Between vigilantism and bureaucracy: Improving our understanding of police work in Nigeria and South Africa
Between vigilantism and bureaucracy: Improving our understanding of police work in Nigeria and South Africa
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在私刑和官僚主义之间：提高我们对尼日利亚和南非警察工作的理解
DOI：
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发表时间：
2015
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Olly Owen
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
S. Cooper;Olly Owen
迄今为止，许多关于非洲治安的分析学术都集中在非国家行为者身上。在这样做的时候，它可能会忽视国家行为者和国家地位，而这些必须按照他们自己的条件以及他们理应服务的人民的眼睛来理解。本文试图通过探索尼日利亚和南非公民寻求与国家警察接触的背景，来发展我们在这方面的理论和经验理解。在这样做的过程中，它突出了警察联系可能起到的三个特别重要的作用，但目前这些用途被忽视了。州警察可以允许、授权或限制其他人通过非正式监管干预进行的犯罪控制。他们可以通过立案行使独特的官僚权力，该案件被视为记录是非的记录，用于日常生活的谈判，而不仅仅是作为一种法律起诉的手段。最后，通过采取“非正式”的行动，警察可以行使一种可以被称为“警察义勇军”的强制权力，公民可能会试图利用这种权力来达到自己的目的。因此，我们认为，我们应该认识到，即使在国家警察部队达不到预期的情况下，公众对其服务的需求仍然很高，并更密切地分析人们利用和帮助复制他们所谴责的警察部队的方式。
To date, much of the analytical scholarship on policing in Africa has centred on non-state actors. In doing so, it risks neglecting state actors and statehood, which must be understood on their own terms as well as through the eyes of the people they supposedly serve. This article seeks to develop our theoretical and empirical understanding in this respect by exploring the contexts in which citizens seek to engage state police in Nigeria and South Africa. In doing so it highlights three particularly important uses that police contact may serve, that are currently being overlooked. State police can permit, authorize or limit crime control performed by others through informal regulatory intervention. They can exercise a unique bureaucratic power by opening a case which is valued as a record of right and wrongs to be used in the negotiation of everyday life, not simply as a means to legal prosecution. And finally, taking action ‘off the books’, the police can exercise a coercive power that can be termed ‘police vigilantism’, which citizens may try to harness for their own ends. We therefore argue that we should recognize the continued high public demand for the services of state police forces even in contexts where they fall short of expectations, and more closely analyse the ways in which people utilize and help to reproduce the police forces they condemn.