Between containment and crackdown in Geylang,Singapore: Urban crime control as the statecrafting of migrant exclusion

Abstract

Based on a case study conducted in Geylang, Singapore, this article explores the role of urban policing, surveillance and crime control as mechanisms of social ordering that contribute to the marginalisation of excluded groups, including low-income migrant workers and sex workers. Adopting a statecraft approach that emphasises the significance of ‘governing through crime’ for the upholding of urban political-economic projects, we examine the entanglement of political discourses and crime and social control practices as co-constructive of class- and race-based inequality in Singapore. Drawing from qualitative interviews with NGO workers and sex workers, augmented by extensive non-participant observations, we identify three processes through which state power is vectored in Geylang: the stigmatisation of the neighbourhood through association with marginalised groups, legitimising intense spatialised intervention; the enacting of performative zero-tolerance policing; and the containment and surveillance of illicit activities within the neighbourhood. Contributing to discussions that advance the statecraft approach to researching urban crime control, the article shows that seemingly contradictory practices of tolerance and intervention constitute strategies of governance. The article argues that spatially specific crime control practices in Geylang generated an exclusionary ‘spectacle’ which symbolically connects low-income migrant workers with deviance, in turn supporting citizenship exclusion, racialised marginality and a wider politics of capital accumulation resting on disempowered labour. As we argue, crime control policies are an important form of statecraft legitimising an urban political economy that is heavily reliant on low-cost labour provided by migrant workers.

Introduction

Contemporary city economies are increasingly dependent on various forms of immigration to secure profit-generating economic activities, whether it is of hypermobile middle- and upper-class consumer-workers from wealthy regions or low-income labourers from ‘periphery’ countries. The political and social ramifications of immigration can have important implications for the stability of cities and harbour the potential to threaten the legitimacy of urban political structures and economic systems. Immigration can contest and challenge ideological assertions that inform belonging, threatening dominant ideas about the natural, pre-given status of citizenship (Anderson, 2010). Simultaneously, poorly paid migrants frequently make up the backbone of various industries in cities, enabling certain economic activities dependent on devalued labour. The successful incorporation of migrant-dependent economic activities into the urban political economy requires the institutional management of this contradiction between belonging and exclusion. Mainstream political discourses may, at times, depict immigration as indispensable to the wealth of the city. At other moments, immigrants are constructed as unwelcome aliens, even when their presence might only be possible due to clandestine forms of state ‘toleration’.

Examining Singapore state’s crime control strategies within a specific area of the city, this article explores the role of urban policing, surveillance and crime control as social ordering practices instituting the marginalisation of low-income migrant workers and sex workers. It further explores experiences and understandings of urban policing by NGO workers and sex workers living and working in the neighbourhood, which illuminates the impact of crime control and surveillance on marginalised groups. In our analysis, we adopt and develop the statecraft approach (Coleman et al., 2005; Peck, 2004; Peck and Tickel, 1994; Peck et al., 2013), paying particular attention to the evolving synergies between politics, crime control and the process of urban economic transformation. Following this understanding of statecraft as a form of urban governance, we examine the entanglement of political discourses and crime and social control practices as co-constructive of class- and race-based inequality in Singapore. This study uncovered governmental intervention in the area to be a complex and seemingly contradictory ‘mix’ of acceptance of criminality with concurrently robust forms of policing and state intervention.

Our research focuses on Geylang, which has a significant population of low-income migrant workers and a high density of illegal and ‘vice’ activities. Using this case study, we explore urban crime control practices applied by the Singaporean government both locally and nationally, including police control and surveillance, the implementation of various crime prevention and surveillance technologies and the invention and reproduction of symbolic understandings about where criminality resides and who is responsible for it. We define urban crime control as a panoply of co-ordinated state-led, civil society and corporate technological and institutional processes geared towards preventing, detecting, investigating and managing criminal activity (Lee, 2007). Crime control cannot be understood as merely objectively calculated and applied; rather, it needs to be understood as part of politically and ideologically embedded institutional procedures seeking to realise and legitimise state power and economic interests (Coleman, 2005; Coleman et al., 2005).

The micro-level research centring on Geylang scrutinised the spatialised crime control practices within this area. A statecraft approach is deployed emphasising the significance of state power directed at the apparent control of criminal activity for the upholding of urban politico-economic projects. Drawing from empirical data collected through qualitative interviews with NGO workers and sex workers and non-participant observations, we explore the enacting of crime control and the related experiences of those living and working in the neighbourhood. Based on this data, we elaborate three state-led crime control strategies operating in Geylang. This includes the stigmatisation of the neighbourhood through association with vilified social groups; the enacting of performative zero-tolerance policing, which includes the toleration of illicit activity within limitations; and the containment and surveillance of illicit activities such as sex work within the neighbourhood. As we argue, these complex practices of crime control, and their impact on those marginalised groups they are targeted at, can be understood as forms of statecraft, as they play a role in supporting certain key industries dependent on precarious immigrant labour. On the symbolic and discursive level, crime control stigmatises migrant workers as deviant, providing a normative and moral basis for their exclusion by establishing a connection between criminality and the Othered ‘foreigner’. This process places this group of workers under observation, invoking their compliance with their vitiated status and limiting the possibility to engage in forms of resistance. Mirroring De Genova’s (2013) critical observations, the contradictory formulation of the scene/obscene – of simultaneous exclusion and inclusion – can be cast as a state intervention reproducing the existence of a compliant migrant working class.

