(2022) ‘It’s like crossing a border everyday’: Police-migrant encounters in a postcolonial city. Journal of Urban Affairs. doi/full/10.1080/07352166.2022.2091448.
How are migrant communities policed in cities of the Global South where racially securitized discourses and colonial institutional legacies shape contemporary police practice? Critical criminologists advise that postcolonial perspectives offer valuable insights on imperial legacies, while allowing us to expand conceptual and empirical analyses of crime, policing, justice, and social order. Building on this agenda, this paper explores the intersection of postcolonial policing and immigration enforcement in the context of urban encounters between police officers and Afghan and Bengali migrants in urban Pakistan. It considers how the securitization of migration and migrants impacts their routine interactions with street-level enforcement officers. Based on ethnographic findings from Karachi, this paper argues that migrant encounters with urban policing can be captured by what I call the “postcolonial condition of policing” wherein prejudiced security policies enable expansions in police power without addressing structural inequalities within the police, facilitating reliance upon informal procedures and practices.
(2021) Policing COVID-19 through procedural informality in Pakistan, Policing and Society, 31(5), 583-600.
How do police officers respond to public emergencies in developing countries where state institutions struggle to protect citizens and officers alike? This paper investigates police response to the COVID-19 crisis in Pakistan and develops an analytical framework of ‘procedural informality’, a condition whereby state policies are constructed and conveyed to state officials with the tacit acceptance that these are likely to be implemented through informal practice. Procedural informality, therefore, is central to official state practice. It is argued that procedural informality manifested itself in Pakistan during the COVID-19 pandemic in three ways: (1) due to a lack of support from the government, it enabled officers to rely on interpersonal connections within the private sector; (2) intra-organisationally, it forced the police to make hasty decisions due to contradictory policies that strained the workforce, but also allowed it to creatively manage demand; and (3) it compelled the police to respond to non-compliance with a heavy hand, whilst equipping them to protect vulnerable communities and maintain individual relationships. In this way, procedural informality enabled the police to try to meet demand with flexibility, which was encouraged and expected by those interacting with the police. Procedural informality moves beyond the formal-informal dichotomy to show how informality facilitates the implementation of formal policy goals, and the operations of street-level bureaucrats, especially during a crisis. This paper contributes to debates on informality within state institutions and in state practice, while providing empirical insights on police response to COVID-19 from a developing country.
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(2020) Policing in pandemics: A systematic review and best practices for police response to COVID-19, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction
Co-authored with Julian Laufs.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a range of unforeseen and unprecedented challenges for police departments worldwide. In light of these challenges, the goal of this review is to understand the potential short- and long-term effects of disasters and public health emergencies on policing organisations and officers. A total of 72 studies were eligible for inclusion, based on their focus on policing and police work during and in the aftermath of natural disasters and public health emergencies. Through an extensive review, we compile and analyse the most common issues and best practices identified in the literature, and discuss ‘what works’ in the context of policing such emergencies. The literature reveals four categories of issues predominantly raised in this context, namely police-community relations, the mental health and wellbeing of officers, intra-organisational challenges, as well as inter-agency collaboration and cooperation. Based on our review and analysis, we offer a list of recommendations relevant for policing the current COVID-19 outbreak. The findings of this review have immediate implications for policing during COVID-19 but also cover long-term effects, providing valuable recommendations for after the crises has passed.
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(2019) ‘Brothers in arms’? A police-paramilitary partnership in Karachi, Policing and Society, 31(2), 131-147.
This paper explores the relationship between two state institutions, a civilian police and a paramilitary force, jointly tasked with maintaining law and order in Karachi. I describe this system of pluralised policing as a ‘competitive-network model’, in which unstructured cooperation between police and paramilitary officers coincides with competition and inter-agency conflict. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Karachi between 2015 and 2019, I analyse the impact of the competitive-network model on the civilian police. I argue that this relationship model causes institutional disruptions within the civilian police, reinforces the belief that militarisation of routine police work is necessary, and creates a crisis of self-legitimacy for civilian police officers who identify their institution as the ‘younger brother’ in such relational dynamics. This is the first study to investigate the partnership between two public policing providers in Pakistan. In doing so, it makes an empirical contribution to an expanding scholarship on the pluralisation of policing that currently lacks an understanding of partnerships between state officials and entities jointly tasked with public policing.
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