A Reign of Burnt Wounds and Crowded Cells: Exploring how political power is upheld at street level through observations of the municipal police in Mexico City

Abstract

Recent studies of police, particularly those that have followed an ethnographic approach in diverse settings across the Global South, have unmasked policing as an everyday exercise of power, a source of mediation between state and non-state actors and an apparatus that enforces the status quo. But if these findings entail a conceptualisation of the police as a political actor, then how does it enact politics at street level? Moreover, how are political elites upheld through police practices? This dissertation follows the methods and aim of the aforementioned ethnographic studies in order to explore whether policing in Mexico conceals answers to these questions. For that purpose, this dissertation draws on eight months of participant observations conducted within a municipal police precinct located in the outskirts of Mexico City. Through this method, I examine how municipal police officers and detectives operate through gendered assumptions and racist logics. Indeed, the practices, words and gestures of municipal police officers and detectives exposed how their way of conceiving and reacting to crimes and violence unearthed the systematic reproduction of a hegemonic masculinity. Concurrently, their treatment of alleged suspects revealed the enforcement of a long-established social hierarchy that is based on privileging whiteness. As this dissertation argues, the exercise of street level power on gendered and racial terms points to why these police officers and detectives represent a political elite that has ruled over that area of the city – and until recently, over the entire country - for nearly a century. Crucially, these exercises of power are largely obscured by everyday policing techniques that systematically produce arrested subjects, therefore creating a façade of law enforcement that allows for the police to be justified in a moment when its role is increasingly questioned and scrutinised, moreover in the face of ever-expanding violence and the incipient militarisation of municipal policing.