‘Crime control strategies’ or the statecrafting of migrant exclusion?

The statecraft perspective posits that state power is essential for the consolidation and extension of neoliberal urban economies. Statecraft is foundationally bound up with advancing processes and activities that facilitate the opening up of new markets and the rolling out of market-driven philosophies (Peck, 2004; Peck and Tickel, 1994; Peck et al., 2013). Further, statecraft approaches emphasise the political order-making practices which are entangled within economic projects.

Coleman et al. (2005: 2511) have outlined the association between urban restructuring and ‘governing through crime’ (see also Simon, 2009), that is, social control operating through technologies, interventions, images and discourses relating to crime and deviance. It is argued that processes of policing, surveillance and other forces managing poor and marginal populations through criminalisation and applications of carceral state power can allow the establishing new modes of profit generation. Social control practices relating to crime control cannot be disentangled from the politics of harm generation, whereby other forms of suffering and injustices created, say, through corporate profit generation are tolerated and concealed, and danger is continually imagined to be ‘caused’ by the marginalised. As Coleman et al. (2005: 2512) argue, this ‘narrow definition of harm and danger’ predominating in cities ‘reinforces the gaze down the social and political hierarchy’. Such a definition of danger as blameable on the excluded is often reproduced at the street level through the spectacle-like qualities of crime control. Coleman (2005: 134) argues that policing initiatives and technological and spatial interventions such as CCTV surveillance are entwined with the objectives of the state’s role in constructing capital accumulation, enabling the exercise of symbolic prioritisation through ‘primary definition’. This allows urban social problems to be erroneously blamed on the apparent moral deficiency of vilified groups: social order ‘breakdown’ is not imagined to be emergent from exploitative corporations, lax regulatory frameworks or welfare state failures. State interventions that follow from such representational logics target the ‘least powerful inhabitants of the city’ (Coleman et al., 2005: 2517), locating blame with the marginalised, while discourses about safety and crime act palpably in the interests of the powerful.

Immigration policies here can be understood as part of the processes that ‘organise the material and ideological order of space and, in doing so, mask corporate culpability in the generation of harm’ (Coleman et al., 2005: 2526). As Feldman (2019) argues, the construction and policing of legality and illegality play a central role in the state’s production of exploitable immigrant workforces. By either refusing formal recognised citizenship altogether or officialising degraded citizenship statuses, migrants are directed into difficult, low-paying or defamed forms of labour (Anderson, 2010). Accompanying the systemic exclusion from material goods and benefits is a politics of deprecation constructing migrants as a threat to national values. Immigrants, documented and undocumented, are subjected to constant supervision through criminal justice institutions and border agencies justified through value-based and naturalised political assertions that migrants are considered to represent a threat (Anderson, 2013).

Accordingly, multiple social and political practices form the ideological climate conducive to migrant structural ‘(non)incorporation’ (Yeoh, 2005: 33). Migrants are socially, economically and spatially marginalised, whilst simultaneously being central to the functioning of the economy. Negative representations of immigrants construct moral and political justifications for marginalisation and serve to reinforce the degraded economic position of temporary workers. Images and discourses – such as the ‘spectacle’ (De Genova, 2013: 1181) of the ‘migrant invasion’ swarming the borders – establish and reproduce socio-economic relationships between migrants and citizens. The condemnation of migrants in the media reinforces the association of immigrant groups with criminality. The logics of this ‘racial abjection’, according to De Genova (2013: 1190), are to validate an essentialised juridical and economic inequality between ‘illegals’ and citizens. Existing beneath the ‘scene of exclusion’– the spectacle of images and narratives showing the othered, criminal migrant mobs threatening the nation – is an ‘obscene of inclusion’ (De Genova, 2013: 1186). Migrants are included by their central function in providing cheap labour in contemporary economies. Yet, denigrating narratives of undocumented migrants as ‘criminals’ represent them as undeserving of social and economic rights. Accordingly, the structural economic incorporation of migrants into precarious labour markets partly rests on the constant diffusion of an abject politics of migrant denigration (De Genova, 2013).

The primary theoretical relevance of the statecraft approach followed in this article is to reveal the connections between the denigrating narratives and crime control deployed in one neighbourhood, which ‘have underpinned the ascendancy and power of … capital in the urban landscape’ (Coleman et al., 2005: 2514). In following the statecraft approach, we understand socio-spatial ordering strategies as motivated by the interest of elite class forces (coalitions of business and state actors, for example) to ensure social conditions that allow for economic accumulation in the city (Peck, 2004; Peck et al., 2013). Extending Coleman et al.’s (2005) argument that social regulation operating through crime control is a form of statecraft, we argue that in Singapore, state-organised crime interventions seek to secure the compliant integration of migrant workers into the economy. State power generates the social, economic and spatial marginalisation of low-income migrant workers, whilst their labour is simultaneously central to the functioning of the economy.

