Breaking Windows as Corrective Justice: Impure Resistance in Urban Ghettos

Abstract

This book review of Tommie Shelbie’s Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform (2016) asks what duties the police have towards the public that they serve and protect, and what duties the public have in return. Shelby argues that there are two sets of duties at play: basic duties of natural justice that govern our conduct no matter what; and reciprocal duties of civic justice that depend upon how we treat each other. If the state fails to treat its public with sufficient respect and solicitude, then considerations of civic justice entail that the public need not treat the state, and its laws, as creating obligations binding upon them. Instead, the public may resist state injustice in ways that may seem, to the majority at least, perverse or deviant. Nonetheless, these actions may make sense given the limited options available to individuals who live in situations of pervasive injustice: circumstances brought about by state animus or malign neglect.

Shelby’s book has, I argue, some important consequences for the way we think about policing, and in particular interactions between the police and the public in communities that are structured by the state’s overwhelming failure to ensure decent living conditions. In such communities, the public may be justified in protesting and resisting state neglect. Such protest may be radically disempowering for the police.