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Paper Short Abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork with a local police unit in a socially disadvantaged Copenhagen suburb, this paper investigates how various kinds of affective and bodily intimacies shape the everyday logics of local policing and security provision.

Paper Abstract:

‘Proximity,’ ‘community,’ and ‘local embeddedness’ have become policing buzzwords in recent years (e.g. Biden 2020; Jassal 2020; Pinto & Do Carmo 2016). Such scalar configurations, however—‘the community’, ‘the local’, etc.—are rarely neutral markers of socio-material magnitude, but tend instead to operate as politicized short-hands for particular kinds of relations between places, people and the institutions that govern them (Tsing 2000, Howitt 1998). This is where this paper, which draws on fieldwork with a local police unit in a socially marginalized Copenhagen suburb, takes its cue.

Placing concrete relationships between police officers and local residents at the centre of attention, the paper reflects ethnographically on how various kinds of affective and bodily intimacies (Berlant 1998, Povinelli 2006) shape the everyday logics of local policing and security provision in the Danish capital. The paper’s intervention, then, is to move beyond familiar analytical figures such as power/resistance or state/citizen in order to highlight the various emotional and corporeal registers involved in ‘close encounters’ between police and residents. In this regard, the concept of ‘intimacy’ plays a dual role for the paper: 1) as an empirical concept, as police officers have been tasked with enacting nærhed vis-à-vis local neighbourhoods (nærhed literally means ‘proximity,’ but comes with ‘intimacy’ as a strong double connotation), and 2) as an analytical heuristic that encourages us to explore how policing practices produce, and are themselves conditioned by, complex mutual attachments that transgress institutional spaces through their inscription in officers’ as well as residents’ social and material biographies.