Political Geography, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 47-57, 1996
Elsevier Science Ltd
Printed in Great Britain
Pergamon
0962-6298(95)00004-6
The geopolitics of the police: Foucault,
disciplinary power and the tactics of the Los
Angeles Police Department
STEVE HERBERT
Department of Sociology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1382, USA
Auswe,Acr. This paper uses the insights of Foucault to analyze the Los Angeles
Police Department (LAPD) as an agency of discipline. It takes Foucault's
injunction to study the 'how' of power seriously, using insights from
ethnographic fieldwork with the Los Angeles Police Department to assess
Foucault's general formulations concerning disciplinary power. The fieldwork
reveals that the LAPD does indeed engage in a series of technologically and
organizationally sophisticated practices to monitor and control the populace.
However, it also reveals the need to remember Foucault's more cautionary
programmatics in analyzing an agency such as the LAPD; dynamics both internal
and external to the police organization limit the reach of its surveillance
capacities. The disciplinary network of the LAPD is much more restricted,
complex and contradictory than a simplistic Foucauldian reading would
suggest.
Introduction: a vignette 1
It is drizzling o n this Saturday night, but Air 18 hovers beneath the clouds, affording a
panoramic perspective of the seemingly infinite street grid of Los Angeles. Major streets
are o b v i o u s - - t h e lights are brighter, the expanse is b r o a d e r - - b u t side arteries are visible
as well. And if the street lights are not illumination enough, the observer in front of me
can draw u p o n a 30 million candlepower 'nightsun', or, if a suspect seeks cover, u p o n the
craft's FLIR (forward looking infrared device), which registers heat-bearing substances in
a glowing white.
The observer is using both devices to try and locate a robbery suspect from a South
Central check-cashing facility w h e n a call comes over the headphones requesting the
helicopter in Hollywood. An officer has a 'code 3 6 ' - - a stolen c a r - - a n d wants the
helicopter overhead before he attempts to detain the driver. The car, the officer explains,
is at Highland and Hollywood. The pilot, sitting to the observer's right, hears the call,
banks the craft sharply to the north and heads towards the Capitol Records building, a
prominent landmark for pilots trying to find Hollywood. As they speed north, the
observer pages through his thick book of street maps to find the precise location.
Meanwhile, the patrol officer tailing the stolen car regularly broadcasts its m o v e m e n t s - eastbound Hollywood, n o r t h b o u n d Las Palmas, eastbound Franklin. At the corner of
48
The geopolitics of the police
Wilcox and Franklin, the helicopter is n o w overhead and, from the back seat, it is easy to
spot the stolen c a r - - i t is the one with three patrol cars behind it.
The officer knew the car was stolen because he had entered the car's license plate into
his MDT (mobile display terminal), an in-car device that, among other things, allows
access to Department of Motor Vehicles files on stolen cars. Within seconds of typing in
the license plate number, an officer can learn the registration status of any car, as well as
whether there are any outstanding violations, or any reports of theft. Armed with this
information, and with the assistance of a helicopter overhead and two patrol cars behind,
he is ready to pull the car over.
The appearance of the helicopter seems to confirm what the driver of the car had
undoubtedly begun to fear--that the police want to detain him. Upon the helicopter's
arrival, the suspect turns suddenly and speeds down Wilcox, runs a red light at Yucca and
continues southward. The chase is on.
Air 18's role is straightforward. Its pilot circles the ship continuously, so that it
perpetually stays above the car. The observer does two t h i n g s - - k e e p s the stolen car
permanently illuminated by the nightsun, and informs the lead pursuing vehicle whether
there is cross-traffic at each intersection the car approaches. On the ground, the task is
more difficult. By speeding strategically through cross traffic, and by causing a traffic
accident on Sunset Boulevard which slows the pursuing police car, the suspect gains a
significant advantage. The helicopter, though, never loses the suspect from its 30 million
candlepower sight, so w h e n he jumps out of the car and tries to blend into pedestrian
traffic, he is easily picked out when the patrol cars catch up. The chase over, the suspect
is taken into custody.
