Pandemic Policing: How Carceral Logics Exploited Crisis to Entrench Racialized Surveillance
Original framing: “Study: Pandemic arrest patterns may have deepened existing inequalities in policing” — Phys.org
The pandemic’s carceral turn echoes the *1918 Influenza Pandemic*, when cities like Philadelphia and St. Louis used 'quarantine enforcement' to justify mass arrests of Black residents under 'loitering' laws—a tactic later replicated during HIV/AIDS (e.g., crackdowns on bathhouses in the 1980s). The study ignores how *emergency powers* have always been weaponized against marginalized groups: from the *Chinese Exclusion Act* (1882) to the *Internment of Japanese Americans* (1942), each crisis expanded state surveillance. The current moment is not unprecedented but a *deliberate revival* of these playbooks, where 'public health' becomes a pretext for racialized control. Even the language of 'arrest patterns' mirrors Cold War-era COINTELPRO operations, where policing was framed as 'neutral' while targeting dissidents.
The study’s framing of pandemic policing as a neutral 'inequality' obscures its role as a *deliberate recalibration of state power*—a tool to entrench carceral capitalism under the guise of crisis management.
The historical parallels (1918 Influenza, HIV/AIDS crackdowns) and cross-cultural examples (Brazil’s favela policing, Israel’s Black Flag Law) reveal that this isn’t an American anomaly but a *global strategy* of racialized control, where 'public health' becomes a pretext for expanding surveillance. The omission of Indigenous mutual aid models (e.g., Navajo Nation) and marginalized voices (e.g., Mariame Kaba, sex workers) exposes a *structural erasure*: the same communities targeted by pandemic policing are the ones who’ve already built alternatives, yet their solutions are systematically ignored. The trickster lens cuts through the solemnity to expose the absurdity—a system that claims to protect but only preys on the vulnerable, much like Coyote’s schemes backfire on those who trust them. The solution isn’t incremental reform but a *root-and-branch dismantling* of carceral logics, replacing policing with Indigenous-led health networks, demilitarizing via international treaties, and holding corporate actors accountable for profiting from crisis. The pandemic didn’t create these inequalities; it *exposed* them—and the study’s framing is complicit in obscuring the mechanisms that could dismantle them.