Affective Policing

Affective Policing provides an in-depth exploration of police raids in the sex industry in Germany and how police officers navigate these events by mobilizing affects such as compassion, suspicion, disgust, and frustration. Although raids are officially justified as measures to identify and protect victims of human trafficking, such victims are largely absent in everyday policing practice. Instead, raids operate as a moral and epistemic technology that targets migrant sex workers, reproducing older regimes of vice control under the language of humanitarian concern.

Based on extensive fieldwork with a vice squad police department and on routine police raids—riding along in unmarked cars, entering brothels and private apartments, observing encounters between officers and sex workers in the local red-light district—Julia Leser reveals how sex work and human trafficking are governed through affects. By connecting police ethnography with affect theory, Affective Policing uncovers the constitution, withdrawal, and (un)ungovernability of subjects in the everyday practice of police officers. It contemplates how 'the state' feels for its subjects and affects the governance of marginalized populations.