Copyright by Samantha Jones Simon 2020 the Dissertation Committee for Samantha Jones Simon Certifies That This Is the Approved Version of the Following Dissertation

Copyright by Samantha Jones Simon 2020 The Dissertation Committee for Samantha Jones Simon Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

The Police Force: Gender, Race, and Use-of-Force Training

Committee:

Christine L. Williams, Supervisor

Jennifer Glass

Harel Shapira

Sarah Brayne

Forrest Stuart The Police Force: Gender, Race, and Use-of-Force Training

Samantha Jones Simon

Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin May 2020 Acknowledgements

I would like to first and foremost thank Christine L. Williams, my incredible advisor, for your tireless enthusiasm, thoughtful and sharp feedback, intellectual guidance, and feminist mentorship. You taught me how to think critically, showed me how to conduct great research, and helped me find my voice. You have encouraged me to ask important questions, pushed me to develop my own theories, and inspired me to expand the boundaries of existing thought. Most importantly, you taught me how to be a feminist scholar, and for that, I am not sure I can ever thank you enough.

I would also like to thank the four other members of my dissertation committee:

Jennifer Glass, Harel Shapira, Sarah Brayne, and Forrest Stuart. Jennifer, you have been a wonderful advisor, boss, and mentor throughout my graduate school career. Thank you for providing instrumental intellectual and emotional support in my development as a scholar, and for facilitating incredible opportunities to conduct and present research.

Harel, thank you for giving me my first experience in the field; for believing in me always; for validating my questions, hunches, and theories; and for helping me navigate the exciting, challenging, and often confusing, waters of ethnographic methods. Sarah, thank you for helping me develop and complete this project. You provided a vitally important feminist support system during my time in the field. Lastly, Forrest, thank you for your input and continued support of me and my research. Your thoughtful theoretical and methodological feedback helped make this research possible.

Thank you, also, to my classmates and colleagues in the sociology department at iv The University of Texas at Austin, past and present, for their feedback, encouragement, and support throughout graduate school. Carmen Gutierrez, thank you for being a sounding board, source of knowledge, intellectual partner, and devoted friend. Rachel

Donnelly-Mason, thank you for providing an infinite amount of positive reassurance, guiding me through the job market, and laughing with me. Thatcher Combs, thank you for being there for me from the very first day, in so many ways. Brandon Robinson, thank you for pushing me to be the best, and most productive, scholar I can be. Erika

Slaymaker, thank you for the always-interesting conversations and for cheering me on, every Tuesday, while I wrote this dissertation. Thank you also to the other students in my cohort and to the members of Fem(me) Sem – Caity Collins, Katie Sobering, Nino

Bariola, Maricarmen Hernandez, Shannon Malone Gonzalez, Katie Rogers, Inbar Weiss, among others – for your support over the years and for contributing to the thriving intellectual environment of the graduate program at UT.

I am forever indebted to the village of family and friends who helped get me to graduate school in the first place, and now, to finish. To Elaine Jones, my wonderful mother: thank you for introducing me to feminist perspectives, for supporting me even when it came with personal costs, and for finding and pursuing opportunities for me to discover my interests and talents. To Paul Simon, my father, thank you for teaching me to work hard and persist, encouraging me to form evidence-based opinions, and for supporting and trusting every professional decision I have made. To both of my parents: thank you for providing me with excellent education from an early age, for believing in me, and for loving me unconditionally. To Emily Simon, my sister, thank you for v endlessly, persistently, and enthusiastically supporting me in every part of my life, but especially in my professional pursuits. You have always kept me grounded, reminded me that I could, in fact, do things that at times felt impossible, and given me too many laughs to count. To Nick Baranowski, my brother, thank you for always showing an interest in my work, asking me important questions about race and gender, and for your enthusiasm and humor. To Dan Baranowski, my brother, thank you for opening the door to elite education for me. Without you, I am not sure I would have ever found sociology at

UPenn. Thank you for being wonderfully generous and supportive.

