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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines police unionism in Brazil, India, and the US to better understand some intractable tensions between demands for security and democracy, and to consider how to construct context dependent policies of institutional transformations in policing that will promote equity and justice.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines police unionism in Brazil, India, and the US to better understand some intractable tensions between demands for security and democracy, and to consider how to construct context dependent policies of institutional transformations in policing that will promote equity and justice. Based on data collected through an ongoing collaborative ethnography, as part of the first transnationally coordinated longitudinal study comparing police unionism in the global south and global north, it aims to critically rethink the role of these organizations and movements in political struggles over governance reform. The analysis will focus specifically on how (and whether) members of three different police unions in the listed countries conceive of their mission and activities as “political” movements in the particular context in which they operate. Some claim that they are not political because they do not officially or financially support a specific political party; some question being labeled as such because they focus primarily on things like employment law rather than “issues”; others conceive their work as aligned with revolutionary movements aimed at fighting fascism, or with conservative campaigns to stave off those very movements. Comparing and contrasting different visions of “the political” among actors whose work is often idealized as bureaucratic, impartial, indeed apolitical, we may address questions about the role of police unions, and police officers more generally, in ongoing controversies over whether and how to defund, detask, demilitarize, dismantle, or otherwise transform policing and governance institutions in response to global calls for reform and even abolition.