Our study of crime control and surveillance impacting on migrant workers and sex workers in Geylang raises several questions and considerations necessary for identifying the processes through which crime control becomes part of the statecrafting of the Singaporean political economy. If ‘governing through crime’ includes the governing through images and discourses of crime, this necessitates identifying the role of interventions in ‘performing’ the apparent containment and elimination of crime, and the symbolic attachment of stigma to certain social groups and the spaces they populate.

Further, as Coleman et al. (2005: 2514) point out, viewing crime control as statecraft highlights the material dimensions of practices managing criminality, in which decisions about (non-)policing certain crimes are made while other illegal or harmful activities are tolerated or obscured. Crime control tends to discipline those at the bottom of the hierarchy while ignoring harm generated through official city ‘development’. Questions emerge around what social problems and dangers are selected for governance, which behaviours are seen as intolerable, in which locations and in relation to which groups of people – and what is tolerated to allow for maintaining economic and socio-political goals.

This article identifies these state-led spatial processes in Singapore, which create a situation where migrant workers and sex workers are placed under considerable supervision and control, whilst simultaneously reproducing the spectacle of the criminal ‘Other’. Significant surveillance efforts, the containment and condensation of deviance and the spatial organising of migrants and sex workers within Geylang all contribute to their spatial and social exclusion. To the extent that these processes divert the gaze from the harms of marginalisation and the exploitation of immigrant labour, we argue that state activities centred on crime control in Singapore, as part of statecraft, contribute to maintaining a certain class position for low-income migrant workers.

Method

This study adopted a qualitative multi-methods approach, including semi-structured interviews and non-participant observations in Geylang. The non-participant observations were conducted between February 2018 and June 2019, predominantly in the early and late night. We gathered observations of crime control strategies operating in Geylang’s main streets and the more secluded back alleys, including visible police activity, such as patrols and interactions between residents and police. These strategies included the social architectures (Kusenbach, 2003) created by Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED) and technological surveillance such as CCTV cameras. Observations also focused on non-hidden and visible transgressive activities such as gambling and sex work. We conducted these observations in streets and back alleys, beer gardens and KTV lounges (karaoke bars where sexual services are usually sold).

We conducted 11 semi-structured interviews with NGO staff and sex workers. Eight of the participants worked for local NGOs supporting migrant workers and sex workers. In interviews, we asked about experiences with police, changes in policing strategies towards transgressive activities and perceptions of the politics of crime control in Geylang. In addition, we interviewed three sex workers. These interviews took place in NGO offices and were conducted in English. The three sex workers who participated in the study were all Singaporean citizens, female and working in Geylang. In the interviews, we focused on their experience of sex work in Geylang, experiences with the police and the dynamics between migrant (sex) workers and citizen sex workers. The interviews were recorded and transcribed. Data from interviews and fieldnotes from non-participant observations were analysed using a thematic analysis in which initial codes relevant to our research were incorporated into themes surrounding stigmatisation, (performative) policing and the containment of illicit activities in Geylang.

The research received institutional ethical approval. At the time of the research, we had both been living and working in Singapore for several years and were familiar with local customs and politics, the social and cultural dynamics and the mechanism of (in)formal control. These experiences, and the necessary attentiveness of intensified policing and surveillance in Geylang, informed the ethics of this research. During non-participant observations, we focused only on activities and interactions that were visible, non-concealed and non-obscured. While being visibly white Westerners marked us as ‘outsiders’ in Geylang, we were mostly tolerated or ignored. On occasions where our attendance was obviously not welcomed (e.g. in the KTV lounges that were very obviously brothels), we would promptly leave situations and/or venues. For the interviews, contact with participants was made through already established networks between local NGOs and our academic institution. The sex workers who participated in the study were recruited by NGO workers. Given the illegal status of sex work in Singapore, sex workers constitute a hard-to-reach population. Due to risks that come with sharing information about migrant status and engagement in sex work, we were not able to recruit migrant sex workers. Although the experience of sex workers who are Singaporean citizens differs from that of migrant sex workers, their relatively safe legal status allowed participants to talk more freely about their experiences. Full informed consent from participants was sought prior to all interviews. The participants were anonymised using pseudonyms, and any potentially identifiable personal information and names of NGOs were removed.

