Against the Managerial State: Preventive Policing as Non-Legal Governance

Since at least the 1980s, police departments in the United States have embraced a set of practices that aim, not to enable the prosecution of past criminal activity, but to discourage (or even prevent) people from breaking the law in the first place. It is not clear that these practices effectively lower the crime rate. However, whatever its effect on the crime rate, I argue that preventive policing is essentially distinct from legal governance, and that excessive reliance on preventive policing undermines legal governance. To show this, I emphasize law’s unique aptitude to define legal subjects’ ‘manifest’ status relations – that is, the rights and obligations that live within their local practices. I then argue, first, that preventive policing does not aim to define these relationships; and second, that excessive preventive policing threatens the relationship that law must bear with its subjects if law is to define their manifest relations authoritatively.