I am also deeply grateful for the dance community that I found in Austin while in graduate school. Thank you to my co-founders and co-directors of my dance team, EPEK

– James Kim, Wilgene Carvajal, and Mike Domingo – and to the wonderful friends I met through dance, especially Lissette Martinez, Nicole Cappabianca, Elise Gan, and Cerita

Kelly, for giving me a home in Austin.

To my friends, old and new: thank you for listening to me, making me feel important, giving me so many reasons to smile, and tolerating my tendency to bring sociological information into almost every conversation. A special thank you to Jinny

Kim-Baker, Joe Forzano, Alanna Powers, Miriam Tischler, Marsi Taylor, Erika Engler, and Kelly Grazdan.

I received generous financial support for this research from the National Science

Foundation (1904407), American Association for University Women - Austin Branch,

The University of Texas at Austin Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and the Department of Sociology, Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, Urban Ethnography Lab, and vi College of Liberal Arts at UT.

Finally, I would like to thank the police cadets and officers who allowed me to witness and experience their lives. In this dissertation, I am, at times, critical of policing and of the ideologies and practices that I observed at these departments. However, I also feel a great sense of gratitude to the officers and cadets with whom I spent hundreds of hours for answering any question I asked, inviting me to departmental events, welcoming me into their space, and cheering me on when I struggled. Thank you for giving me your time, for offering your candid opinions, and for teaching me about your worlds.

vii Abstract

The Police Force: Gender, Race, and Use-of-Force Training

Samantha Jones Simon, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2020

Supervisor: Christine L. Williams

Dozens of high-profile cases of police violence against Black people have incited public outrage and organizing. In response to this mounting pressure, police departments have implemented new practices and policies, including diversity initiatives in hiring, de- escalation training in the academy, and body cameras on officers. Despite these efforts, however, the police continue to use force disproportionately and excessively against

Black people. In this dissertation, I provide evidence of the organizational practices of law enforcement that lead to racist use of force. I turn the attention away from explanations of police violence that point to officers’ individual racial biases, the purported necessity of using force in high-crime areas, or inadequate de-escalation training, to instead show how police hiring and training practices contribute to racist violence. I draw on one year of ethnographic field work at four police departments and 40 in-depth interviews with cadets and officers to answer the following questions: (1) How do police departments decide who to hire? (2) How are police cadets taught to think

viii about their relationship with the public? (3) How are police cadets taught to use force? In answering these questions, I present three primary findings. First, I argue that the way in which police departments conceptualize the ideal candidate, and the hiring procedures and practices organized around this discourse, contribute to patterns of racist violence.

Second, I show that at the academy, cadets are taught to be warriors, and that their enemies are Black men. Lastly, I argue that the academy conditions cadets’ bodies, through repetition and institutional disciplining, to engage in violence. In this dissertation, I focus on hiring and training to provide an organizational explanation of racist trends in police violence.

ix Table of Contents

List of Tables ...... xiii

List of Figures ...... xiv

Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1

Background and Theoretical Framework ...... 2

Racialized Patterns of Police Violence ...... 2

Explanations of Police Violence ...... 4

Masculinity, Violence, and State Power ...... 7

Institutional Socialization ...... 10

Field Sites and Methodology ...... 15

Field Sites and Data ...... 16

Rollingwood Police Department ...... 17

Terryville Police Department ...... 17

Hudson Police Department ...... 18

Clarkston Police Department ...... 19

Interview Respondents ...... 20

Data Collection and Analysis ...... 23

Access ...... 25

Positionality and Embodiment ...... 29

Dissertation Overview ...... 32

Chapter 2: Hiring Good Police Officers ...... 36

Constructing and Hiring a Good Police Officer ...... 38

Official Procedures ...... 39 x Discourses ...... 44

The Right Qualities: Integrity, Honesty, Responsibility, Discipline, and Teamwork ...... 44

