We can’t let people policing others become a new form of status and citizenship

Everywhere you look, people seem to be losing rights. Texas’ Senate Bill 8, which its legislators passed last year, was perhaps the most shocking example of this anti-rights wave. It’s one of the most severe restrictions on abortion rights in the United States, banning abortions after six weeks, before many people know they are pregnant, and its effects are already being felt throughout the state. But it’s all the more alarming for its unique method of enforcement.

Rather than being enforced by the state government, which would be a clear violation of Roe v. Wade, the law gives Texas residents the right to sue those who aid or assist an abortion. Although this “vigilante” provision is described as a way to work around the Roe precedent, another way of thinking about it is as a new form of social citizenship in America.

S.B. 8’s vigilante provision is not just about finding a new way to reduce women’s rights, but also about creating new rights, or a superordinate category of citizenship, for men. That new status is achieved through the act of policing.

Looking at it this way, S.B. 8 falls into place alongside a plethora of public policies that use policing as a vehicle for a new kind of citizenship status.

In Florida, the governor signed House Bill 1557, known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. It primarily restricts speech and educational content about LGBTQ issues. But it also contains a provision akin to Texas’ S.B. 8: It empowers parents to file complaints against schools based on their educational content. This gives these parents a new set of powers that elevates them in relation to those who will not or cannot use these powers. It hardly needs mentioning that in both S.B. 8 and H.B. 1557, the people who will use these powers will be those opposed to abortion and those opposed to LGBTQ educational content, which is not exactly a crosssection of American society.

But this phenomenon of giving some people policing powers and elevating their status relative to that of others is neither new to this year nor confined to these states.

All across the country, local municipalities have passed crime-free and nuisance housing ordinances that empower neighbors to surveil and file complaints about others in their communities. Take Faribault, Minnesota, as an example. After an influx of Somali immigrants, the city passed crime-free and nuisance housing ordinances that empowered its residents to surveil and police their neighbors. One Black woman and her family were evicted after her white neighbors, one of whom told her to “go back to where you came from,” summoned the police to her home 82 times. They didn’t call to report criminal activity but rather to complain about barbecues, birthday parties and children playing on the trampoline — things people take for granted as part of suburban life.

The same pattern has played out in California, Illinois and Ohio. It’s also recognizable in the incidents of white people calling police on Black citizens barbecuing at the park, sitting on a bench, bird-watching and so on. In incident after incident, often caught on camera, these individuals seem to realize they can weaponize police against their fellow residents and then consciously proceed to do so. They do not have to call the police, and in many instances, they seem aware that their calls are frivolous. That they call anyway shows that policing is not just about the law but also about status.

Someone who can engage in policing is recognizably different from and, in this context, elevated above, one who is policed or who can neither engage in policing nor rely on police services. The act of policing another person — whether a pregnant person, schoolteacher or neighbor — produces and communicates a subordinate status to the policed while simultaneously producing and confirming one’s own superordinate status. This is the other side of the new wave of laws targeting abortion and education across the country.

If the civil rights era represented a time when people whom the law made formally subordinate at least symbolically caught up to the rights of those at the top, the ensuing decades have been marked by constant efforts by the American right to erode those legal gains.

But to focus only on how the right has weakened the citizenship of others is to miss how it has produced new forms of status and citizenship. Policing is a way to reassert status hierarchies that have been threatened over the past decades of social change.

It’s a dangerous dynamic and one that will lead to a more policed, less free society.

Rahim Kurwa is an assistant professor of criminology, law and justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.