Setting the context: Crime control, policing and immigration regulation in Singapore

Since gaining independence in 1965, Singapore has undergone rapid economic development, emerging as an economic hub and ‘global city’ (Sassen, 2001). The ruling People’s Action Party’s (PAP) long-term success is founded in a series of consent-generating political strategies through investment in social policies and strong ideological narratives fostering nationalist sentiments (Chua, 2017). The PAP exerts a highly centralised political control of civil society activity and often reverts to the criminal justice system to discipline transgression and dissent (Rajah, 2012). Certain dimensions may usefully be described as ‘authoritarian’, encompassing high rates of imprisonment (Chok, 2018); sometimes extreme punishment for recreational drug use (Chok, 2018); use of capital and corporal punishment (Yap and Tan, 2020); strict control and censoring of political opposition; and a pervasive system of CPTED (Yuen, 2004). Governmental activities frequently harness ‘survivalist’ discourses constructing Singapore as small and fragile, justifying rigid control over the economy and legitimising the dispensation of political freedoms (Lim et al., 2014: 13): the message is that only with a ‘strong state’ and constant vigilance can the national interest be protected, guaranteeing Singapore’s ongoing stability. On top of this, attempts to forge national solidarity have promoted the idea that Singaporeans share a set of ‘Asian Values’ (Chua, 2017: 21), collectively identifying with a set of conservative principles revolving around law-abidingness, commitment to ‘hard work’, ‘familial piety’ and a supposed respect for authoritarian rule.

Singapore’s economic success has historically been facilitated by mass importation of the low-income labour of migrant workers from the Asia region. In public discourse, however, migrant workers have been constructed as the ‘dangerous other’, requiring constant monitoring (Yeoh, 2005). Low-income migrant workers have been consistently subjected to widespread state surveillance and formally and informally imposed forms of spatial and social segregation (Loong, 2018). Singapore’s immigration regime makes clear distinctions between lower and higher income workers (Yeoh, 2005). Lower income workers enter Singapore in the ‘Work Permit’ category. Officially, regulations afford some limited protections and benefits (Ministry of Manpower [MoM], 2019c). However, Work Permit holders are not subject to any form of minimum wage requirement and wages are somewhere between S$250 and S$1500 (approximately US$185–$740). In 2019, there were 975,800 Work Permit holders in Singapore (MoM, 2019a), constituting 90% of the foreign workforce and more than a quarter of the entire labour force (MoM, 2019b). Of the total Work Permit population, 214,500 are female foreign domestic workers, whilst most of the rest are predominantly male workers in construction (318,900) or in other industries such as manufacturing and transport (MoM, 2019a).

Work Permit holders are subject to a series of rigid regulations relating to employment and everyday conduct. They must only work in ‘the occupation and for the employer specified in the Work Permit card’, and they must ‘[r]eside only at the address set by the employer at the start of employment’ (MoM, 2019c). They are forbidden from marrying Singaporean citizens even after the expiration of the Work Permit. Workers frequently lack the power needed to demand basic contractually agreed entitlements (Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics [HOME], 2011, 2017; Yea and Chok, 2018). There is virtually no route to claiming permanent citizenship arrangements within the scheme.

These multi-layered exclusions of Work Permit holders are nonetheless more regularised than those conditions that frame the experiences of migrant sex workers. In Singapore, the transaction of trading money for sex is legal, but many of the activities surrounding sex work are not, such as soliciting sexual services, subsisting on money earned through the sex trade or owning a brothel. According to the Women’s Charter section 140, the selling of sexual services is technically illegal (Singapore Statutes Online, 2020). Yet, Singapore’s sex industry is clearly large, visible and unofficially permitted. A small fraction (800–1000) of sex workers obtain something akin to a formalised employment status by enrolling in the so-called Medical Surveillance Scheme (MSS) (Project X, 2020). However, Teo et al. (2019) estimated that most of the sex industry lies outside of the MSS, with around 4200 sex workers in Singapore.

Most sex workers in Singapore are migrants and there is evidence that a range of different entry routes exist, including quasi-legalised Work Permits which allow employment in the night-time economy, and more illegal routes through tourist visas (Lainez, 2020). Bars and clubs that have a Public Entertainment Licence are eligible to recruit foreign workers on the specific Work Permit ‘for performing artistes’ (MoM, 2019d). These are only issued for six months, and individuals are not permitted to enter Singapore for employment of any type for one year after the termination of the permit (MoM, 2019d).

Immigration regulations represent the formal-legalistic framework for imposing precarity because any citizenship ‘entitlements’ (i.e. access to employment and healthcare, rights to remain) are temporary and highly conditional on employment status. Work Pass holders remain in Singapore for as long as there is requirement for their labour. For ‘performing artistes’, regulations establish an extremely transitory status. Thus, immigration regulations formalise the stark material inequalities between the large group of migrant workers and the rest of the population.

Post-riot crime control,zero-tolerance policing and containment in Geylang, Singapore

Geylang is in the south of Singapore roughly four and a half miles from the city centre. The neighbourhood has significant numbers of privately rented properties, many of which house low-income migrant workers from countries including Bangladesh, India, China, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. Many of the colonial-era shophouse buildings have been converted into illegal two- or three-bedroom apartment-dormitories hosting up to 80 people in shared rooms and even beds. Conditions of severe overcrowding and very poor and unsanitary standards have been reported (Mothership, 2017). Fires in these buildings have been common recently (Channel News Asia, 2019).

There are a high number of licensed and unlicensed brothels situated in Geylang. Many of the bars also facilitate trade by linking sex workers up with clients, and in certain locations there are women soliciting sex on the street. Many of the local hotels service the sex industry by offering hourly and even half-hourly room rates. Whilst there are Singaporean sex workers working in Geylang, the majority are migrants from China, Vietnam and Thailand. Customers are ‘mixed’, as one sex worker told us, including local Singaporeans, migrant workers and also the odd tourist ‘looking for an adventure’ (sex worker, June 2019).