An interpretation
It is an impressive performance, a vivid demonstration of the extensive and intensive
reach of the police. Plugged into a sophisticated and far-ranging information network,
able to communicate easily and directly with one another, organized to assume different
and complementary responsibilities such that land and air are effectively patrolled, the
police are able to focus unwavering attention on a single suspect and monitor his
movements so well that his eventual capture is an inevitability. One sees here, perhaps,
vivid evidence for a disciplinary network of the sort described by Foucault (1977), one
based on 'permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance' (p. 214), on an 'infinite
examination' (p. 189) in a 'panoptic machine' (p. 217). This elaborate political technology
surveys and interlinks, it monitors and controls, it creates and maintains a cartography of
power (Deleuze, 1998; see also Foucault, 1980, 1990). It is a view of the police,
specifically the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), adopted by Mike Davis (1990),
w h o emphasizes the development of helicopter surveillance and the increased
interlinking of the police with other security mechanisms to achieve wider and deeper
control. This is the police as developers of a 'space program', a significant cog in a
confusing but ultimately seamless web of social control, which seeks relentlessly for more
control, for a more sophisticated political technology, for a more intensive and
thoroughgoing penetration into daily life. Joining power and knowledge in a tactical
geopolitics, this network, according to Foucault, operates on its own logic, satisfying its
o w n appetite for control largely autonomous from the discourses of laws, rights and
central powers.
Foucault's interest in linking power and knowledge via an analysis of geopolitics is by
n o w well known, and his spatially sensitive analytics have been usefully employed by
STEVE HERBERT
49
several geographers. Hannah (1993), for example, demonstrates h o w attempts to control
Native Americans in the 19th century were made difficult before the establishment of an
effective grid of power; the subject population resisted control by resisting locatedness.
Similarly, Robinson (1990) shows h o w apartheid worked as a quite specifically spatialized
mode of social control. It is clear from these accounts (see also Lowman, 1986, 1989) that
modern systems of disciplinary control rest quite fundamentally u p o n the establishment
of a system that exhaustively maps and monitors those that it disciplines; surveillance in
the modern era links knowledge, power and space (Dandeker, 1990; Ogborn, 1993a).
Centralized police forces did not receive much of Foucault's analytic attention and were
mentioned only sporadically in his more general discussions of discipline. However, it is
clear that he saw the police in terms of disciplinary power:
But, although the police as an institution were certainly organized in the form of
a state apparatus, and although this was certainly linked directly to the centre of
political sovereignty, the type of power that it exercises, the mechanisms it
operates and the elements to which it applies them are specific. It is an
apparatus that must be coextensive with the entire social body and not only by
the extreme limits that it embraces, but by the minuteness of the details it is
concerned with. (Foucault, 1977: 213)
Police power, clearly, is understood here as an instance of the type of decentralized,
capillary power characteristic of the disciplines, extensively enwraping society while it
intensively concerns itself with minute details. Further, policing rests fundamentally upon
a political geography (Fyfe, 1991); the effort to attend to minute details involves the
diagramming and controlling of space.
Any history of the development of police forces, or any contemporary account of their
practices, must recognize the cogency of Foucault's insights. While policing was largely
haphazard and reactive in the 1800s (Fogelson, 1977; Richardson, 1974), it has become
increasingly 'professionalized' throughout this century, such that contemporary forces are
extensively regulated bureaucracies with increasingly sophisticated technologies at their
disposal (Manning, 1992; Walker, 1977, 1989). Telephones, radios and automobiles, for
example, came to be united in a system that was designed to provide rapid police
response to citizen requests. This communications system, more recently, was augmented
by in-car computer terminals which allow officers not only to communicate with
supervisors, dispatchers and other officers, but also to access information concerning
vehicles and suspects. Such information is quite extensive; current databases in Los
Angeles, for example, enable officers to access information on motor vehicles, stolen
property, firearms and criminal records. Indeed, the LAPD has emerged during the
contemporary era as the leading US example of a professionalized, technologically
sophisticated department (Gazell, 1976; Schiesl, 1990). It was, for example, a pioneer in
the use of helicopters as part of patrol operations. Helicopters literally provide another
dimension to police oversight, enabling a capacity to monitor suspects' movements far in
excess of on-ground efforts. Also, in more recent times, the LAPD and other police
organizations have become increasingly specialized. Distinct units concern themselves
with narrowly defined crimes to exploit particularized knowledge about those crimes.
