Just Police Violence: Liberal ideology and the critique of violence from Walter Benjamin to Black Lives Matter

Abstract

Policing is broadly legitimate – even while imperfect and in need of reform. This axiom of liberal political theory and practice is shaken by movements like Black Lives Matter, which confront and expose carceral violence as the routine, deadly edge of racial capitalism. Thinking with abolitionist currents within these movements, this paper engages critical theory to unpick the ideological discourses that legitimise police violence in ‘real existing liberalism’. I argue that justifications of policing replicate the ‘analytic atomism’ and mythologisation of law that Neu’s Just Liberal Violence identifies in defences of sweatshops, torture, and war. I bring together Benjamin’s classic excavation of sovereign power in the policing function with the experiences of today’s policed subjects to reveal the limitations of liberal appeals to ‘the rule of law’. The standard figuration of oppressive violence as exceptional, deviant, and unlawful, I argue, serves to legitimise the institutions in and through which that violence is normalised.