Police action

In the plural limits of the sensitive

Abstract

In this article I dwell on the pluralities of the sensitive in police and university security actions that are implicated in local and contextualized decision moments. The ethnographic analysis is one of the tools that can best help us to understand these plural modalities of the sensitive of this type of action. In this sense, three scenes will be analyzed: the improvisation of an arrest, an eviction and institutionalization of people and, at last, disputes in university security. I argue that the collective work of the emotions at play in policing depends on actions that are always somehow within the limits of sensitive life.