Geylang has been historically associated with crime, vice, as well as Chinese secret societies (see e.g. Nasir, 2014). It continues to be linked with criminal and vice activities such as gambling and sex work. As one participant employed by an NGO stated:

When I was growing up nobody would bring me to Geylang … it’s not somewhere you have a family outing to … but that is its reputation, that people think you shouldn’t go to Geylang because it is very dangerous. But you have to be of a certain class, I mean Singaporean society is very stratified by class, and it takes a certain class of people who would be comfortable going there and there will be a bunch of others who would be like, ‘nah-ah, it’s dirty, it’s criminal’. (NGO worker, June 2019)

This reputation of Geylang is now commonly linked to the people who inhabit the area – sex workers, migrant workers and those engaged in illicit markets. In recent years, several interventions have sought to increase the visibility of the state’s presence in the neighbourhood. These interventions were implemented after the 2013 riots in Little India. On 8 December 2013, Sakthivel Kumaravelu, a 33-year-old construction worker from India, was killed by a bus. Around 500 migrant workers, enraged by the disregard for the man’s life, attacked the bus driver and, later, emergency personnel and the police. The authorities reacted promptly and harshly to the riot: 53 migrant workers were deported, and the government sought to shift blame on migrant workers by locating the cause of the riot as excessive alcohol consumption (Kaur et al., 2016). A host of measures were instigated seeking to regulate actions and behaviours across Singapore, but especially in Little India and other areas with high migrant worker presence. These included regulations relating to alcohol consumption, curfews and increased policing and surveillance.

After the Little India riots, the heightened fear of social and political unrest turned the authorities’ attention towards Geylang as another neighbourhood populated by migrant workers and associated with sex work, gambling and the selling of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and cigarettes. Politicians and the state-regulated media started talking of an ‘undercurrent of fear’ pervading Geylang, and a ‘hint of lawlessness’ (Straits Times, 2014) which would potentially attract criminal behaviour. In 2014, the then Chief of Police, Commissioner Ng, publicly stated that Geylang ‘is a potential powder keg’ and a threat to peace and social order (quoted in Today, 2014).

In the months and years after the Little India riot, several measures were implemented in Geylang. Although there had not been a comparable incident of social unrest, authorities were ‘banking on the image of Geylang as already being dangerous’ (NGO worker, June 2019) in justifying extensive post-riot measures. However, it seemed that state efforts were more concerned with geographically condensing, rather than preventing, deviant activities whilst also placing certain groups under more intense surveillance. Geylang became, in the words of one NGO worker and local resident, ‘a sacrificial lamb for the rest of Singapore … when you sacrifice a lamb for everybody else to be safe’ (NGO worker, July 2019).

Geylang became, like Little India, a Liquor Control Zone. Drinking on-the-street was prohibited and most licensed establishments were prevented from selling alcohol after 10:30 pm. The number of police on the streets increased by 60% and a new police and fire station was built. Bright floodlights were installed to allow the control of the secluded, and previously unlit, back allies and there was a large investment in security cameras. After 2014, over 300 new CCTV cameras were installed by the police, leading to a total of 600 cameras in an area of 3.7 square miles (excluding private security cameras). Body heat-detecting infra-red cameras were installed on the pedestrian bridges on Geylang Road, which automatically alert authorities to mass congregations on the street. More recently, ‘smart lampposts’ with facial recognition capacities were installed (Channel News Asia, 2018).

However, despite the extensive (and equally visible) security technologies and post-riots measures, non-participant observation in the neighbourhood showed that illegal gambling, on-street soliciting of sexual services, the peddling of ‘fake’ sexual performance enhancers and the sale of tax-not-paid cigarettes were all easily discernible in the area after sunset. In a car park off Geylang Road, we observed a ‘pop-up’ gambling stall that, as one participant confirmed (NGO worker, September 2018), appeared there every evening. In the smaller backstreets, we found empty bottles of liquid codeine; rare evidence of illegal recreational drugs consumption in Singapore. On one street opposite to food courts, several improvised stalls selling illegal sex drugs could be found. These illegal drugs were placed on blankets for fast exiting. One NGO worker informed us (September 2018) that police officers would generally patrol in the evening time when families go out for dinner; the officers would wear bright yellow jackets and approach very slowly, whilst the peddlers would pack up and walk away, only to return to their trade a few hours later.

