Based on a case study conducted in Geylang, Singapore, this article explores the role of urban policing, surveillance and crime control as mechanisms of social ordering that contribute to the marginalisation of excluded groups, including low-income migrant workers and sex workers. Adopting a statecraft approach that emphasises the significance of ‘governing through crime’ for the upholding of urban political-economic projects, we examine the entanglement of political discourses and crime and social control practices as co-constructive of class- and race-based inequality in Singapore. Drawing from qualitative interviews with NGO workers and sex workers, augmented by extensive non-participant observations, we identify three processes through which state power is vectored in Geylang: the stigmatisation of the neighbourhood through association with marginalised groups, legitimising intense spatialised intervention; the enacting of performative zero-tolerance policing; and the containment and surveillance of illicit activities within the neighbourhood. Contributing to discussions that advance the statecraft approach to researching urban crime control, the article shows that seemingly contradictory practices of tolerance and intervention constitute strategies of governance. The article argues that spatially specific crime control practices in Geylang generated an exclusionary ‘spectacle’ which symbolically connects low-income migrant workers with deviance, in turn supporting citizenship exclusion, racialised marginality and a wider politics of capital accumulation resting on disempowered labour. As we argue, crime control policies are an important form of statecraft legitimising an urban political economy that is heavily reliant on low-cost labour provided by migrant workers.

基于在新加坡芽笼进行的案例研究，本文探讨了城市警务、监视和犯罪控制作为社会秩序机制的作用，这些机制有助于被排斥群体（包括低收入移民工人和性工作者）的边缘化。我们采用一种强调“以犯罪治罪”的治国方略对维护城市政治经济项目的重要性，我们研究了政治话语与犯罪和社会控制实践的纠缠，作为基于阶级和种族的不平等的共同建构因素。新加坡。通过对非政府组织工作人员和性工作者的定性访谈，并辅以广泛的非参与者观察，我们确定了在芽笼传播国家权力的三个过程：污名化通过与边缘化群体的联系，使强烈的空间化干预合法化；制定执行性零容忍警务；以及遏制和监视附近的非法活动。这篇文章有助于推动研究城市犯罪控制的治国方略方法的讨论，表明容忍和干预看似矛盾的实践构成了治理策略。文章认为，芽笼的空间特定的犯罪控制实践产生了一种排斥性的“奇观”，象征性地将低收入移民工人与越轨行为联系起来，进而支持公民排斥、种族边缘化和更广泛的资本积累政治依赖于被剥夺权利的劳动力。正如我们所论证的，犯罪控制政策是一种重要的治国方略形式，使严重依赖农民工提供的低成本劳动力的城市政治经济合法化。