The Right Reasons: A Calling to Protect the Innocent ...... 49

The Right Politics: Conservative ...... 56

The Right Kind of Violent: Fighting Back ...... 59

Informal Practices ...... 62

Hiring Applicants with the Right Personality ...... 62

Hiring Applicants Who Are Passionate About Police Work ...... 70

Hiring Politically Conservative Applicants ...... 73

Hiring Applicants Who Fight Back ...... 75

Conclusion ...... 82

Chapter 3: Warriors or Guardians? ...... 86

Bad Guys ...... 90

Profiling Bad Guys ...... 98

Black Officers and the Racialized Bad Guy ...... 103

Adopting a Warrior Mentality ...... 111

Women Warriors ...... 118

Conclusion ...... 125

Chapter 4: Embodying State Power ...... 128

Violence Through Repetition ...... 132

Verbal Control ...... 132

Physical Control ...... 137

Physical Harm ...... 140 xi Institutional Disciplining of Violence ...... 145

Disciplining Violence ...... 146

Gendered Disciplining ...... 155

Pushed Out of Policing ...... 160

Tactics as Sexual Domination ...... 167

Dominating Women's Bodies ...... 168

Sexualizing Women's Bodies ...... 172

Conclusion ...... 179

Chapter 5: Conclusion ...... 183

Violence in Hiring and Training ...... 185

How Can We Reduce Police Violence ...... 187

Reduce Civilian Gun Ownership ...... 187

Civilian Oversight of Hiring and Training ...... 189

Conclusion ...... 191

References ...... 192

xii List of Tables

Table 1: Description of field sites ...... 20

Table 2: Demographic information of police officer respondents ...... 22

xiii List of Figures

Figure 1: The American police flag ...... 56

Figure 2: Harris County Sherriff Deputy ambush ...... 95

Figure 3: Number of police officers feloniously killed and ambushed in the United States, by year ...... 97

Figure 4: General James Mattis ...... 115

xiv

Chapter 1: Introduction

About six months after I completed field work for this project, the local newspaper published an article titled, “Women wanted: Austin police recruit female cadets in record numbers” (Plohetski 2019). The author’s tone is encouraged and optimistic in his reporting that

Austin Police Department (APD) has put forth considerable effort to, and is succeeding in, recruiting more women cadets. Twenty-three of the 71 recruits who began the most recent APD academy are women, he writes, which constitutes a larger percentage than ever before. Drawing on his interviews with officers, he explains that having women in the department is important because they “have special skills that can help defuse combustible situations and build trust with victims of crimes.” A few paragraphs later, he relates this to diversity generally, writing that

“more women – and an overall more diverse work force – will improve the city’s quality of policing, helping build a level of trust and connection between officers and residents.”

The argument made in this article – that having more women and men of color officers will improve the relationship between the police and civilians and decrease rates of police violence – is reflective of national conversations about racist police violence. In the last several years, dozens of high-profile cases of police violence against Black people have incited public outrage and organizing, most notably the #BlackLivesMatter movement. In response to this mounting pressure, police departments have implemented new practices and policies, including diversity initiatives in hiring, de-escalation training in the academy, and body cameras on officers. Despite these efforts, however, the police continue to use force disproportionately and excessively against Black people.

In this dissertation, I answer the question: will these reform efforts work in reducing racist police violence? I examine the institutional practices that structure hiring, ideologies about

the public, and use-of-force training. I turn the attention away from explanations of police violence that point to officers’ individual racial biases, the purported necessity of using force in high-crime areas, or inadequate de-escalation training, to instead examine how police hiring and training contributes to racist violence. In this dissertation, I answer the following three questions:

1. How do police departments decide who to hire?

2. How are police cadets taught to think about their relationship with the public?

3. How are police cadets taught to use force?

To answer these questions, I conducted one year of ethnographic field work at police hiring and training units and 40 in-depth interviews with police officers who work in hiring, training, and patrol units. In my analysis of this data, I highlight the ways that conceptions of gender and race are embedded in the hiring and training processes at these departments.