During the research, however, the authorities seemed to be seeking to reduce the visibility of certain illicit activities in Geylang. Gambling had disappeared from public spaces and moved into private areas (NGO worker, July 2019). In addition, gambling activities were taking place in the KTV lounges we visited during fieldwork. But as the NGO worker confirmed, authorities had focused on ending gambling activities around October 2018:

Yeah, ‘Police Crushed Organised Crime Group’ [referring to reports on a crackdown reported in the local media (Huiwen, 2018)]. It’s the first time they use ‘crush’ and this was the last article that came out before it [pop-up gambling stalls] was shut down. […] So, this was a very specific raid that was done in 2018. […] it was the last raid that kind of shut everything down or rather it disappeared from the streets and it may have been the moment when they made a clear stance against public gambling. (NGO worker, July 2019)

Police raids are commonly accompanied by media reports on police successes in the state-owned newspapers, and in headlines such as ‘51 arrested in multi-agency Geylang operation’ (Straits Times, 2019), ‘73 arrested, illegal items worth $10.5k seized in 7-day multi-agency Geylang operation’ (Straits Times, 2018) or ‘Joint operation in Geylang nabs 22 men’ (New Paper, 2019). However, while the police ‘crushed’ illegal gambling, the selling of sexual performance enhancement pharmaceuticals, counterfeit cigarettes and sexual services was still tolerated. As one NGO worker stated regarding the nightly ‘raids’ on those vending sexual performance enhancement pharmaceuticals, even when these are reported in the media there is very little evidence of further action such as prosecuting the vendors:

So every three to six months there will be a huge raid that they will like announce on the media so typically the day after they all come back in brute force … so they will definitely show like what they’ve confiscated. But no one knows for sure what happens to these guys [selling counterfeit drugs] […]. For the moment it looks like that [it is still performative]. But it’s hard to say when they [the police] might crush it. It’s like the gambling was similar in the patterns of constant raiding, announcement about how much was seized, who was arrested and what was confiscated. But they’ve never used such strong words about crushing the sex drugs. (NGO worker, June 2019)

As participants reported, police raids also regularly target sex workers in Geylang. The regulation of sex work in Singapore is here dealing with a specific contradiction between the political and ideological commitment to so-called conservative, religious and family ‘Asian Values’ (Chua, 2017) and a paradoxically large commercial sex industry. Despite the PAP’s emphasis on conservative values, the sex industry remains important for Singapore’s economy. Tourism, international events such as the Formula 1 race, MICE (‘Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions’) industries and the attraction of higher income ‘expatriate’ workers as well as low-income workers who have left their families mean that Singapore has a large and diverse commercial sex industry.

Controlling the sex industry in Geylang orientates around the social disorder associated with sex work and in particular the public’s supposed concerns about the violation of conservative morals, to which policing attempts react. As one NGO worker stated when asked what drives policing priorities in Geylang:

Complaints, number one, complaints. People picking up the phone … so some sex workers tell me they get targeted if they are near schools, religious buildings or government buildings because they are the clean areas, right, and you cannot taint it, so to speak, and obviously ‘not in my backyard’. […] People like to complain and when somebody calls the police they are forced to take action. And this is verified by certain officers when I call and say ‘why did you arrest them?’ they say ‘when people complain, I have no choice but to do it’. (NGO worker, June 2019)

The general anxieties around sex work are also manifested in the approach taken in national media in reporting brothel ‘busts’. Frequent brothel raid reports highlight effective police work ending the sex trade and often include provocative photos of sex workers sitting on beds next to confiscated packets of condoms (e.g. Straits Times, 2019). As the NGO worker explained, the highly visible raids fulfilled a function in displaying a tough stance on crime and disorder:

A raid is a spectacle, it is something to see … it’s a huge show, and who is this show for? For the people who complained about the brothel, to be like ‘that’s where my taxes go’, ‘you’re taking action, well done you!’ And then the newspaper report comes out, right, for even more people to see what has been done. So on the one hand there is awareness that it is a necessary evil, but on the other there is a need to maintain our look as a conservative society. (NGO worker, July 2019)

Outside of the public spectacle of the raid, the policing of sex work differs depending on who is the target of police efforts. These were primarily unlicensed migrant sex workers. As a Singaporean sex worker told us:

Those officers in disguise, we know who they are, we know their faces already. And they know us, they know me, they are chit-chatting before. So nothing new for us; we know who they are, they know who we are. So when they come down they expect new faces, the migrant sex workers, the unlicensed ones. […] They don’t come after Singaporeans; we give them respect and they are nicer to us – they ask us ‘how’s things?’ and so on. And it would be very stupid of them to keep on coming to us. They ask us ‘have you seen any new Thai ladies here?’ then it’s up to us whether we want to rat them out or not. But … they are mostly looking for new faces. But those that I know have already been arrested before, or they’re just waiting for their time to be up […] I think now because they’ve been doing it for so many years, on and off, on and off, the effort is not worth it, no point in them keeping on coming, hoping to find new women to catch. (Sex worker, June 2019)

However, even among the migrant sex workers, there is knowledge about when and by whom policing efforts are conducted. As a Singaporean sex worker explained:

Even the pimps know; they have a tip off when the police are coming […] We even know which car number plate is not a client, it is a police car. Yeah, we can identify it. So it is no surprise for us, or for even the unlicensed migrant sex workers, as the pimps know all these numbers, which cars. (Sex worker, June 2019)

Overall, police efforts in Geylang place sex workers under significant scrutiny and at periodic times the laws around solicitation may even be enforced. Policing is presented as zero tolerance: there is a high visibility of surveillance strategies and efforts to disseminate various media images of ‘clamping down’ on sex work. In reality, policing strategies, which include considerable tolerance of sex work in Geylang, appear to be more concerned with the spatial regulation of sex work in order to confine it to an area deemed suitable.

