Security Apparatus in a Neighborhood Space. The Police Practice of Identity Checks

Abstract

This article discusses the management of the security apparatus and its differential application to population taking as a paradigmatic case the identity controls conducted by the police in the public spaces. The security apparatus, understood as a set of imaginaries, architectures, discourses and practices which emphasize “citizen safety” as a key point, is marked by two logics: the logic of neo-liberal management and the professional culture of security agents. Although these two logics arise from very different civilizational projects, they come together in a space like Carabanchel –along with other forms of ‘expertise’– to delineate the figure of the citizen and of the “non-citizen” based on the differential relation established between neighbors through a process of class-differentiation and racialization. Thus the migratory process, problematized by the media and by institutions, has become a special object of control and surveillance shaping the differences upon the basis of which ‘legitimate’ identities are reconstructed in the neighborhood (“good citizens”). This proposal will describe how both of these logics of ‘security’ work, building a guilty subject of the victim neighbourhood –the “foreigner”– through selective police identity checks in public spaces.