Below, I review the four bodies of literature that frame this research: (1) racialized patterns of police violence, (2) sociological explanations of police violence, (3) masculinity, violence, and state power, and (4) institutional socialization. Following that, I discuss my case studies and outline my research methods.

BACKGROUND AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Racialized Patterns of Police Violence

In the United States, the relationship between the police and communities of color is fraught with tension, distrust, and violence. This is especially true for Black communities, who have been subject to state-sponsored violence for centuries, and continue to experience disproportionate levels of police labeling, harassment, abuse, arrests, and lethal force (Alexander and West 2012; Barlow and Barlow 2002; Brunson 2007; Brunson and Miller 2006; Buehler

2016; Epp, Maynard-Moody, and Haider-Markel 2014; Ferguson 2001; Goff et al. 2016; Rios

2011; D. A. Smith and Visher 1981). Black adolescents describe being routinely harassed, treated as suspects regardless of their involvement in delinquency, and physically abused by the police (Brunson 2007; Brunson and Miller 2006; Stuart and Benezra 2018). Black and brown men experience disproportionate levels of police violence (Gilbert and Ray 2016; Hickman,

Piquero, and Garner 2008) and death at the hands of the police (Buehler 2016). Among men 10 years or older, for example, Black and Hispanic individuals are killed by the police at rates 2.8 and 1.7 times higher, respectively, than their white peers (Buehler 2016).

Although public conversations about racist police violence tend to focus on the experiences of Black men, Black women are also subject to both racialized and gendered police violence. Young Black women explain that they are regularly stopped for curfew violations, harassed by police when they are with young Black men, and subjected to police sexual misconduct (Brunson and Miller 2006). In addition to being harassed and abused, Black women also explain that the police are unresponsive to their calls for help (Brunson and Miller 2006). In cases of domestic violence, the police more likely to make an arrest if the victim is older, but not if the victim is an older Black woman; the police are also more likely to make an arrest if children are present, but not if the victim is Black (Robinson and Chandek 2000). Thus, even in cases where the police do show up, they are more likely to “protect” non-Black women.

In the United States, starting in childhood, Black Americans are criminalized, labeled, disciplined, profiled, harassed, assaulted, and killed at disproportionate rates by many social institutions, but especially by the police. In this dissertation, I examine police hiring and training to better understand why these patterns of racist violence persist. I examine the institutional practices that dictate who is allowed into the institution, and what they are taught there, to shed light on how and why officers are trained to use force disproportionately against Black people.

Explanations of Police Violence

Sociologists studying the racist use of force by police generally focus on three different explanations. First, and perhaps most popular among the public, is the “bad apple” or “racial bias” theory. According to this approach, racist police violence can be explained by officers’ racial biases. Social psychologists have taken the lead on this explanation, studying how officers’ racial biases shape instances of police shootings. These scholars explain that in ambiguous and high- stress situations, particularly when there is a perceived threat, human beings rely on stereotypes to fill in incomplete information in their decision-making. In the context of policing, these scholars suggest that police officers rely on racial stereotypes that characterize Black people – especially men – as dangerous and violent (Duncan 1976; Payne 2001; Quillian and Pager 2001) when deciding whether or not to shoot.

Several lab experiments have tested this theory, both for civilians and police officers. In one study (Correll et al. 2002), for example, the authors conducted four separate experiments to evaluate how the “target’s ethnicity” affected civilian participants’ decisions to shoot. They found that participants fired more quickly when the armed person was Black, and were more likely to shoot an unarmed person who was Black. Other studies have tested how race affects police officers’ reaction time and decisions (Correll et al. 2011; Nieuwenhuys, Savelsbergh, and

Oudejans 2015; Plant, Goplen, and Kunstman 2011). Highlighting the important role of training,

Plant and Peruche (2011) found that officers were more likely to mistakenly shoot unarmed

Black men, though after training with a computer simulation program, this pattern disappeared.

