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Association and the Ethical Foundations of Policing

Kierstan Kaushal-Carter (African and African American Studies, Harvard)

DESPITE WIDESPREAD, VOCAL DISSATISFACTION WITH POLICE IN THE US, no consensus has emerged to answer the question “what ought to be done about them?” Instead, the interdisciplinary debate produced at least four policy pathways ranging from budgetary infusions to legal reform to “unbundling” police services to full abolition. KIERSTAN KAUSHAL-CARTER argues that this policy confusion stems from a submerged debate about what the police should do and why. In a political environment full of commentary about the police, no explicitly normative account of what function police ought to perform exists. Kaushal-Carter offers such an account. By first describing the imperative to live together and the mechanism for nurturing peoples’ collective life, she tethers policing to the fundamental goals of just democratic orders. She then defines the police and policing in a way that (1) acknowledges the distinctiveness of the police authority to use violence without mistaking that authority as an end and (2) connects police conduct to broader goals of well-being and mutual flourishing without confusing those ends for a description of the means. Finally, she argues the police should be internal members of a political community afforded a limited right to collect information and use physical coercion against others to restore or promote conditions for mutual flourishing when an interpersonal violation of public concerns occur.