CLARA HAN

A long-term occupation: police and the

gures of the stranger

Police as emergent

In this essay, I consider the place of police in a low-income neighbourhood under police
occupation in Santiago, Chile. Since 2001, this neighbourhood, known as an epicentre for
drug trafcking in the city, has been under occupation by the Carabineros, the military
police force. Police checkpoints to control for identity and to inspect vehicles, bodies
and personal belongings were placed on streets providing entry and exit into the
neighbourhood. A series of high-prole drug raids have led to the incarceration of
extended kinship networks as illicit associations under Drug Law 20.000. In 2011, in
the wake of intense ghting between rival clans, the neighbourhood priest wrote an open
letter on behalf of the neighbourhood Christian Community to the Ministry of the
Interior, asking for greater police protection. The Ministry of the Interior responded with
what is called by neighbours the second intervention. A Special Forces armoured bus
was positioned at a xed point in the neighbourhood, an armoured jeep vehicle colloqui-
ally called El GOPE makes rounds over the narrow cracked and pot-holed passageways
of the neighbourhood, and the Anti-Narcotics Unit of civilian Police Investigations con-
ducts massive drug raids.1
The occupation of this low-income neighbourhood can be understood within
wider policy shifts enmeshed with the War on Drugs: towards targeted intervention
in critical neighbourhoods identied as loci of drug trafcking and delinquency and
consisting of focused police surveillance as well as special police operations against
drug trafcking and organised crime. For this neighbourhood, such an intervention
has not only produced extremely high incarceration rates, but has also created condi-
tions for episodes of police brutality and death by police violence that have only
recently been taken into account by the wider human rights community in Chile.
Recent anthropological and sociological works on policing in Latin America have
engaged how multiple forms of violence police, domestic, environmental hook
together within the local (Auyero and Burbano de Lara 2012), while also emphasising
the structural violence and the institutionalised violence of the police force itself

1
GOPE is an acronym for the Grupo de Operaciones Policiales Especiales (Special Police Operations
Group), an elite force within the Carabineros de Chile (the Chilean military police) who carry out
high-risk police activities.

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doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12036
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(Scheper-Hughes 2006). Other recent work has elaborated how police generate further
insecurity through their modes of presence and absence, while providing the conditions
for improvisational forms of justice-making, such as lynching (Goldstein 2012).
Here, I would like to slightly shift the frame of inquiry to consider the specic ways in
which the police emerge within the life of a neighbourhood under occupation. I attend to
the actual spatial proximities and cumulative time of police in neighbourhoods understood
as a dened material and social territory. In engaging the work those proximities do and the
cumulative time of police occupation, we might appreciate not only how the police
embody and destabilise the actual workings of law but also how the local itself works on
the police. That is, in long-term occupation, the police are both local and extra-local:
emergent properties of a neighbourhood under occupation while also indexing a law that
is beyond the neighbourhood.2
In this essay, I draw from 10 months of eldwork I conducted in this neighbourhood
between March 2012 and January 2013. Because this eldwork and the analysis of ethno-
graphic materials are still on-going, I offer here some tentative coordinates for an inquiry
into the place of the police in the neighbourhood. How might the police be appended to
the social? Might the gure of the stranger help us consider the ways in which police are
with the neighbours under long-term occupation in this territory? I hope that this brief
essay might be taken as an initial foray into this question.

Figure of the stranger

In his essay The Stranger, Georg Simmel begins by troubling a given notion of the
stranger dened primarily as radical alterity:

The stranger will thus not be considered here in the usual sense of the term, as the
wanderer that comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the man who comes
today and stays tomorrow the potential wanderer, so to speak, who although
he has gone no further, has not quite gotten over coming and going. He is xed
within a certain spatial circle or within a group whose boundaries are analogous
to spatial boundaries but his position within it is fundamentally affected by the
fact that he does not belong to it initially and that he brings qualities into it that
are not, and cannot be, indigenous to it. (Simmel 1908 [1971]: 143)

In Simmel's account, the primary problematic of the stranger is not with regard to his
belonging, but rather the synthesis of nearness and remoteness that constitute his
formal position in the group. Simmel illustrates this position through analogy to the trader
or the middleman. The trader intrudes as a supernumerary in a group in which all
economic positions are already occupied. However, it is by virtue of his mobility within
the group that he comes incidentally into contact with every single element but is not
bound up organically, through established ties of kinship, locality, or occupation, with
any single one (1908 [1971]: 145).
Let me draw out two related directions in his inquiry: (1) how the stranger might indi-
cate the nearness and remoteness that he argues is involved in every human relationship
and (2) how we might consider the specic patterning of that nearness and remoteness in
2
I delineate actual spatial proximity and cumulative time of engagement in order to inspire compar-
ative insights. It is evident in literature on policing in Latin America that the modes of policing are
variable.