Similarly, another study shows that police officers are less susceptible to racial bias than community members in their decisions to shoot, though the bias does still exist (Correll et al.

2007). These studies provide important insights into how racial stereotypes shape what people see and how they make decisions to use violence.

Uncovering these psychological patterns is an important part of understanding racism.

However, this approach to police violence generally frames the issue as being individual, where racial bias, located in an individual officer’s brain, leads to racist police violence. According to this way of thinking, if departments eliminate individual racist officers, then racist police violence would not exist. In this study, I instead consider the institutional underpinnings of this social problem, examining how organizational systems, rather than individuals, contribute to patterns of racist police violence.

A second explanation for racist police violence highlights neighborhood-level factors.

These scholars explain that the police are more likely to use violence in communities characterized by legal cynicism, low income levels, and/or high violent crime rates. Legal cynicism is defined as a group-level “cultural orientation in which the law and the agents of its enforcement are viewed as illegitimate, unresponsive, and ill-equipped to ensure public safety”

(Kirk and Matsuda 2011, 443). This cynicism, according to some scholars, creates a feedback loop that results in disproportionate use of force in Black communities: Black communities do not trust the police because they excessively use force and do not respond to their needs. The police are more likely to use force against people who do not demonstrate deference towards them

(Reisig et al. 2004). Black communities, because of their lack of trust, are less likely to be deferential in their interactions with the police, leading to more use of force (Reisig et al. 2004).

Hostility towards the police, rather than race, becomes the explaining factor in police use of force.

Other scholars importantly point out that Black people are more likely to have unfavorable views of the police – including skepticism and distrust – because they are more likely than white people

to have experienced negative interactions with the police, to be exposed to stories of police misconduct, and to live in neighborhoods with a high police presence (Weitzer and Tuch 2004).

Other scholars point to neighborhood-level crime rates or income levels as explaining racist police violence. Terrill and Reisig (2003) show that officers are more likely to use force in disadvantaged neighborhoods and areas with higher homicide rates. Other research suggests that the police use force more often in areas with higher crime rates (Lee, Vaughn, and Lim 2014).

According to this approach, the police are more likely to use force against Black people because they live in low-income, high-crime neighborhoods, not because they are Black. This theory is complicated by other studies, which, for example, show that crime rates, even race-specific crime rates, do not explain why the police disproportionately shoot Black people (Ross 2015).

A third conventional explanation for police violence looks at the gendered and racialized patterns in violence between police officers and civilians. Sociologists have studied whether the race and gender of an officer can predict patterns of violence, with the idea that white men are perhaps more prone to use violence than other demographic groups. Largely, these studies present conflicting and complex findings, and lack an intersectional approach (Crenshaw 1991), treating racial minorities and women as separate populations in their analyses.

Scholars find, for example, that Black officers are less likely to use their firearms than white officers (McElvain and Kposowa 2008) and are more likely than white officers to use

“supportive” activities in majority-Black neighborhoods (Sun and Payne 2004). However, other studies show that Black officers are more coercive than white officers in their responses to conflicts (Sun and Payne 2004); that Black officers may be more likely than white officers to arrest Black civilians (Brown and Frank 2006); and that the race of the officer does not predict their likelihood of their shooting civilians (David J. Johnson et al. 2019). These findings are, of

course, complicated by the fact that Black officers are often assigned to patrol Black neighborhoods.

Studies that focus on gender show that women officers are less likely than men officers to use excessive force or their firearms (Lonsway et al. 2002; McElvain and Kposowa 2008).

However, other studies find that women officers are not any less likely to use force, broadly defined, are not more likely to provide comfort to civilians during encounters (DeJong 2005;

Hoffman and Hickey 2005). Other scholars have found no direct link between an officer’s gender and race and the outcome of a civilian encounter (Frydl and Skogan 2004) and that more gender and race-diverse departments do not have significantly lower rates of police-caused homicides (B.

