ABSTRACT
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, black, Latinx, and Indigenous populations have been disproportionately burdened by the disease. Epidemiological studies have shown that these disparities are driven by structural and environmental forces, which reflect persistent systemic racism. To curtail the spread of COVID-19, policing was used to enforce public health mandates, with evidence emerging that black and low-income communities were disproportionately surveilled and arrested for failing to comply. This chapter explores how this policing approach helped to turn social failure into individual failure—as medical authority in conjunction with the law—and shifted attention away from systemic racism and economic injustice as individuals (disproportionately black and low income) were criminalized and were subjected to expanded police powers. This chapter argued that undergirding and legitimating this were medicalizing imperatives, which made certain marginalized populations more vulnerable to pandemic policing.