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the relation of the stranger. First, what might provide the sensibilities of simultaneous near-
ness and remoteness? Rather than difference, Simmel points to those common characteris-
tics that unite the members to each other. Commonality allows us to feel close on one
level, but on another level, such common qualities may be so common they make us feel
remote, as if there is nothing in particular that draws us to one another. For, even in the most
intimate relationships such as the feeling of passionate, erotic love one might perceive
the trace of strangeness that may emerge as a moment of estrangement (1908 [1971]: 147).
In the case of the stranger, what one has in common are more general qualities, qual-
ities that are so widely shared that they lose their specic, centripetal character (1908
[1971]: 147, emphasis his). That is, the commonality, while providing a basis for unifying
the members, does not specically direct these particular persons to one another (1908
[1971]: 147, emphasis his). The relation of the stranger hinges upon the specic proportion
and reciprocal tension of nearness and remoteness created through commonality: The
stranger is close to us insofar as we feel between him and ourselves similarity of nationality
or social position, of occupation or of general human nature. He is far from us insofar as
these similarities extend beyond him and us, and connect us only because they connect a
great many people (1908 [1971]: 147).
Because the relation of stranger is based on what is common, the stranger is inorgan-
ically appended to the group while still being an organic member of the group: the
stranger is within the group, stands outside it and confronts it, but is also conditioned
by it (1908 [1971]: 149). Let me now turn to ethnographic scenes through which this
thought of police as stranger emerged to me.

Embodied existence

In an impromptu gathering for my birthday at a friend's house in the neighbourhood,

women semi-joked about the police's intimate knowledge of their web of kinship rela-
tionships and domestic arrangements. A woman remarks with a familiar sense of wonder,
The cops stopped me and said to me, Hey, mom of X! They know everything.
Women respond to her remarks with similar encounters, yet also interspersed with how
drug trafcking occurs under the police's nose: That woman pretends she is deaf and
dumb, but ella es la ms viva que todas (she's the most alive aware of everyone).
The cops have no idea. In their talk, police are both unleashed dogs (perros sueltos) in
the poblacin and adornments to the poblacin (no ms que un adorno), constantly
sapeando (gathering information and informing) and at the same time distracted by their
cellphones and portable TV. My friends say with a tone of pity, That must be the worst
job. The only thing that saves them is their cellphones. They wonder how difcult it
would be to be the lone policewoman in that mix. When neighbours near the bus are
not home for them to ask for the bathroom, the policemen urinate on the street behind
the bus. Does the woman also have to do that, one woman wondered? Imagine that.
How embarrassing. Another woman chimes in, And when she has her period, even
worse.
While chatting with women in their houses or sitting on chairs on the sidewalks to
take in the sun, it slowly dawns on me that the police are taken up in talk in the most
quotidian of ways and that this talk often centres around the very fact of their embodied
existence. What the police have in common with others is that they too must urinate,
defecate and eat. They too get hot from the sun, feel the chill in their bones in the winter

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rain and stave off boredom by updating their Facebook pages on their smartphones or by
texting their friends. Among women, they too get their periods.
Through these common characteristics of an embodied existence, the Special Forces
who stand on the street corner day in and day out are loosely and awkwardly hinged to
domestics that are physically proximate to the Special Forces bus. This olive-green
armoured bus is almost always parked on the same street corner, where three or four
Special Forces functionaries stand guard in 8-hour shifts, dressed in olive-green fatigues,
army boots, helmets and bulletproof vests, with assault ries in their arms. On rainy
winter days, they stand under the awning of a neighbour's storefront. On the days when
the Chilean ftbol team plays in the Copa Amrica, they bring an extension cord and TV
and ask for current from a neighbour's house so that they can also watch the game that
everyone else in the neighbourhood is watching. They borrow a pot and pan from another
neighbour across the street so that they might also cook sh they bought in the market.
They too buy kebabs from the women who sell them on the street. They ask to use the
neighbour's bathroom, and at the next visit bring piping and x the broken plumbing
of the kitchen sink. Police, by virtue of this physical proximity and characteristics com-
mon to an embodied existence, then, incidentally come into contact with every single el-
ement but is not bound up organically, through established ties with any single one
(Simmel 1908 [1971]: 145).
These all-too-common characteristics of having an embodied existence, however, also
may congeal the cruelties between the neighbours and the police. For, in a split second,
those same neighbours who allowed Special Forces to use their bathroom might be the
ones who throw stones and jeer at them during a police operation, while those same police
functionaries who xed a drain in the kitchen sink are those who launch the tear gas
bombs on a warm Sunday afternoon when everyone is in the street taking in the sun.
One sunny afternoon, my friend and I are sitting on her house's patio in the proxim-
ity of the Special Forces bus when we hear jeering, shouting and the bus's engine revving.
We look out the patio gate to see the bus rumbling off from its usual spot to meet the
GOPE a few houses down. Neighbours are gathering around the bus. Some lm the func-
tionaries' actions with their cellphones. Youths throw stones at the bus, while women on
bicycles circle towards and away from the bus, taunting the police. All of a sudden, we
hear a gasp and raucous laughter from the crowd. More Special Forces come out of the
bus with riot gear and make a ring around a corner house. A little later, we hear another
surge of raucous laughter. The GOPE speeds off, almost running over a young man cross-
ing the street. The bus rumbles back onto the same corner. The neighbours continue their
laughter.
Without a good view, my friend and I could not gure out what was so comical until
a neighbour showed us the video he took with his cell phone. One of the police function-
aries of the GOPE had hoisted himself onto the brittle zinc roof of a house (houses are
only a little over 2-metres high) in hot pursuit of a youth. The youth had been walking
up a passageway when he guessed that the GOPE was going to stop him. He ran into
the corner house to hide. The policeman, so stealthily walking across the roof in order
to cut off an imagined path of escape, however, all of a sudden disappears with a loud
BANG! He had fallen through the roof. Injuring his leg in the fall, he barely missed
falling on top of a bedridden man who resided in this house. The fall produced the rst
gasp and round of mocking laughter.
Special Forces scramble to secure the safety of the injured policeman. A handcuffed
youth is brought out of the corner house and put into the Special Forces bus as the injured

