RT Article
T1 ‘It is not about punishment, it’s about protection’: Policing ‘vulnerabilities’ and the securitisation of public health in the COVID-19 pandemic
JF Criminology & criminal justice
VO 24
IS 1
SP 39
OP 58
A1 Russell, Emma K. 1986-
A2 Phillips, Tarryn
A2 Gaylor, Averyl
A2 Trabsky, Marc
LA English
YR 2024
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1878572237
AB This article advances a critical analysis of the concept of ‘vulnerability’ and highlights the ways in which it can work to justify the pre-emptive detention and over-policing of marginalised populations. Building on a historical analysis of the entanglement between public health directives and carceral techniques of securitisation, we provide a contemporary case study of the ‘hard lockdown’ of nine public housing towers in Melbourne, Australia in July 2020, at the start of the city’s second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. A thematic analysis of media discourses surrounding this event reveals that tower residents were constructed as vulnerable across four interconnecting discourses: spatially, culturally, behaviourally and psychologically. This enabled government actors to frame the exceptional mobilisation of police powers and detention directives to peoples’ homes as caring measures, despite their punitive optics and effects. Our analysis suggests that the pandemic has heightened the securitisation of public health measures, which can extend notions of racial inferiority and pathology, and compound social and economic inequalities. It indicates the need for further interrogation of the nexus between ‘care’ and control and the intensification of police powers in times of crisis.
K1 Vulnerability
K1 Public Housing
K1 Public Health
K1 pandemic policing
K1 Lockdown
DO 10.1177/17488958221120480