Discussion: Stigmatisation, policing and containment

Our fieldwork data reveal three processes through which state power through crime control is directed at Geylang: the stigmatisation of the neighbourhood through association with marginalised groups, legitimising spatialised crime control; the enacting of performative zero-tolerance policing, which includes the toleration of some illicit behaviours; and the containment and surveillance of illicit activities such as sex work within the neighbourhood. These intricate practices of crime control can be understood as forms of statecraft; a fusing of mutually reinforcing semiotic and institutional strategies creating the political conditions for constructing a political economy dependent on the devalued labour provided by migrant workers.

Following the Little India riots of 2013, the stigmatisation of Geylang intensified due to its association with crime in a context of heightened fear of social unrest, as exemplified in the labelling of Geylang as a potential ‘powder keg’. The stigma connected to the neighbourhood feeds the perpetuation that the primary signifier (Coleman, 2005) of social problems is the ‘immoral’ and ‘deviant’ migrant worker. This justifies not only the control and surveillance of migrant workers, but the control of the spaces they inhabit. In addition, the stigmatisation of Geylang as an area that must be avoided by law-abiding citizens contributes to, and maintains, the social and spatial exclusion of migrant workers. The stigma attached to the neighbourhood reproduces the assumed immorality associated with sex work and migrants, while the difficult life circumstances these people experience is downplayed or ignored.

Examining policing in Geylang, our data show an apparently contradictory application of practices. On the one hand, the neighbourhood is policed by use of surveillance technologies and regular patrolling. This ‘tough-on-crime’ approach reinforces the apparent authoritarian tendencies of social regulation in Singapore. However, both participants’ experiences and non-participant observations indicate that there is considerable lenience and deliberation around when and how laws are applied, at least in terms of street-level policing. Considerable tolerance is shown for many illegal activities such as sex work or the selling of counterfeit goods. The example of the intentional eradication of on-street gambling, which has since been largely eliminated in Geylang, indicates that police power can be exercised successfully in curbing illicit activity. However, even after police ‘clampdowns’, illegal activities in Geylang remain visible. This suggests that Geylang is, in part, a space for the performance of zero-tolerance policing, which seeks to communicate to the public an image of zero tolerance by the Singaporean authorities. In particular, the reported police raids, accompanied by media reports and images of spectacular ‘crackdowns’, appear to follow a double objective: to make visible and public both the presence of illegal activity in Geylang and its apparent successful suppression by the authorities. This suggests that the manufacturing of spectacular images for distribution in the media is an important intent of policing in Singapore. The intentional visibility of policing strategies in Geylang, surveillance technologies and accompanying images of effective police power in the local media co-produce narratives about where criminality resides and who is dangerous. In other words, performative policing in the neighbourhood reinforces both the assumption that marginalised groups pose a potential threat to social order and the idea that the state is effectively managing this threat.

Our research further shows that despite stated policing agendas opposing sex work, in Geylang commercial sex is widely tolerated. Through regular patrolling, highly visible surveillance actions and the dissemination of various narratives and (media) images of ‘clamping down’, the state portrays itself as actively seeking to eradicate and eliminate sex work in the neighbourhood. Police efforts place sex workers under significant scrutiny; and at periodic times the laws around solicitation may even be enforced. However, as the participants’ experiences and the observations show, outside of the public spectacle of the raid, the policing of sex work is permissive. This suggests that sex work is policed when it meets aspects of social life which are deemed to require insulation from the immorality of the sex industry, which stands in contradiction to Singapore as a conservative ‘Asian Values’ (Chua, 2017: 21) society. As such, the actual policing strategy in Geylang is more concerned with containment of sex work (and other illicit activities) within the bounds of the neighbourhood than with their eradication. Ultimately then, by spatially condensing illicit activities into a neighbourhood associated with migrant workers and sex workers, crime and the threat to social order it poses are constantly interlinked with marginalised social groups.

These multiple strategies of state-led crime control in Geylang can be understood as a form of statecraft: they seek to maintain and legitimise the close management of migrant workers and thus contribute to upholding dominant unequal economic and political structures. As we argued earlier, formal regulations within citizenship processes generate vulnerability for migrant workers, structuring rights such as access to employment and denying them permanent residence. In this way, immigrant classes can be pushed to the margins of labour markets either because they are denied legal status, forcing them into the black market for jobs, or through more fully regularised systems which actually designate and enforce access to the labour market but on lower terms (Feldman, 2019). Most lower income migrants in Singapore receive legalised status to remain and work through the Work Permit system. However, the politics of belonging and deservingness also rests on more informal political assertions. As Anderson (2013: 6) argues, the worsened status experienced by migrants and other ‘Failed Citizens’ is a question not only of the legal parameters of citizenship, but also of the normative politics of ‘value’. The politics of belonging revolves around which groups have failed to be ‘Good Citizens’ and who becomes ‘imagined as the “illegal” and thereby associated with the Criminal’ (Anderson, 2013: 5).