Thus, specialized divisions focus exclusively on gangs, narcotics, forgery, and so on.
Together, these advances in technology and these shifts in organizational structure
represent significant transformations in the techniques of the police, heralding a larger
capacity to monitor and intrude (see Gordon, 1991). It is clear, in other words, that an
elaborate and sophisticated technology of discipline undergirds contemporary policing.
50
The geopolitics of the police
This no more obvious than in the structure practices, and capabilities of the Los Angeles
Police Department.
Because of its high level of technological and organizational sophistication, the LAPD
is an unusually appropriate object of attention for an examination of the geopolitics of
c o n t e m p o r a r y discipline. To undertake such an examination is to take seriously Foucault's
insistence on studying the 'how' of p o w e r and its instantiation in the further and finer
reaches of the disciplinary network. Further, such an examination provides the best
means of assessing the utility of Foucault's analytics for c o m p r e h e n d i n g the practices of
such agencies of m o d e r n discipline as the police.
As the following reveals, an ethnographic analysis of the LAPD provides some
important cautions against an u n n u a n c e d Foucauldian interpretation of m o d e r n
discipline. Foucault's s w e e p i n g and powerful rhetoric can seduce one into such a
simplistic reading; his b o l d formulations make it easy to overlook his o w n admonitions to
find the ruptures and inconsistencies within the network. Several authors (e.g. Callinicos,
1982; Dews, 1984; Garland, 1990; Ignatieff, 1983; Poulantzas, 1978) have argued that
Foucault pays rather less attention to the limits of and resistances to disciplinary p o w e r
than he might, and thereby perhaps encourages a confusion b e t w e e n the ideal of the
Panopticon and the reality of m o d e r n discipline. As Driver (1985) has noted, this line of
critique may itself be an overstatement, because it d o w n p l a y s the cautionary notes
Foucault interspersed within his commentary on m o d e r n discipline. The goal here is to
give more prominent play to these cautionary notes, to work against a view of at least one
agency of discipline, the LAPD, as capable of seamless surveillance and control of the
spaces it patrols. A closer look at the LAPD reveals the ruptures and contradictions that
blur a n d limit the Panopticon's vision.
A closer look inside the Los Angeles Police Department
A second vignette
A call comes over the radio regarding a shooting on St Andrews Place. W h e n the officer
I am with arrives, two patrol cars are there already, as is an ambulance. Two more patrol
cars will arrive shortly, so that ultimately seven officers are at the scene. Although there
is clearly a v i c t i m - - w h o is being l o a d e d into the ambulance as w e arrive--little else is
certain. The officers s p e n d about 45 minutes talking with residents of the n e i g h b o r h o o d
and examining the street and sidewalk for such evidence as spent bullet casings. It is not
clear w h e t h e r the victim was also carrying a gun, and if so w h e r e he hid it, whether there
were one or two episodes of shooting, and w h e t h e r the shooters were on foot or in a car.
It is also unclear w h e t h e r this is gang related, and if so, which gangs are involved and
why. Judging from the graffiti, this is apparently BSA territory, but the officers cannot
agree on what the acronym means. Further, they w o n d e r whether BSA is a tagger group
or a full-blown gang, and just w h o its enemies might be. Some officers have noticed rival
graffiti in the neighborhood, but what these a c r o n y m s - - M O T and T I K - - s t a n d for is
unclear.
As for this particular crime, it is unlikely to b e investigated, much less solved. If it is
gang related, it will u n d o u b t e d l y be r e s p o n d e d to, although in a fashion that will again
only involve the police tangentially. After the next retaliatory shooting, the police will
again have little role but to put u p crime-scene tape, collect bullet casings, interview a few
neighbors, and then turn over their m e a g e r evidence to o v e r w o r k e d detectives w h o are
likely to ignore it.
STEVEHERBEUT
51
On this night, what is striking is not police power, but police impotence. The relentless,
lethal struggle between rival gangs in Los Angeles is something the police, particularly
those on regular patrol, cannot even understand, much less stanch. In this case, the
exclusion of the police is desired by those participating in the carnage. More than just
wanting to prevent the police from getting too close a look at their membership and
activities, gang members do not participate with police investigations of their shootings
because they want to preserve the right of retaliation for themselves.
