The Politics of Vagrancy

I think the thing that emerges so strongly from your work in some ways is how much the police power is a power of making and enforcing class. Perhaps you could tell us just a little bit about the role that vagrancy plays in the concerns of early police and policing theorists. I trace this back to, well, in a sense to the collapse of feudalism and the gradual rise of commercial order and the growth of capitalism. It's important because it really, really gets to the core of, you know, of contemporary problems with policing.