Crime control in Geylang operates to condense and contain illicit practices within the neighbourhood and is highly visible to those marginalised groups targeted by spatial management practices. Zero-tolerance policing and surveillance accompany a significant degree of toleration of many illegal activities, rendering policing, to some extent, performative. Media discourses present Geylang as a crime-ridden area where the state actively works hard to quash all lawlessness. The resulting situation of intense state supervision and seemingly paradoxical tolerance emerges from the management of the ‘scene of exclusion’ and ‘obscene of inclusion’ (De Genova, 2013). In the ‘scene of exclusion’ created through localised control, Geylang becomes systematically associated with the ‘foreign’ Other, constructed as out-of-place; their existence seemingly unauthorised by formal state policies. In this sense, the scene of exclusion is less through the border spectacle and more through the supposed deviance of everyday migrant lives, eventually naturalising the bases of exclusion. Constructing criminality as the remit of invasive foreigners makes it appear as though migrants might even be present without the state’s permission, and therefore legitimately deserving of second-class status. Yet the examination of the formal immigration system shows that the state itself arranges routes to entry and work for low-income migrant workers including sex workers. The ‘obscene of inclusion’ (De Genova, 2013: 1186) is that the immigration regime ensures a flow of labour necessary for the various state-sanctioned accumulation strategies.

The contradictory formulation of the scene/obscene, of simultaneous exclusion and inclusion, both informed by and informing a ‘governing through crime’ agenda, in turn supports a wider politics underpinning projects of capital accumulation through disempowered labour. To lean again on Coleman et al. (2005), the specific discourses and practices relating to crime control also have a connection to wider politics of harm distribution: ‘what kinds of crime does this governing process include and, conversely, what does it ignore’ (Coleman et al., 2005: 2526)? Dominant political forces in the city manage and police some forms of harms and crimes to the detriment of others. The state strategies described here keep the public’s gaze firmly on the street, suppressing awareness of the harms faced by migrants as a result of government policies, immigration regulations and exploitation. NGOs and human rights initiatives, such as the HOME (2011, 2017), have documented the serious harms done by employers to migrant workers. These include mistreatments such as working long hours, forced labour, inadequate wages, risk of injury and death, inadequate housing, inadequate healthcare and poor access to food (Yea and Chok, 2018). Sex workers in Singapore are also known to commonly face abuse, violence, theft and mistreatment at the hands of clients and risk arrest by the police or deportation from the police if these violations are reported (Project X, 2020). In fact, Lainez’s (2020) study suggests that those engaging in circular migration from Vietnam to Singapore for prostitution rely on ‘illegal’ informal networks for socio-economic security. Those that the authorities may wish to brand as ‘traffickers’ or ‘people smugglers’, in truth may be the source of workers’ safety against the greater risks of detection and deportation. The constructing of criminality (and thus harm, danger and threat) as residing on the street masks the much more harmful and systemic exploitation of migrants organised through the immigration policies for the benefit of capital. This is shown in Geylang, where the occurrences of fires and the poor living conditions in migrant dorms in the area indicate that landlords seem not to be subjected to much scrutiny. Social problems are seen to be the remit of marginal and disempowered populations rather than being embedded in the forms of dominant economics. In this sense, statecraft is concerned with creating an accepted social lens for justifying inequality and entwined with the materialities of economics and profit-making.

Conclusion

Statecraft places the intentional and strategic use of localised state power as central to sustaining forms of economic accumulation. Contributing further to the development of the statecraft approach to researching urban crime control, our research focuses on deconstructing the various local processes that contribute to the upholding of race- and class-based inequalities in Singapore. Drawing empirically from observations and the experiences of those living and working in a highly controlled neighbourhood, we demonstrate that the material dimensions of practices managing criminality (Coleman et’al., 2005) in Geylang are fundamentally undergirded by a representational politics. Here, governing through (images and discourses of) crime as part of statecrafting the Singaporean political economy entails performative zero-tolerance policing enacting a ‘tough on crime’ stance, and the symbolic attachment of stigma to Geylang and its residents. Albeit based on a small sample, the experience of the NGO workers and sex workers who participated in this research suggests that the policing of Geylang is not aiming to eliminate crime, as many illicit activities remain tolerated by authorities. Rather, the aim of policing appears to be the condensing and containment of crime within Geylang. This is intertwined with the construction of migrant workers and sex workers as the criminal and deviant Other, providing a moral dimension to class and racialised exclusion based on the potential threat they are considered to represent. At the same time, sex work, construction, domestic work and the numerous other industries in which Work Permit holders find employment sustain Singapore’s status as a global city. This contradictory formulation of the scene/obscene (De Genova, 2013), of simultaneous exclusion and inclusion, as such, plays a role in the legitimising of a political economy that is, in part, dependent on the labour provided by migrant workers. Statecraft approaches to researching immigration, as such, necessitate awareness of the extent to which the exclusionary ‘spectacle’ of regulating low-income migrant workers through crime control agendas naturalises structures of intense inequality and supports citizenship exclusion, racialised marginality and a wider politics of capital accumulation through cheap labour.