in their apartment in the 18^tharrondissement of Paris.  The building, mainly occupied by the 20-something unmarried officers who make up the majority of the police force in the Île-de-France region, was located just down the street from the local station.  For what it’s worth, it was also not far from where I would one day live, although that was a bit into the future.

The party was still going on, in some form, into the early hours of the morning on Friday.  The news reports would later make special mention of the fact that the company was of mixed sex.  Some time before 8am, Fabio, a 26 year-old gardien de la paix, shot his colleague Laurent, of the same age, in the chest with his service weapon.  This was, by all accounts, a traumatic event.  After seeing his friend lying on the ground shot, and most likely dead, Fabio pointed the gun at his own head and killed himself.  All the witnesses present agreed that the initial shot was an accident.  Including Laurent, who it turns out was not killed by the gunshot as Fabio so fatefully feared.  Laurent tried to alert the paramedics as they carried him out of the building.  His broken thorax refusing to vibrate the air with sufficient force to make an audible sound, he mouthed the words: “Accident. It was an accident.”  This fact was also widely reported in the local newspapers; as was the insistence by those present, and the detectives in charge of the case, that, above-all, this was a “private affair” and not a police action

Afterwards, those same newspapers would have very few details of what that night meant for the rest of Laurent’s life, Fabio’s remaining family, or any of the other people present on scene.  The incident did serve as a minor touchstone in a larger debate about the regulation of officer’s service arms; about how they should be regulated and surveilled, and above all over whether their possession should be limited to on-duty officers (who should duly check them into locked boxes in the station when going off duty, as per official regulation) or if, as some union representatives argued, that police were police “24/7,” with all the dangers and responsibilities the profession brought with it, and should therefore have access to the tools of their trade accordingly.  If the particular issue has been resolved administratively, the broader tension remains.  It’s there at the heart of what “police” means today in France; in negotiations over its role in the larger social fabric and, most especially about the regulation of its tools of violence in constructing that social fabric itself.

–From “Time, Regained” on Somatosphere: Science, Medicine, and Anthropology

You can use the promotional code on the above flyer to save 20% when you order directly from Routledge.    Below, you can also read the Introduction I co-authored with Will Garriott, as well as the rest of the front matter

I.

He didn’t know, one way or the other, any way of getting there.  Of course there was the usual way, but for that he didn’t have the stomach today.

“Charles, what’s the matter honey?  Don’t you have to go?”  Of course he did.  That was known.  If anything, knowing that was not the problem.

“What time is it?” he stalled.

“Time to go, or you’ll be late.”

Suddenly, something totally unexpected happened.

II.

Only later did it make any sense.

“You see, Turkmenistan had always had rather vague borders, let alone after the recent business with the Shah.  How else could One be expected to respond?” he said in the most surprisingly perfect English you’ve ever heard.  And after that, everyone could see the reason for his actions.

A jolly good laugh was had by all.

III.

Meanwhile, back on the homefront, Gina had been waiting seventeen years for the #52 bus to come down Balmora Avenue and was beginning to wonder if it ever would.  However, being recently informed of the exploits of Col. Major Thomas Waterpaint IV in the hitherto unexplored regions of the Belgian Congo and the peripheral Asiatic Caucasus, she took it upon herself to summon the intestinal wherewithal to initiate a maneuver of her own accord, on par with anything the above-mentioned hero had yet seen fit to dare.

“Miss Linda,” she called out.  “I don’t think I’m ‘bout to set here and wait for the #52 Balmora Avenue Bus today,” as she ventured her foot, attached to its stout ankle away from her place on the curb.

“But Miss Gina!” Linda called out in the wrong direction, facing not the target towards whom her warning was aimed but down the row, her eyes reflecting the terror of what was appearing over the horizon.

IV.

And so forth.

V.

“However, there is still one thing I do not understand, my dear Col. Major,” he said as he pored exactingly equal portions of an unspecified mixture of liqueurs into an unspecified number of vessels, “and that is how you could have possibly known what the Turk had been planning in the first place.”

“Quite simple, Mr. Harberry” he said venturing a sample from the proffered drinking vessel.  “Once I had heard of the unfortunate occurrences on Balmora Avenue, I knew there was only one possible course of action.”

“Indeed!” slurped Mr. Harberry.

“Yes, indeed” smirked the Countess, her haired pulled back tightly.

THE END