Abstract
ABSTRACT Police violence contributes to uneven experiences of citizenship. Identity often determines who is affected and the ability of loved ones to fight back. While reforms to the criminal justice system are important, I argue that police violence is best understood as situated within public contestations over the meaning and practice of citizenship. These are multilevel and interdependent contestations that occur at the interpersonal, discursive, and judicial levels and are embedded in power structures that aim to reproduce existing social inequalities. Through contestation, targeted communities, at the very least, create a dissensus on the practices that exclude them and, at best, contribute to the reconstruction of the meaning of citizenship in ways that include their voice. This argument is grounded in the literature on police violence in Latin America and in an in-depth qualitative analysis of the case study of the enforced disappearance of Luciano Arruga in Argentina in 2009.
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