Policing and the Poetics of Everyday Life takes a unique approach to the investigation of several abiding issues at the center of criminological and sociological inquiry by engaging them from a standpoint grounded in philosophy and aesthetics. This study by a self-described “philosopher-cop” develops a phenomenological interpretation of police-citizen encounters, revealing the importance of metaphysics in everyday life through a disclosure of the grounding principles that inform the bureaucratic approach to human predicaments. Jonathan M. Wender, a social philosopher and veteran police sergeant, brings a refreshing new voice to academic and practical discussions of social questions that are otherwise addressed almost exclusively from a narrow scientific or administrative perspective.

This book reflects a conscious attempt to follow the general model of Martin Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars, in which Heidegger engaged psychiatrists and psychologists in a sustained dialogue aimed at developing their critical awareness of the unexamined philosophical foundations informing their everyday clinical practice. Wender draws on Heidegger to argue that “praxis is poetry” and from this standpoint interprets all social action as intentional creation (or “poiesis”), which by its very nature is intrinsically meaningful. Using an interpretive framework that he calls a “phenomenological aesthetics of encounter,” Wender takes up a number of case studies of police-citizen encounters, including cases of domestic violence, contacts with juveniles, drug-related situations, instances of mental and emotional crisis, and death.

Jonathan M. Wender, a former police officer and sergeant of fifteen years, is a lecturer in the department of sociology and the Law, Societies, and Justice Program at the University of Washington.

Preface   ix
Acknowledgments   xi

Introduction: The Bureaucratic Paradox   1
Division 1
1. Approaching Human Beings as Problems   15
2. The Common Roots of Bureaucratic Policing and Mainstream Social Science   35
3. The Approach of a Phenomenological Aesthetics of Encounter   47
Division 2
4. Domestic Violence Encounters: The Eye of the Painter and the Eye of the Police   65
5. The Policing of Childhood: Encounters with Juveniles   89
6. The Poetry of Policing: Encounters from the Drug War   113
7. Encountering the Drama of Mental and Emotional Crisis   138
8. Policing Death: The Problematization of Mortality   162
9. Policing and the Poetics of Everyday Life Postscript: Imagining Otherwise   197

Notes   201
Bibliography   215
Index   237