The enforcement debate is joined over what institution, if any, the political community is structurally obliged to maintain for protection against internal coercion, and over the encounter-architecture that institution must run. The framework's recognition tradition reads enforcement as constitutive infrastructure on the same logic as defense (the protective obligation [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) derives discharges through institutions, and enforcement is one channel), with the upstream-prevention thesis running across [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) / [§9.9](<9.9 Education.md>) / [§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>) / [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) / [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) as preconditions that drain the sources of internal coercion, with the rights-protection inversion at the encounter level (the enforcement-target is a participant in the political community throughout, not the institution's adversary), with the [§8.4](<8.4 Reasoning.md>)- and [§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>)-derived time-preservation tactical doctrine as load-bearing structural commitment, with civilian first-response routing for mental-health and substance-related crises, with demilitarization as the boundary with [§9.11](<9.11 Defense.md>) Defense, and with for-profit / revenue-extraction policing structurally precluded as extraction at the citizen-encounter interface. Four contemporary traditions deny this framing at its premise from different directions.

The police-abolitionist tradition (Davis 2003; Gilmore 2007; Kaba 2021; Vitale 2017; the abolitionist-organizing tradition of Critical Resistance) presses the institutional-form claim: the framework's refounding of enforcement on rights-protection orientation still presupposes a coercive state-monopoly institution that the abolitionist record argues cannot be reformed within the structural-extraction frame. The racialized origins (slave patrols, strike-breaking, the colonial-policing literature), the institutional persistence of extraction patterns across decades of reform, and the empirical record on what police-funded budgets crowd out together support abolition rather than refoundation. Refoundation on the framework's terms, on this reading, will be captured by the same structural forces that captured every prior reform cycle.

The broken-windows / order-maintenance tradition (Wilson and Kelling 1982; Bratton's NYPD record across two commissioner terms; the contemporary order-maintenance literature represented by Mac Donald; the empirical work on hot-spots policing by Weisburd) presses the prevention-mechanism claim from the opposite direction: visible order-maintenance presence at the level of low-level violations and disorder cues prevents the conditions under which more serious coercion-events occur. The framework's upstream-prevention thesis converges with, rather than against, active proactive enforcement of those cues; rapid presence and assertive enforcement of low-level violations is what produces the upstream-prevention work the framework asks for.

The libertarian minimal-state tradition on policing (Nozick 1974; Rothbard 1973; the private-security and arbitration literature through Benson and Friedman) presses the legitimacy claim from a third direction: the state monopoly on legitimate force is itself an extractive institution that cannot be justified on rights-protection grounds, because rights protection at the encounter level is delivered better by private security under contractual relationships and by competitive arbitration mechanisms than by state-monopoly enforcement that operates under inverted incentives.

The anarchist tradition (Kropotkin, *Mutual Aid* 1902; Bakunin, *God and the State* 1882; Rocker, *Anarcho-Syndicalism* 1938; Ward, *Anarchy in Action* 1973; Graeber, *Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology* 2004) presses the legitimacy claim past the point the libertarian minimal-state tradition stops: not merely that the state's monopoly on legitimate force should be relocated to private contract, but that no standing authority empowered to bind a non-consenting party is structurally necessary at all. Voluntary association, mutual aid, and federated direct action, on this reading, can discharge protection against internal coercion without any institution — public, privately contracted, or otherwise — holding binding authority over a member who has not consented to a given exercise of it.

A fifth line of critique, from the standpoint/intersectional feminist tradition (Crenshaw 1989, 1991; Collins 1990), presses a different kind of claim: it does not dispute that some institution should discharge protection against internal coercion, but disputes that a formally equal encounter-architecture, designed and evaluated from an undifferentiated vantage point, actually delivers that protection to everyone the institution is meant to protect. Crenshaw's analysis of antiracist and antiviolence institutions shows each organized around a single axis of subordination — race or sex — and shows that women of color fall through the resulting gap: domestic-violence response built on a gender-only model and antiracist politics built on a race-only model both systematically underserve a population whose exposure to coercion is the product of the intersection, not the sum, of the two axes. Collins's matrix-of-domination analysis generalizes the diagnosis: a subject occupying multiple, simultaneously operating structural positions has an epistemic vantage on how those positions compound that a single-axis analysis, however rigorously it treats each axis alone, cannot recover, and institutional design that draws only on majority-position evidence will misjudge which encounters are actually protective.

