Securitizing Vulnerability: County Lines, Multi-Agency Safeguarding, and Pre-Emptive Justice

The rise of vulnerability in criminal justice policy has been seen as indicative of a new paradigm centered on notions of compassion and care. My ethnographic research with professionals who respond to individuals found at risk of ‘criminal exploitation’ in the illicit street-level economy known as ‘county lines’ challenges this narrative. At the front line, professionals engage in ‘multi-agency partnerships’ to respond to those they deem vulnerable. And yet, the interventions authorized in the name of safeguarding also extend state monitoring and surveillance even where no crime has been committed. They further give rise to knowledge practices that reconceive of everyday relations among ‘vulnerable’ communities as a site of exploitation and coercion. I argue that multi-agency safeguarding practices follow the logic of pre-emptive policing that has been central to the government's domestic wars on ‘suspect’ populations. As such, the governance of vulnerability is best understood as yet another facet of liberal order building that works to securitize the daily life in racialized and working-class communities.