W. Smith 2003). In this dissertation, I provide an analysis of these inconsistent trends. I examine how race and gender are embedded in police departments’ organizational practices around violence, illuminating gendered and racialized processes, rather than analyzing gender and race as demographic categories.

Scholars have provided important information about patterns in individual officers’ decisions to use violence, the neighborhood contexts surrounding instances of police violence, and demographic patterns of police violence. In this study, I include the organizational level of analysis. I argue that police academies are training the police to resort to excessive use of force against Black communities.

Masculinity, Violence, and State Power

Engaging in coercion, control, and violence is intimately tied to performances of masculinity. The military, for example, has historically provided a pathway for men to achieve status through masculinity and violence (Britton and Williams 1995; Gibson 1994). Carrying guns allows civilian men – specifically white men – to personify masculinity through fantasies of

violence and self-defense (Gibson 1994; Stroud 2015). In prison, men gain status by enacting, and having others witness, violence (Contreras 2012; Kupers 2001). This close relationship between men, masculinity, and violence is highlighted by the fact that women have historically been excluded from contexts – like the military, police, or gangs – that require violence. Where women are involved, they are often used as props in men’s pursuit of masculinity.

The kind of violence that bolsters masculinity is rooted in a repudiation, and domination, of the feminine. In fraternities, for example, men participate in gang rapes to bolster their masculinity and status (Sanday 2007). During drug robberies, men perform torture, which sometimes involves rape or other gendered violence, to demonstrate dominance and status

(Contreras 2012). At times, this violence is symbolic. For example, C.J. Pascoe (2011) shows that, in the context of high school, young men consistently assert their masculinity by attacking those who embody the “fag,” i.e. who lack masculinity, and often describe their violent sexual conquests of women. Pascoe shows that masculinity is a site of constructed meaning and is primarily maintained through collective assertion and an attacking of what it is not. Similarly, scholars have shown that in policing, enacting masculinity has historically involved expressing misogynistic and patriarchal attitudes towards women (Fielding 1994; Prokos and Padavic 2002).

Rather than being an individual characteristic, masculinity can be defined as a system of practices (West and Zimmerman 1987), often centered around dominance. R.W. Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity provides a way of thinking about gender as a system.

Hegemonic masculinity can be understood as “the pattern of practice (i.e. things done, not just a set of role expectations or an identity) that allowed men’s dominance over women to continue”

(Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 832).

Performing masculinity, and engaging in violence, then, are not exclusively accessible to men. There is some disagreement, however, among gender scholars about how to theorize women’s performances of violence. The primary question these scholars consider is whether or not women engaging in violence is, in fact, non-normative behavior. James Messerschmidt

(2002) draws on empirical work on young women in gangs to argue that for these women, engaging in violence actually constitutes their feminine identities. He characterizes this gender identity as “bad-girl femininity” to capture the way in which, for these women, violence is rooted in femininity. Jody Miller (2002b) criticizes Messerschmidt’s perspective, proposing that women can, and do, perform masculinity, including in the context of violence. She encourages scholars to take seriously the role of agency, and argues that Messerschmidt’s labeling of these performances as feminine reifies gender difference, rather than similarity, in behavior. She particularly takes issue with the concept of “bad girl femininity,” explaining, “This is where the potential for a sex/gender tautology lies: women’s actions are always an articulation of femininity and men’s of masculinity” (2002a, 478).

Several other gender scholars have considered the relationship between women and enacting masculinity. C.J. Pascoe (2011) examines the performance of masculinity among teenage girls at a high school. She destabilizes the direct association between gendered performances and certain bodies, showing that girls can also embody masculinity. Tying this to violence, Anima Adjepong (2016) explains that women rugby players describe joy in their violent sport, referencing their bruises as badges of honor. Similarly, Nikki Jones (2009) explains that young girls and women in South Philadelphia – in similar ways to boys – use violence to bolster their status and navigate their lives.