Here, then, the police run up against very real limits to their power. For many reasons,
street gang members refuse to cooperate with police investigations and engage in a
number of successful informal tactics to elude capture. For example, they frequently use
stolen cars for drive-by shootings or for robberies, they utilize obscure hiding places to
conceal drugs or other contraband, and they exploit their local geographical knowledge
to speed their escapes. Also, gang members frequently intimidate neighborhood residents
into not cooperating with the police (Grinc, 1994). And these are just some of the informal
techniques potential suspects can use to elude the police net.
However, limits to police investigative efforts are not just external to the police; the
disciplinary net itself is not as well knit as casual observation might suggest. In fact, the
very information network that provides seeming evidence of extensive police power may
also serve to limit the police. For instance, the mobile display terminal that allows the
police to locate stolen cars and gather information about potential suspects may also be
deskilling officers to the point where their capacity to read space is deteriorating. That is
because the MDT is used for more than just finding stolen cars. Each incident that the
officers are assigned gets an incident number, which the officers can use to bring up all
available information about the call onto their screen. Thus, the officers are able to learn
everything that the 911 operator learned from the person w h o telephoned her, which
typically includes information about the alleged crime and a description of the suspect.
Increasingly, according to veteran officers and veterans in the LAPD's communications
division, police officers are relying entirely on the MDT for all the relevant information on
a call, and relying less and less on their own observational skills. As a result, the art of
what is called 'observational policing'--the capacity to witness evidence of criminal
actions amidst the swirl of urban life--may be dying, and with it, one aspect of the police
capacity to intervene in social life. Veteran officers report a decline in arrests initiated by
officers who, on routine patrol, sniff out evidence of criminality, engaging in what the
officers refer to as 'pooping and snooping'.
The MDT, therefore, may well be a mechanism by which the officers can locate and
control, but it may also work to disable equally effective means of surveillance. The pride
and care that officers formerly took in developing their observational skills is displaced by
frustration when the MDT does not provide them with all the information they need. This
is an illustrative example of how the impersonal technological surveillance described by
Foucault can work to undermine the reach and intensity of the disciplinary network, and
reveals a paradox endemic to the increasingly technologized nature of police practice. On
the one hand, the database is larger and the capacity to access it easier. On the other hand,
by putting officers in patrol cars and linking them more organically to the information
network, current patrol practice isolates the police from the community, thus often
making it difficult for them to gather the information necessary to solve crimes.
It is important to remember that the elaborate communications network established by
modern police departments was implemented to map and monitor not just suspects,
but also the officers themselves. Without such a sophisticated communications system,
early police forces were unable to prevent the laziness and corruption that flourished
52
The geopolitics of the police
amongst officers (Fogelson, 1977; Rubinstein, 1973). Currently, officers are regularly
sent messages from dispatchers and supervisors via the radio and the MDT, and their
reported movements are inscribed by the dispatchers into an ongoing record of their
activity. Nonetheless, the network is not entirely effective in disciplining the disciplinaries: officers possess a raft of techniques to elude capture by the system. For
example, they can delay reporting that they have 'cleared' a call, and thus buy time
until they are given their next assignment. Or if they fail to clear a number of calls, and
thus develop an apparent backlog of responsibilities, they know the dispatcher will not
give them any more assignments. Conversely, they can exaggerate their effectiveness
to supervisors by reporting they are 'at the scene' before they actually arrive, thus
giving a false sense of their ability to respond quickly to calls. In these ways, police
officers themselves resist the monitoring mechanisms of the communications network
in which they are enmeshed.
It is the case in Los Angeles, and other major cities, that more technologized police
operations are part and parcel of what Lea and Young (1984) term 'military policing'.
Drawn away from a close connection to the community and plugged instead into a
sophisticated surveillance network, police officers develop a less-nuanced capacity to
read and understand what is occurring outside the car window. It becomes easier for
officers to bluntly categorize people as either good or bad, and to move aggressively
against the latter group. Such aggressive maneuvers are buttressed by a culture of
militarism. This is most obviously displayed by the LAPD's reliance upon helicopters
(termed, in militaristic lingo, 'Air Support'), which are used to provide literal oversight to
patrol operations and assist in such displays of aggressive derring-do as vehicle
pursuits.
