Police and atrocity crimes

This chapter reviews literature on police as atrocity perpetrators. Atrocity crimes (the core crimes of international criminal law, including genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity) are the focus of increased criminological attention (see e.g. Aydın-Aitchison et al. 2024). We use Mawby’s (2008: 17) framework of police as a structured organisation, tasked with functions related to law and order, under the legitimating grant of a monopoly of coercive powers. Diverse research covers several contexts: colonial rule, its demise, and the post-colonial states which followed (Elkins 2005; Chattha 2022; Dube 2021); authoritarian states (e.g. Këlliçi 2002); and apartheid (Frankel 2001). We focus on historical accounts of police during the Holocaust, in colonial Australia, and during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. This literature offers valuable perspectives on how and why police participate actively in atrocity, and in particular how they are organised to this end. Our chapter goes beyond this to examine contemporary police violence in two democracies, Brazil and the USA, through the lens of atrocity. Theoretically, we argue for the value of this step in exposing conditions of a broad range of everyday police violence. In between deployments, violence, including extreme violence, always remains a latent potential resting with police as agents of forceful social ordering in democracies as much as in other state forms. It is a predisposition waiting to be activated. Restraints on this need constant attention. Practically, we argue for urgent demilitarisation, in terms of materiel and mentalities, and reinvigorated accountability structures, including less judicial deference to police defences.