In this research, I begin from the assertion that embodying state power and using violence does not require a male body, but rather, is rooted in a system of masculinity and male domination. Women can, and do, succeed in the academy setting, as long as they embody state power in ways required by the institution. I highlight the ways in which those who embody effeminate qualities are subject to scrutiny, humiliation, and punishment in an effort to correct their behavior to align with the institution. Thus, gender as a demographic category does not predict which cadets are more or less successful in an academy setting. Rather, gender as an institutionally-constructed, highly-consequential performance organized around control and violence, explains who graduates to become a police officer.

Institutional Socialization

Scholars have proposed many different theories to account for how human beings become the way that they are. These social theorists point to ways that unconscious drives (Freud

1917), interactions and performances (Goffman 1959; West and Zimmerman 1987), group culture and history (Bourdieu 1992), and discipline and surveillance (Foucault 1995) dictate personality, dispositions, tastes, and behavior. In this dissertation, I draw on theories that highlight the importance of institutions in shaping behavior. Specifically, I use Erving Goffman’s theory of total institutions (1961), Susie Scott’s concept of performative regulation (2010), and

John Van Maanen and Edgar Schein’s (1979) model of organizational socialization to frame the social transformation that occurs during the hiring and training processes at police departments.

Goffman (1961) drew on one year of field work at St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital to develop his theory of total institutions. Goffman defines the total institution as “a place of residence and work where a large number of situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable length of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life”

(1961, xiii). The four defining features of a total institution are: (1) batch living, or the requirement that members complete daily activities in the company of many others, who are all treated alike; (2) the presence of a pre-determined and supervised daily routine; (3) the inflexible scheduling of activities; and (4) the institutional objective of resocialization. Goffman uses the examples of mental hospitals, monasteries, cadet schools, and army training camps to illustrate the concept, arguing that institutional arrangements re-make identities. Goffman conceptualizes identity within institutional parameters and practices, explaining:

The self, then, can be seen as something that resides in the arrangements

prevailing in a social system for its members. The self in this sense is not a

property of the person to whom it is attributed, but dwells rather in the pattern of

social control that is exerted in connection with the person by himself and those

around him. This special kind of institutional arrangement does not so much

support the self as constitute it (1961, 154).

These all-encompassing, physically-confining institutions come to define identities, where its members experience a loss, and then reconstitution, of self.

Goffman’s concept of total institutions provides a way of thinking about the role of police academy training in reconstituting the identities of participants. Police academies are characterized by the defining features of a total institution, with two major exceptions: (1) police cadets are voluntarily, not forcibly, participating in these institutional arrangements; and (2) police cadets go home at the end of each day. Scholars have considered variation in these kinds of all-encompassing and self-defining institutions, where some are perhaps not as extreme or rigid as the total institution.

Drawing on Goffman’s work, Susie Scott (2010) developed the concept of reinventive institutions. Mental health institutions have changed dramatically since Goffman’s writings in the 1960’s, and Scott’s work theorizes these shifts in arrangements and motivations for buy-in.

Scott defines the reinventive institution as a “material, discursive or symbolic structure through which voluntary members actively seek to cultivate a new social identity, role or status …. It is achieved through not only formal instruction in an institutional rhetoric, but also the mechanisms of performative regulation in the interaction context of an inmate culture” (2010, 226). Scott incorporates the role of agency in her conceptualization of these kinds of institutions. In contrast to the total institution, the reinventive institution does not demand compliance and self-definition through physical force or mandatory confinement. Members of a reinventive institution are both subjects and agents of disciplinary regimes. Scott calls this dynamic performative regulation, which she defines as the process whereby “groups of people submit themselves to the authority of an institution, internalize its values and enact them through mutual surveillance in an inmate culture” (2010, 221). Members of reinventive institutions, then, perform for authority figures and for one another, where they must enact a commitment to the institution and also monitor others’ commitment. It is through performative regulation that the institution enacts its power both coercively and through members’ own agency.

