Epistemic Authority and Legitimate Policing

Sor Juana's writings challenge the monopoly on knowledge-claims held by established institutions, arguing that marginalized voices possess legitimate expertise about their own conditions and experiences. In cross-cultural policing, epistemic authority means recognizing that community members possess authoritative knowledge about local safety, harm patterns, and effective interventions that police cannot claim regardless of training. Police often assume they hold universal expertise in 'crime prevention' and 'disorder management,' but this denies communities' legitimate authority over understanding their own contexts. A framework grounded in epistemic justice requires police to defer to communities' self-identified expertise: Which interventions have communities proven work? What do local elders, healers, and dispute-resolution practitioners understand about social harmony? How do communities define successful outcomes? By relinquishing claims to total epistemic authority and instead supporting communities' exercising authority over their own situations, police shift from experts imposing solutions to facilitators enabling community-defined justice.