| Summary: | This thesis analyzes the influence of local political and moral economies on police
practices within marginalized communities. Field research of policing in the skid row
districts of Edinburgh, San Francisco and Vancouver provides comparative data on
policing demands, strategies, styles and practices in three distinct civic contexts. While
there is a combination of exclusionary, coercive-inclusionary and inclusionary policing in
all three jurisdictions, there is a different emphasis in each jurisdiction deriving from
structural features of their respective civic political regimes. Operating within a regime of
ordoliberalism, the police in Edinburgh primarily function as knowledge workers who
network with a range of other community agencies to accomplish order and provide
inclusionary services on skid row. In contrast, the police in San Francisco operate within
a neo-liberal regime that mandates a coercive approach to skid row problems with
exclusionary consequences for inhabitants. Vancouver blends both forms of liberalism in
a more conflicted political environment, resulting in a 'middle-way' regime of
peacekeeping that utilizes an unique mix of inclusionary and exclusionary programs and
practises on skid row. In all three cities the police are shown to be 'demand negotiators',
addressing conflicting sets of demands that reflect the structural conditions in which they
operate. How police meet demands - through incident and context-specific uses of law
enforcement, peacekeeping, social work and knowledge work - is shown to be a
consequence of the political and moral economies in which they operate. In offering a
new conceptualization of police as demand negotiators, the thesis not only advances
knowledge of police organization and decision making-processes, but also refines our
understanding of how processes of inclusion and exclusion occur in different liberal
regimes. === Arts, Faculty of === Sociology, Department of === Graduate
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