Jeffrey T. Martin

Calling the police, more or less democratically:

The interface between police and citizens in Taiwan is no crisp confrontation between state and society. It is a thickly layered space of mediation, populated by diverse agents, authorities, institutions, and networks. This article uses an ethnographic study of this space to explore its historical and cultural organization. I assemble a series of descriptions of situations in which people sought to mobilize police powers on their behalf, sometimes successfully and sometimes unsuccessfully. I use this evidentiary basis to reflect on the cultural skills involved in making an effective call to police in democratic Taiwan. These skills, I argue, are best understood as a reflection of the meaningful foundations in which the democratic qualities of state powers have taken root in the context of Taiwan’s historical experience with modern governance.

The hukou and traditional virtue: An ethnographic note on Taiwanese policing

This research note suggests that traditional ideals of virtue in Taiwan enable an order-making dynamic to operate in the backstage of state record-keeping processes. These virtues coordinate cooperation by policemen, civilians and politically empowered elites, simultaneously facilitating local order-maintenance and ensuring that police records serve the interests of the established political economic structure. I focus on the ways that this arrangement is grounded in the historical institution of the population registry, or hukou. I argue that Taiwan’s hukou has effectively translated traditional virtues into policeable objects of modern administration: inscribed in the documentary practices of population registration, embedded in a naturalized division of social control labor, and institutionalized as collective habits of response to trouble.

Police: A Sociology of Knowledge Approach

The sociology of the police concerns the study of the institution of policing, its structure, function, and evolution. This focus requires a sociology of knowledge, a framework that highlights how social factors shape current knowledge of police. The concept of police is a contested one and often assumed without definition. Its functions are associated with governance in general and the executive function in particular. The public policing form assembled by Robert Peel, a visible, reactive force, is an assumed paradigm for much police research, but it is one of several types of policing, and contrasts with high policing concerned with national security. Internationally, broad types or ‘families’ of policing have emerged as a result of colonialism. Four specific types of police are common in Western democracies: private policing, pubic policing, hybrid policing, and outsourcing or paying organizations to carry out functions previously restricted to police agencies. Metaphors for studying policing, such as dramaturgy, the policing web, and nodal policing, highlight selected features of the policing function. Many external factors shape policing and the future role and function of the police, given new forms of crime, is unpredictable.

Police as Linking Principle: Rethinking Police Culture in Contemporary Taiwan

This chapter describes the operational logic of police work in contemporary Taiwan, focusing on how police fit into the sociocultural order of life. My description is designed to speak to two related theoretical questions. (1) What is the nature of the practical interface between the police (as a state institution) and policing (as a broader arrangement of social control labor)? And (2) how is the ethnographic level of face-to-face police work involved in the larger-scaled processes that reproduce the overall regime-level characteristics of political society?