Such a militaristic approach, however, often works to alienate the police from the
community. In Los Angeles and elsewhere, the police have often adopted an aggressive
stance vis-a-vis crime-prone communities, engaging in such pro-active measures as
random searches and seizures to convey a strong sense of presence in those communities.
The LAPD, in the words of one of its sergeants, was an 'ass-kicking department', at least
in the era before the beating of motorist Rodney King in 1991 (see Acuna, 1984; Escobar,
1993; Fogelson, 1971; Raine, 1967). Such aggressive policing, however, breeds
tremendous distrust between the police and the citizenry. This has the effect of limiting
the effectiveness of the police, because the judicial resolution of the vast majority of
criminal actions requires information and eye-witness accounts that only the community
can provide (Eck, 1982; Skogan and Antunes, 1979). The seeming strength of the
militaristic, aggressive pose, in other words, actually weakens the control and capture
capacities of the police.
Further, the introduction of sophisticated information technologies appears to have
little effect on the bureaucratic workings of police forces (Manning, 1992), which means
that the various subdivisions within these forces continue long-standing practices that
limit the sharing of information. The increased specialization of departments has led to
efforts on the parts of various divisions to demonstrate their worth by solving crimes with
little assistance (Ericson, 1982; Rubinstein, 1973). Organizational standing and prestige, in
other words, run counter to organizational efficiency. Thus, a specialized gang unit in the
LAPD, organized at the more centralized bureau level, rarely attends roll calls in the more
decentralized divisions from which patrol officers are dispatched. The gang unit positions
itself as a bastion of expertise and removes itself from the less prestigious world of patrol.
In so doing, however, it renders itself and the organization less able to curtail gang activity
by limiting the flow of information across bureaucratic lines.
STEVE.HERBERT
53
A too simplistic look at the technological and organizational sophistication of the LAPD
can easily overestimate the department's control and capture capabilities. The depersonalized technology of its communication network does increase the capacity to monitor the
movements of suspects and to provide up-to-date information about the legality of their
activities. It also helps police supervisors maintain oversight of those on patrol. However,
it leads to a decline in observational skills and it spawns a new range of tactics for officers
themselves to avoid detection. Organizational sophistication similarly does not necessarily translate into seamless disciplinary control, because it creates internal political
tensions that discourage inter-organizational cooperation. And to the extent that these
technological and organizational developments encourage a confrontational style of
policing, they discourage the police-community interaction needed to capture and
convict most criminals.
An appreciation for a nuanced look at the disciplinary power of the LAPD is further
d e e p e n e d by examining not only how the department is internally at odds with itself, but
also by investigating the variety of determinants of its practices. It is useful, in other
words, as Driver (1994) suggests, to locate disciplinary networks within their appropriate
political and social contexts. This is an important antidote to Foucault's tendency to see
the rise of disciplinary power not in terms of institutions nor interests (Driver, 1985;
Jessop, 1990), but as a manifestation of a general expansiveness of a more amorphous
network of power. This relentless focus on power, and the development of the allegedly
far-reaching disciplinary network as an outgrowth of power, makes less obvious the
complicated construction of that network, the panoply of often-contradicting discourses
that constitute the operations of an agency such as the LAPD. Many of these discourses
emerge from the internal subculture of the LAPD, while others intrude into the
disciplinary network from without.
A closer look around the Los Angeles Police Department
It is difficult to detail exhaustively all of the discourses shaping police practice. However,
an elaboration of some of them demonstrates the necessity of resisting the impulse to
understand the structuring of the tactics of the LAPD largely in terms of a mostly
autonomous reign of power. It also underscores the importance of grounding an analysis
of disciplinary networks in a wide-ranging social analysis.
One important discourse that shapes police practice is the law, the logic of which
Foucault was at pains to distinguish from that of the disciplines (see, especially, Foucault,
1980: ch. 5). However, it is impossible to understand most disciplinary agencies,
especially the police, without examining the law. It is the law that defines the police's
function and power, as well as the various crimes the police are responsible for detecting
(Grimshaw and Jefferson, 1987). One of the effects of the law, however, is to restrict
police access to certain spaces (Fyfe, 1992; Stinchombe, 1963). Again, an incident
provides a vivid illustration.
