Abstract

This chapter summarizes the foregoing. Social control is an ineliminable part of society and an essential part of a just society. Institutions of social control settle predictable conflicts of legitimate interest that arise in contexts of density and diversity. Unfortunately, that diversity entails that there is unavoidable disagreement over what justice demands of the police and what just social control looks like. The strategic, legitimacy-risk-minimizing use of police discretion is important for just policing. We should accept a framework that encourages police to minimize normative risks rather than pushing them to achieve a fully-formed ideal of justice because the nature of public policing is that there will always be competing visions of justice, and so competing claims on police power. Policing, like all forms of social control, is fraught with injustice.