Proximity, insecurity and inequality: an approach to police work in the city of Madrid

Abstract

This article has the purpose of relating the police work of proximity with the reified social field in the city. Our objective is to know how certain discursive positions on public security are socially constructed from a series of fundamental structural determinants. To that end, we will try to relate the social space and the urban space through police practices and discourses. We propose an approach to some sociological determinants of police work with "the community", trying to emphasize the productive capacity of the latter, beyond merely repressive functions. Through an ethnographic fieldwork consisting of a series of interviews, observations and rounds of accompaniment with police in two very unequal urban spaces (material and symbolically), we will try to identify some fundamental contradictions of police work of proximity in progressively dual social and urban contexts. We will approach the way in which (in) security occurs in both spaces, highlighting the importance of objectifying power struggles in neighborhoods, the role of the State and the media in these, and the political-social danger of psychologizing the insecurities and de-politicizing the violence, that is, unlinking the social issue from the security problems in the cities.