The long shadow of the repressive state: Militarized policing and the eviction crisis

Abstract

This article is concerned with the often-overlooked role of repressive state agencies in the current eviction and gentrification crisis. Intervening into contemporary research, it provides an empirically based argument to re-include law enforcement into critical housing research for what the police essentially is: a political actor in the evictions crisis in its own right, central to reproducing racial capitalism in the realm of housing. Combining movement-produced data from anti-eviction struggles in Barcelona with US police record research in Oakland, the article shows how law enforcement’s policing and military upgrading determines the course of forced removals, much prior to a judge’s order. Examples of police activity illustrate how officers use the significant discretion afforded to them by the law to execute extralegal evictions of primarily poor women and racialized populations, seeking to secure above all that any ‘opting out’ of capitalist, patriarchal and racist power structures is repressed by state violence.