A w o m a n calls the police and complains that her neighbor to the rear is throwing
bottles over the fence and onto her driveway. This is not only a nuisance, but a
violation of a restraining order. When the police knock on the door of the alleged
offender's house, a friend answers. As she responds to the police's questions, she
reaches for a folding chair, opens it, sets it squarely in front of the door, sits down,
and continues to talk. Her action is unambiguous, a clear statement that she knows the
police are not allowed to enter without her permission. Unable to enter and question
the offender, the officers have little choice but to leave. Their next potential step, to
54
The geopolitics of the police
secure a search warrant, is not likely to be pursued, given the comparatively unserious
nature of the case.
The woman, by asserting her legally defined rights to thwart a police search, has quite
easily and effectively brought the investigation to a halt. What is of interest is not just the
evidence of another limit to police intrusiveness, but the very real presence of the law,
and of rights explicated by law, in the interworkings of a disciplinary agency. Despite
Foucault's effort, in Alan Hunt's terms, to accomplish an 'expulsion of law' (1993) from his
analysis of the rise of the disciplinary network, any thoroughgoing understanding of the
geopolitics of the police cannot ignore it.
What this incident further illustrates is not only that law and discipline are complexly
intertwined (Herbert, 1995; Ogborn, 1993b), but that the law itself occasionally runs at
cross-purposes. Although the officers arrive at the woman's door legally empowered to
arrest the violator of the restraining order, restrictions on access to private property
prevent them from enacting their legally defined authority. The barrier the w o m a n erects
with her folding chair serves, for the moment, to check one legally empowered move
with another.
It is worth noting that the boundary between private and public space can be a
resource for police officers as well as a barrier. For example, an LAPD officer concerned
to stop drug trafficking in and around an apartment building used the private-public
distinction to her advantage. She secured a key to the building from the owner, along with
his permission to arrest any non-residents she found on the premises for trespassing. She
was thus able to put pressure on the drug dealers, most of w h o m did not in fact live in
the building. The arrests for trespassing, made legally salient by the definition of private
space, were used as a means toward the end of eliminating the drug sales.
Besides the law, there are other discourses, developed largely within the police
subculture, that are similarly crucial in constituting the practices of the police, including
those of safety, morality and bureaucratic efficiency. The discourse of safety emphasizes
the establishment of practices to preserve officers' lives by ensuring that they possess
optimal information about a given scene and can respond forcefully and pro-actively if
necessary. The discourse of morality constitutes the police as the 'good guys' protecting
society from the predatory tendencies of the 'bad guys', thereby infusing police practice
with a deep sense of moral rightness. And bureaucratic efficiency tries to ensure a smooth
flow of c o m m a n d and control within the organization, such that the overall capacity to
map and control space is maximized.
My intent here is less to explain the significance of each of these, but rather to draw
attention to their importance, and to their sometimes contradictory tendencies. The
imperative to be safe may conflict with the imperative to abide by the law, when, for
instance, officers search a suspect they consider suspicious without clear legal ground for
doing so. Or, the imperative to be safe may conflict with the desire to clear a 'bad guy' off
the street w h e n an officer chooses to pursue a fleeing felon at high speeds along surface
streets. The complex interactions between these various discourses is usefully illustrated
by the following incident from the fieldwork.
The sergeant is surprised that he is being requested by two of his better officers;
confident in their decisions, this pair rarely call for supervisory assistance. When he
arrives at the six-floor apartment building, the two officers and a citizen are standing in
front. The citizen lives on the fifth floor and is the person w h o summoned the police. This,
it turns out, is his fourth such call in the past six months. His concern is a mother and child
w h o live in the apartment above him. He claims that the child can be regularly heard
jumping up and down and claiming that he is hungry. The man further claims that the
STEVE HERBERT
55
w o m a n and the child have recently visited a child service agency because of alleged
abuse.
The officers have s u m m o n e d the sergeant because of the sensitive nature of the
situation. For his part, the sergeant takes little time making his decision: the officers will
do nothing. There is, he says, no solid evidence of a crime, certainly nothing serious
e n o u g h to warrant knocking the d o o r down. For that, he says, he w o u l d n e e d loud
screaming a n d / o r the sounds of a b o d y being struck. He instructs the officers to file a
report and make sure that it reaches the appropriate detective the next morning.
