The Funambulist Magazine 08 (Nov-Dec. 2016): POLICE Is Now Published

Published

This eighth issue of The Funambulist Magazine, dedicated to the police, can be read in continuity with Issue 04 (March-April 2016), which was focused on carceral environments. Its axiomatic editorial line is resolutely the same: just as there cannot be “better prisons,” there cannot be “better police,” at least not within the logics through which they are currently operating in a majority of the world’s societies. In this regard, the numerous murders of Native and Black bodies by the United States police, the violence of the Apartheid police in Jerusalem against Palestinians, the murderous operations of the Brazilian military police in the favelas, or the legalized abuse of power by the French and Turkish police during ongoing states of emergency; not as “police brutality” that would require reforms but, rather, as the very essence of policing itself, which calls for abolition.

The main dossier opens with a poem about police violence from Palestine to Ferguson written by Palestinian poet Jehan Bseiso. Articles are written by co-editor of Policing the Planet (Verso, 2016) Christina Heatherton, about the “broken windows” doctrine in the United States, doctoral student in Political Geography Sinthujan Varatharajah, about racial profiling in Germany, São Paulo anthropologist Susana Durão, about the ‘redemption’ programs for Brazilian police officers, and an anonymous contributor about the Egyptian police. The long format interview introduces the work of Mathieu Rigouste about the colonial genealogy of the French police from Algeria to the banlieues. The dossier ends with the presentation of two student projects by Whitney Hansley in Oakland and Joséphine Larere in Paris. In the recurrent sections that precede this main dossier, readers will find two edited versions of September blog articles about Calais and Caterpillar bulldozers in Standing Rock and Palestine, the political walk is proposed by Katherine Merriman in Islamic Harlem (New York), while the two guest columns are written by Ather Zia about Kashmir and Nick Estes about Standing Rock. I am extremely thankful to all of them, as well as to the Mapping Inequality team, Hamdi Abu Rahma, Jacob Burns, Dallas Goldtooth, and Jacob Myrick to have accepted to have their maps/photos illustrating these articles.

As usual, the means of purchasing the magazine are listed here:

If you are a student, you can email a photo of your student ID to [email protected] and receive a free digital copy. A new version of the website is also being constructed at the moment and it will soon provide a greater range of options in the way to navigate through the reading and these options. I wish you an excellent reading, hoping that you will like it.

ACCESS THE NEW ISSUE HERE