The Police: Instituting Violence

Abstract

Speaking of the institution of the police in his famous 1921 text “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” (“Toward the Critique of Violence”), Walter Benjamin gives two very important characteristics of police violence.1 The first and fundamental characteristic is that the police are always connected to violence but that the police’s role within the state is difficult to pinpoint, given that the police constitute an “institution of the modern State” (Benjamin 1986: 286–87). Our intention in this text is to show that police violence is a consequence of a deformation of the institution of police or a deformation of violence.