ABSTRACT
The history of authoritarian rule—whether by local landowners, political bosses, or military police—extinguished any incipient culture of protest. Inequality typically constitutes the relationship between police and policed. Diarmaid M. Harkin's usage of general notions such as collective consciousness, popular sentiment and the public and his silence with respect to existing protests provide a view on police legitimacy that can only be maintained if we accept and deem legible the social congruency on which it is based. An epistemology that leverages marked and evident protest alone is not well equipped to distinguish resistance, accommodation, defeat and fear. The upsurge of hashtag activism against police has given voices a firm place on social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Publics may engulf the streets or sit tight behind their computer, their actions criminally violent or remarkably peaceful, their ideas exceptional or in keeping with the main drift of public attitude.
