Introduction

The pandemic has had a much harsher effect on vulnerable urban groups such as refugees, asylum-seekers, undocumented migrants, and the homeless (see also Volume 2, Chapter Sixteen). For many of these, public space is an important realm not only for leisure and social contact, but also as a source of shelter and income. The current crisis, however, has left a lasting imprint on how public spaces are policed, often to the detriment of these groups. Rather than the pandemic being a great equalizer, it has sharpened social differences with regard to urban undesirables’ use of public spaces.

In Belgium, during the first weeks of the sanitary crisis, the pandemic was framed as a security threat, which included calling the national COVID-19 decision-making body ‘The National Security Council’ and launching marketing campaigns that implored people to ‘keep safe’. This ‘securitisation’ (Goldstein, 2010) of a health crisis provided police forces with exceptional powers, similar to those given during times of terrorist threat.

In the securitization logic of the lockdown, the police increasingly focused on maintaining order in public space and keeping ‘everyone in their “proper” place in the seemingly natural order of things’ (Dikeç, 2005: 174). Hayward (2012) uses the metaphor of ‘container spaces’ while discussing police strategies like ‘kettling’ – a means of containing and enclosing protesters into a designated perimeter. The police became managers of public space, moving populations to designed places, like board game players moving pieces around. As Ranciere (2001: 8) cynically noted ‘ “Move along! There is nothing to see here!” The police says that there is nothing to see on a road, that there is nothing to do but move along. It asserts that the space of circulating is nothing other than the space of circulation.’

The displacement of vulnerable populations reveals an aspect of police work that is less related to crime control, and more to a kind of theater or performance: ‘the policing of undesirable bodies and practices is not simply about quantitative crime reduction, but conducted through qualitative, embodied performance’ (Cook and Whowell, 2011: 610). Police officers are guards of the moral dimensions of publicness, in which vulnerable populations are barred from exceeding what Brighenti (2010: 47) called ‘the upper threshold of correct visibility’.