Hyper-policing the Homeless: Lived Experience and the Perils of Benevolent and Malevolent Policing

Drawing on interviews with 164 people experiencing homelessness across Australia, this article discusses the concept of hyper-policing to account for excessive police interventions. Hyper-policing is exhibited in the sheer numbers of police apprehensions of people experiencing homelessness (quantitative aspect) and the extreme use of force (qualitative aspect). By deploying Wacquant’s (Daedalus 139(3):74–90, 2010) notion of hyper-incarceration in “ghettos”, we reveal that policing homelessness in Australia creates a panopticon on the streets and a conveyor belt into the panopticon of prisons. The lived experience of homeless participants demonstrates that hyper-policing is characterised by casual and constant encounters that reinforce homeless peoples’ status as ‘urban outcasts’ (Wacquant Int J Urban Reg Res 17:366–383, 1993). With growing pressures on access to housing and the cost of living across Western capitalist societies, policing is likely to play an increasing role in managing the housing crisis fallout. Homeless participants contend that the antidote to hyper-policing is not better policing but the dilution of policing. A common refrain among participants was for the police to ‘leave us alone’—a strategy that does not seek help from community policing but instead seeks peace on the streets. We articulate how the voices of homeless participants furthers ‘defund the police’ and abolitionist thinking by drawing attention to the need for housing justice over policing interventions in either benevolent or malevolent forms.