Ethnographische Überlegungen zu Polizeiarbeit in Niger

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Abstract

Criminal police work by Nigerian gendarmes or any other police actors includes three steps: knowledge of a supposed breach of the law; investigations and establishing the facts; and putting the results into a literary legal format, that is, writing a case file. I conceive this as a long chain of translations, from a complaint and a case into facts, and finally into a bureaucratic narrative. The 'things' that move along this chain are, I suggest, stories. The gendarmes listened to the complainants' stories and decided whether or not to accept them as valid complaints and turn them into cases. A case was a story the gendarmes wanted to make sense of, and thus they invested time and work in finding the truth. To do so, they listened to other peoples' stories, those of suspects and witnesses, as well as paying attention to the stories revealed by the material evidence. When the gendarmes had established the facts, they composed a new story by bringing all the others together and eliminating discontinuities and ambiguities, thus producing the case file. In other words, enforcing the law was about the gendarmes' hearing, making sense of, and writing stories - not unlike the work of this ethnographer.