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policeman comes limping out of the next door house, helped by the GOPE forces. But,
just then, a little dog wanders behind one of the Special Forces, who, stepping backward
to make way for the handcuffed youth and the limping policeman, trips over the tiny dog,
landing on his backside with his feet rolling high into the air. Laughter explodes from the
onlooking neighbours.
The youth was charged with carrying a knife, and was released 2 days later. When I
ran into him later in the week, he told me, When I saw the policeman fall and everyone
laughing, and laughing myself, I thought, oh no, now they are really going to beat me
[in the bus]. But when I boarded, a policewoman said, We won't beat you unless you
talk. Just look down at the ground. So I did.
How might we attend to the sense of the comical here? What might the laughter be
responding to? Henri Bergson suggests that the comical erupts when we perceive the
mechanical inelasticity of the human: a runner who falls to the simpleton who is hoaxed,
from a state of being hoaxed to one of absentmindedness (Bergson 1911: 9) shows the
effects of automism and inelasticity in the human, effects which we as society are uneasy
with. Laughter, Bergson asserts, is a response to this mechanical aspect of the human. It is
a social gesture that softens the mechanical appearing on the surface of the social:
Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life in common. It must have a SOCIAL
signication (1911: 4, emphasis mine, capitals his). While the laughter gestures to aspects
of an embodied existence in common, the intensity of this laughter is specic to the police
as a stranger. In their roles as standing guard and on the watch for delinquency within
the group but outside it they are to embody a heightened watchfulness. Yet, such
inevitable failures of watchfulness are what bring them back into the fold of the group.

The mechanical

Through long-term occupation, the police become those strangers who are organic to
the group by virtue of inorganic appendage, incidentally coming into contact with
domestics, exposed to and propagating the social gestures of laughter and embodied
cruelty. But, the police also embody and invoke the law, law that is itself extra-local
and outside the group. In invoking the law, however, the line between the legal and
illegal is constantly blurred. Women ask: Is it legal to be dragging a body in the street?
Can they enter my house at will to inspect what they wish? Can they point that gun in
my face or my children's faces? Are they allowed to charge fees on my trade, since what
I am doing is illegal?
In the everyday talk of police violence, the mechanical emerges again, but with omi-
nous and dark tones. In conversations with women, I notice that their accounts of police
violence often waver between the singling out of a specic police ofcer and the vehicle in
which the functionary moves el GOPE or la micro (the Special Forces bus) mechanical
beings that may run you over or in which your body might be locked up and harmed. As I
was walking with a friend, she mentions that one of her friends was killed by the Carabi-
neros, but the case was never investigated. For, at the time he was killed, his mother was
imprisoned for drug trafcking. She remarks, The threw him into the GOPE as if he were
an animal. Another woman speaks of a neighbour killed by the Carabineros, La micro
arrived and they red on him just like that. A woman who is being harassed by the police
and hiding behind slot machines in a storefront says, The GOPE is persecuting me. With
talk wavering between the vehicles and the esh-and-blood functionaries, it is as if the