On the one hand, it is clear that the sergeant uses the law to define this situation as one
where action is not warranted. The available evidence does not fit the legal definition of
a potential crime, and thus does not warrant the strong action of forcefully entering
private space. On the other hand, it is notable that the sergeant does not at least knock
on the d o o r to see if the w o m a n will voluntarily answer questions a n d / o r allow the
officers to examine her child, an action he might feel morally c o m p e l l e d to take. It is thus
p r o b a b l e that it is more than the law that inhibits the sergeant, because he is not legally
prevented from knocking on the door. It is likely that the sergeant is simply not interested
in confronting the woman, because tense family situations are notoriously difficult to
handle, often b e c o m i n g inflamed w h e n the police arrive. The sergeant is u n d o u b t e d l y
afraid that the situation may get out of hand, and that he may then be forced to take an
action that could, d o w n the line, be questioned b y a supervisor. It is better, as a result, to
file a report and make the situation s o m e o n e else's problem. While morality may push the
sergeant toward the w o m a n ' s door, considerations of law, safety and his bureaucratic
standing convince him to retreat. The variety of discourses that structure police practice,
in this and other instances, push and pull officers in different directions, posing significant
dilemmas for them on a regular basis.
By drawing attention to the variety of discourses that undergird the geopolitics of the
police, the intent is not just to challenge the apparently seamless nature of the disciplinary
network that emerges from an u n n u a n c e d reading of Foucault, but also to challenge the
overweening emphasis on p o w e r for power's sake that seems to drive the network,
according to Foucault. Much of what motivates these discourses is not just power, nor
does the working out of these discourses necessarily e x p a n d the overall p o w e r of the
network.
Getting b e y o n d Foucault's sometimes excessive emphasis on p o w e r also enables us to
recognize the important constitutive presence of other discourses whose primary
dynamic lies largely external to the disciplinary network, but whose logics b e c o m e
entwined in disciplinary actions. I want to focus here on two such discourses, those
associated with capitalism and machismo. If w e return to the shooting on St Andrews
Place, and look more closely at the reasons w h y the gangs rebuff police investigations, we
can witness the salience of both of these.
What is emerging from several recent analyses of urban street gangs (Hagedorn, 1988;
Jankowski, 1991; Padilla, 1992) is that many are prototypical capitalist enterprises. There
exists a strict hierarchy of responsibilities and powers, such that the 'chiefs' at the top,
w h o control the disbursement of drugs and revenues, wield an ultimately exploitative
p o w e r over the street-level sellers. Relatedly, m e m b e r s h i p in gangs quite actively
promotes the quintessential capitalist consciousness of competition, wherein various
'firms' engage in often literally cut-throat challenges to markets. This is most obviously
evident by the continual battles over turf, which are very much battles over markets.
But battles over turf spring from more than just economic motivations. It is here that the
discourse of machismo plays its deadly hand. In order to establish themselves as 'players'
56
The geopolitics of the police
in the gang hierarchy, to demonstrate their loyalty and their unflinching courage, urban
youths are compelled to respond to each shooting with a shooting of their own
(Anderson, 1990; Shakur, 1993). As a result, a long and confused history of attacks and
retaliations evolves, as shootings beget shootings in a continuous manner such that the
underlying reasons for the dispute become hard to discern.
One is reminded of the myth of the Western frontier, where unflinching and sometimes
violent responses to a range of unpredictable challenges was the means by which one's
masculine selfhood was defined. Interestingly, this idea is implicitly accepted in the
informal culture of the LAPD, where young officers anxious for action are referred to as
'ghetto gunfighters' who have fallen victim to the 'John Wayne Syndrome'. One can thus
see how the culture of machismo helps constitute both the gangs and the police,
structuring their interaction so that each side has something very vital to prove in their
encounters.
My larger point here, however, is to suggest how the overarching dynamics of
capitalism and machismo help to constitute both the urban reality the police confront,
as well as help constitute active resistance to police intervention. Driven by enduring
and systemic poverty to achieve whatever profits drug sales provide, by the constant
competition of territorial rivals, by the impelling need to establish their masculinity,
urban gangs engage in activities that attract the attention of the police and other
agencies of discipline. The imperatives of economic desperation and masculine
insecurity, however, override any police efforts to curtail gang activity; the police may
arrest occasional suspects, but they can hardly arrest the process from its continuing
lethality.
