| My study began with the claim that no political regime can be truly democratic until policing becomes so. Despite the recent spread of democratic regimes in the world, episodes of police violence and authoritarian practices of policing continue thriving and undermining democracy. The democratization of policing requires democratizing the use of discretionary power which occurs in the gaps and glitches of the law. My study characterizes police power as a type of governing power, at once executive, judicial, and quasi-legislative. Police power needs to be studied by students of democratization. I question representations of the rule of law that inspire most views on policing in political science, and propose to recuperate a classical understanding of the law that incorporates discretionary judgment.;At the heart of my argument lies the concept of police discretion, which I understand as theoretically rooted in the notion of sovereign power and regulated through legitimizing narratives. Engaging in a critical dialogue with the work of Aristotle, Foucault, and Agamben, I approach policing as a capillary form of state sovereignty and the most literal expression of governance.;Narratives inform the action of those who police us. They provide the raw material for the exercise of discretionary judgment. My study combines the review of canonical and postmodern works in political theory with a comparative empirical approach to examine narratives on policing and police discretion. It is my contention that narratives, stories, and tropes make a crucial difference in forms of exercising police discretion. By drawing on both theory and empirical data, I identify narrative elements informing practices of policing. To use discretion democratically is to interpret interstices and glitches of the law in an inclusive manner that draws on egalitarian beliefs. The comparative analysis of police narratives drawn from over 70 tape-recorded interviews with police officers from Argentina, Uruguay, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and the United States gives empirical support to my argument. The analysis of interviews serves to map police narratives in different contexts. Certain narratives seem to reproduce globally. My study stresses the specificity of the political and governing aspects involved in policing. |