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machine aspect is detached from the human in the form of a ceaseless, open and
limitless cruelty that cannot be embodied and is rendered perceptible. How could
this esh-and-blood stranger the one who is proximate and shares this common crea-
turely body be doing this?
Might this wavering indicate a different kind of strangeness? Simmel differentiates
the stranger based on the synthesis of nearness and remoteness with the strangeness of
nothing in common: There is a sort of strangeness in which this very connection on
the basis of a general quality embracing the parties is excluded in which the general
characteristics one takes as peculiarly and merely human are disallowed to the other.
But here the expression the stranger no longer has any positive meaning. The relation
with him is a non-relation; he is not what we have been discussing here: the stranger as
a member of the group (Simmel 1908 [1971]: 148).
Such a mechanical nature also emerges in less spectacular and more quotidian ways.
Shortly before Christmas 2012, my friend and I are driving up the central street of the
neighbourhood. We pass by another friend, who I will call Maria, in the street. With
her hand gripping her forehead, she is talking, red-faced and agitated, to a Special Forces
policeman. Later that day, Maria comes over to my friend's house, still agitated. A dispute
between neighbours was crystallising that could become lethal. She had asked the police-
man to intervene before it was too late. She tells me that while one of the Special Forces
ducked into a store upon hearing her plea, the other said to her that they were under
orders not to move from the the xed point. She emphasises, They don't do anything.
In the policeman, she is confronted with a wavering between these different gures of the
stranger the esh-and-blood other, this stranger who, as part of the group is also
scared; or, a mechanical strangeness, who quotes back to her an order like an answering
machine, a deathly machine-like following of the rules: bound to the rules, which are them-
selves illegible, the police cannot move to respond even if this might avert a violent death.

Investment in the law

In closing, I want to attend more closely to this woman's plea to the policeman to respond.
Even as the police themselves invoke the law and in so doing blur the legal and illegal, the
plea to the police reveals how those most affected by police violence have an investment in
the law itself. As my friends have often told me, No estamos en contra de la policia,
estamos en contra de su actuar [We are not against the police, we are against their acting].
It is the manner in which the police act their actualisation of law that women fear and
resent. The police as the embodiment of law as such however, might still offer a prom-
ise for protection and justice.
In the moment of the plea, Maria is not simply asking this esh-and-blood policeman
to respond, she is invoking the law itself to respond: protect us. This invocation of the law
expresses a desire for a measure of protection that those within the local today cannot
provide. Such an invocation is also echoed in the words of a mother whose son was killed
by the Anti-Narcotics Brigade of Police Investigations, They are supposed to protect us,
not kill us. The investment in the law ramies beyond the desire for protection. It is also
seen in the ways in which women may le charges against the neighbour in the police
commissary for death threats and disputes or ask the anthropologist for a lawyer who
could help them make a claim to justice in the cases of police violence. That moving
through the law in actuality takes a very long time and in fact may not go anywhere is

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well known by all, yet women still go to the police commissary, the public prosecutor, the
Center for Judicial Assistance, and to the courts.
How might we attend to the investment in the law by those so cruelly violated by the
actualisation of law in the form of law enforcement? For, drug raids have worked to incar-
cerate extended kinship networks while leaving the children to circulate between houses
of neighbours; police have killed and disabled youth; the harassment and intimidation
of neighbours identied as trafcking or as hiding something make sustaining material
livelihoods increasingly difcult; living fugitively from the law means not having access
to a host of institutions; stories of extortion abound. Living with these disorderings of
the state, what is it that the law as law might promise? This is not to argue from a
socio-political position to say that women are strategically re-occupying the site of
law. Nor is it to simply reassert the extra-local sovereign power that cuts the natural
cycle of vengeance within the local (Girard 1979). Rather, the call to law here is existential.3
The existential call to law here implicates an aspiration for a law in touch with life, alive to
circumstances and its own incompleteness. It is, however, through that aliveness that law is
emergent to the local.

Clara Han
Department of Anthropology
Johns Hopkins University
3400 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
clarahan@jhu.edu

References
Auyero, J. and A. Burbano de Lara 2012. In harm's way at the urban margins, Ethnography 13(4): 53157.
Bergson, H. 1911. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. New York: Macmillan.
Girard, R. 1979. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Goldstein, D. M. 2012. Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Scheper-Hughes, N. 2006. Death squads and democracy in northeast Brazil, in J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff
(eds.), Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, 15087. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Simmel, G. 1908 [1971]. The stranger, in D. Levine (ed.), Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social
Forms, 1439. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

3 I would like to thank the women of this neighbourhood who welcomed me into the neighbourhood
and who have taught me so very much. I also thank Sruti Chaganti and Grgoire Hervouet-Zeiber
for their acute thoughts, which helped me clarify my concerns. This material is based upon work
supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1123505.

2013 European Association of Social Anthropologists.