Conclusion: working with and on Foucault
Foucault's analyses of modern disciplinary power usefully draw attention to the outskirts
of the networks of that power. His methodological injunction to study the 'how' of power
in ascending analyses shifts focus from the center to the periphery, where the finer and
wider play of discipline is most importantly evident. At its points of extension, the
sophisticated political technology of discipline instantiates itself in a local geopolitics. And
the police are key social agents in this local geopolitics. Empowered to monitor and
patrol, and enabled by a sophisticated infrastructure of information and communication,
police officers, in the modern era, increasingly intrude into more intimate spheres to
regulate individual conduct (Walker, 1989). The expansive reach of the police and the
sophisticated techniques of their surveillance was made evident by the opening vignette,
a case where considerable control capacities mapped and detained an individual suspect
determined to elude capture.
Nonetheless, the significance of such scenarios can easily be overstated, and can help
obscure the more complex, limited and contradictory nature of the disciplinary network.
While the metaphor of the Panopticon is seductive, and while it is tempting to see its eye
materialized as the nightsun of an LAPD helicopter, it remains necessary to recognize how
the reach of the police is hardly limitless. Not only are the police actively, and often
successfully, resisted by such opponents as street gangs, but they are restricted by their
own internal dynamics. Further, aggressive activities that seem to evince strong police
power may actually limit the capacity to corral criminals by dissuading citizens from
providing invaluable information. Thus, it is necessary to keep the cautionary Foucault in
mind when analyzing the police, the Foucault who acknowledged the importance of
resistance, incompleteness and contradiction.
STEVEHERBERT
57
It is also n e c e s s a r y to fully s o c i o l o g i z e a disciplinary a g e n c y such as the LAPD. This
m e a n s e s c a p i n g Foucault's m e t a p h y s i c s of p o w e r , c h o o s i n g instead to nest the practices
of police officers w i t h i n the variety of discourses that structure them, a n d to elaborate
h o w t h e s e discourses pass t h r o u g h disciplinary action. An a p p r e c i a t i o n of these
discourses not o n l y u n d e r s c o r e s the c o m p l e x i t y o f the daily geopolitical practices of the
LAPD, but also draws c o n t i n u e d attention to the lack of s e a m l e s s n e s s within its n e t w o r k .
Different d i s c o u r s e s pull officers in different directions, particularly w h e n , as is the case
in c o n t e m p o r a r y Los Angeles, the d e p a r t m e n t is the object of o p e n political struggle. The
'ass-kicking' m a c h i s m o that has c h a r a c t e r i z e d the culture of the LAPD ( I n d e p e n d e n t
C o m m i s s i o n o n the Los A n g e l e s Police D e p a r t m e n t , 1991) is n o w u n d e r attack, a n d is
explicitly c h a l l e n g e d b y a n e w r e f o r m m o v e m e n t , c o m m u n i t y - b a s e d policing. Just h o w
this internal struggle will play itself out is uncertain, but the struggle is an e v e r - p r e s e n t
reality within the ranks of LAPD.
The analysis h e r e p r o v i d e s strong s u p p o r t for Foucault's m e t h o d o l o g i c a l injunction to
study the local geopolitics of p o w e r , to m a p the b o u n d a r i e s w h e r e discipline m e e t s
resistance. Such analyses p r o v i d e the richest m e a n s of assessing h o w disciplinary p o w e r
and the n e t w o r k it establishes d o a n d d o not w o r k in the m o d e r n era, h o w the r e a c h of
discipline is b o t h e n h a n c e d a n d curtailed by the swirl of impulses that structure it. As
i m p o r t a n t as it is to a c k n o w l e d g e the m e a n s the LAPD e m p l o y e d to capture the car thief,
it is e q u a l l y i m p o r t a n t to r e m e m b e r h o w and w h y so m a n y others get away.
Acknowledgements
I w o u l d like to thank Katherine Beckett, J o s e p h Nevins a n d three a n o n y m o u s r e v i e w e r s
for helpful c o m m e n t s o n earlier v e r s i o n s of this paper.
Note
1. All of the vignettes described here were drawn from field observations of LAPD officers. The
fieldwork occurred over an eight-month period and consisted of nearly 65 ride-alongs with
different units.
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