Policing the safety net: Medical and carceral management of violence in a Los Angeles County public hospital

Medical anthropologists have long shown how hospitals function as spaces of both care and control, yet the entanglement of policing and trauma care remains understudied. This paper offers an ethnographic account of how trauma surgeons in a Los Angeles County hospital navigate the embedded presence of police within their clinical work. Drawing from ethnographic data alongside the historical and political development of county hospitals, I show how the presence of police produces a latent threat of violence and criminalization in high acuity clinical situations that imprints itself on clinical decision-making. These everyday interactions reveal how trauma care is shaped by overlapping regimes of authority, in which care and violence are mutually entangled rather than opposed, and the boundaries between healing and harm remain unstable.