The recognition tradition the section operates within reaches the constitutive-enforcement-with-extraction-precluded destination on multiple independent grounds. The [§8.4](<8.4 Reasoning.md>) and [§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>) agency derivation supplies the time-preservation requirement directly: freedom of will is constituted by the analysis of possibility-space, analysis-depth scales with available time, and any encounter that compresses citizen analysis-time toward zero destroys the agency the encounter is supposed to be protecting. Morality ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)) supplies the recognition-failure-as-wrong logic that grounds the rights-protection inversion. The public-health-to-violence tradition (Krug et al. 2002; Slutkin's Cure Violence model; the Glasgow Violence Reduction Unit's record from 2005 onward) supplies the upstream-prevention thesis at the policy-architecture register. The collective-efficacy and concentrated-disadvantage literatures (Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls 1997; Sharkey, Torrats-Espinosa, and Takyar 2017) supply the empirical case for upstream-conditions adequacy as a driver of policing demand. The reform-criminological tradition (Police Executive Research Forum 2016; the Police Foundation; the Center for Policing Equity; Stoughton, Noble, and Alpert 2020; the empirical evaluations of ICAT training by Engel, McManus, and Herold 2020) supplies the within-department evidence on doctrinal-orientation effects. Stuntz (2011) and Forman (2017) supply the historical-political-economic case for how the institution arrived at its current configuration. The Crisis Intervention Team training literature (Watson and Fulambarker 2012; Compton et al. 2014), the CAHOOTS program operating since 1989, the Denver STAR program, the New York City B-HEARD program, and the Albuquerque Community Safety Department supply the civilian-first-response evidence. The Camden, New Jersey 2013 disbandment-and-rebuild supplies the within-US natural experiment on doctrinal-reform outcomes. The cross-national comparison (Nordic policing systems; UK, Norway, Iceland, New Zealand unarmed-default architectures; the Japanese koban system) supplies the strongest empirical case for the composite framework prediction. Balko (2013) and ACLU (2014) supply the empirical record on the demilitarization-boundary failure. The intersectional diagnostic is granted as a constraint on how that evidence base itself must be built: an encounter-architecture that looks protective against aggregate outcome measures can still fail exactly the multiply-marginalized subjects Crenshaw and Collins identify, so the reform-criminological and civilian-first-response record the recognition tradition relies on must be disaggregated along intersecting structural position, not only along whichever single axis a given source-tradition happened to track, for the participant-throughout commitment to hold for every encounter rather than only in the aggregate.

The dispute the section frames is whether enforcement should be abolished as an institutional form (abolitionism), restructured around aggressive proactive enforcement of low-level disorder cues (broken-windows / order-maintenance), replaced by private-security-and-arbitration mechanisms (libertarian minimal-state), or dissolved into voluntary association and federated direct action with no standing binding authority at all (anarchism) — theses pressed by Davis-Gilmore-Kaba-Vitale, by Wilson-Kelling-Bratton-Mac Donald, by Nozick-Rothbard, and by Kropotkin-Bakunin-Rocker-Ward-Graeber — or whether enforcement is legitimate constitutive infrastructure for protection against internal coercion, load-bearing on the upstream-prevention thesis and the time-preservation tactical doctrine derived from [§8.4](<8.4 Reasoning.md>) and [§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>), with for-profit / revenue-extraction policing structurally precluded and with the demilitarization boundary with [§9.11](<9.11 Defense.md>) Defense holding because the two domains require opposite encounter-architectures, a thesis pressed by the [§8.4](<8.4 Reasoning.md>) and [§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>) agency derivation, the public-health-to-violence tradition, the reform-criminological record, the CAHOOTS / STAR / B-HEARD operational evidence, the Camden case, and the cross-national comparison, and the Stuntz / Forman historical-political-economic analysis, with the standpoint/intersectional diagnostic entered as a constraint on how that evidentiary case must be built rather than as a further competing institutional destination. The structural-necessity derivation puts the dispute to rest at [§9.12.2](<9.12.2 What is Required.md>), reading the [§8.4](<8.4 Reasoning.md>) / [§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>) / [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) grounding through to what enforcement must deliver to count as enforcement under a political community whose protective obligation against internal coercion runs alongside its agency-preservation obligation toward every participant the institution encounters. *Thus the question stands disputed.*


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← [9.12 Enforcement](<9.12 Enforcement.md>) | [9.12.2 What is Required](<9.12.2 What is Required.md>) →
