“I’m Making the Streets Safer Ma’am”: Race,Coloniality,and the Redemptive Theologies of Pastoral Police Power

Abstract

A number of scholarly studies have focused upon mapping the relationship between race, police power, and the sovereign capacity of law onto the coordinates of repressive force. No doubt, the racialized circuits of police violence, underpinned by the mystical foundation of sovereign authority, constitute a coercive apparatus that is marshaled by risk and security. However, rather than reduce mythic police violence to the singular vector of repression, I suggest that the propensity to punish the racialized body and make it suffer through police practices of the confessional and pastoral power imbricate with the pre-liberal Christian theology of redemption and atonement. Upon consideration of decolonial and theological-political concepts, I suggest pastoral forms of racialized police power have been articulated to utilitarian secular-liberal democratic justifications to increase community safety, suppress crime, and reify social and political solidarity through the appropriate dispensation of suffering, and, potentially death.