We Keep Us Safe

Abstract

This essay explores “de-escalation,” the embodied practice of intervening in interpersonal conflict and crisis without resorting to police or carceral tactics. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research at The Sanctuary, a non-profit organization in Philadelphia that provides free social services, clothing, and food to vulnerable populations, I show how de-escalation practitioners use their bodies to manipulate both time and space into non-carceral outcomes. I focus on four overlapping techniques: suspension, the open hold, bridging, and collectivity. Unlike much of the clinical and psychological research on de-escalation, I situate these techniques within Black feminist, performance studies, and anthropological analytics that insist on the embodied nature of political struggle and the malleability of time and temporality. I argue that de-escalation at The Sanctuary creates a space-time in which abolitionist horizons of a future without police or prisons are negotiated through intimate, quotidian social interactions.