Scott suggests that many reinventive institutions can be thought of as what Lewis Coser

(1974) called greedy institutions. Greedy institutions “seek exclusive and undivided loyalty” from members, and like reinventive institutions, do not physically confine members (Coser 1974,

4). Greedy institutions secure “voluntary compliance” from members and “aim at maximizing assent to their styles of life by appearing highly desirable to the participants” (Coser 1974, 6).

Members voluntarily commit to greedy institutions expecting that they will experience liberation,

empowerment, or self-reinvention from this devotion. Members of both reinventive and greedy institutions “embrace the institution’s rules, venerate its staff as inspirational gurus, and willingly comply with its timetabled activities, believing that it is in their best interests to do so” (S. Scott

2010, 219). The promise of shedding the old self and becoming a new, better version drives members to commit to the institutional discourses and practices.

Organizations scholars have similarly emphasized the importance of organizational practices, ideologies, and rituals in shaping members’ behavior, motivations, and opinions. John

Van Maanen and Edgar Schein (1979) studied the specific case of policing, highlighting the socialization process that takes place in organizations generally, and at police departments in particular. Van Maanen and Schein define organizational socialization as the “process by which an individual acquires the social knowledge and skills necessary to assume an organizational role” (1979, 211). Van Maanen conducted both ethnographic and survey research examining police cadets’ experiences at the academy, and found that “the police culture can be viewed as molding the attitudes – with numbing regularity – of virtually all who enter” (1975, 215). Other scholars have similarly found that police cadets experience a change in perspective about discretion and fairness during their time at the academy (Hopper 1977) and that the academy establishes intense group solidarity (Moskos 2009).

Drawing on Van Maanen’s theoretical approach, Zachary Oberfield (2012) examined the role of self-selection and organizational socialization in shaping police cadets’ views on use of force. Oberfield found that both self selection and socialization mattered at different times and in different ways, but, highlighting the role of socialization, explains that organizations “shift workers’ attitudes and approaches to the job” (2012, 22). While Oberfield focuses on attitudes about force, other scholars have studied the role of selection and socialization in violent

behavior. Terence Thornberry (1993) examines the relationship between gang membership and violent behavior to address the question: are certain people just born violent, or do they become this way? Thornberry compared rates of violence and delinquency before and after joining a gang, and found that socialization explained the behavior. Compared to non-gang members, gang members did not have higher rates of delinquent behavior or drug use prior to joining the gang.

Once they entered the gang, however, their rates on these two measures increased substantially.

Paul Stretesky and Mark Pogrebin (2007) apply this theoretical model to argue that gang socialization processes produce gun-related violence through transformations of members’ identities. They engage with Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical model to show that by enacting certain behaviors, people begin to believe their own performances, causing a shift in their identities. Drawing on interviews with gang members convicted on gun-related charges, they argue that “gang-related gun violence can be understood in terms of self and identity that are created through the process of socialization” (Stretesky and Pogrebin 2007, 108). Gordon,

Lahey, and Kawai (2004) engage with similar questions, investigating why gang membership is associated with higher levels of delinquency. They found that before entering the gang, boys who join gangs engage in more delinquent behavior than boys who do not join gangs. However, violent and delinquent behavior increases upon entering a gang, and this increase disappears when members leave the group. According to these authors, then, both selection and socialization play a role in group-level violent behavior.

These theoretical approaches to institutions, socialization, and violence provide a framework for understanding how police academies shape behavior. The concepts of the reinventive and greedy institutions, both of which secure voluntary compliance with the promise of self-improvement, help explain the overwhelming devotion that police academies demand,

and the social transformations that occur there. Police cadets voluntarily enter the institution; they are both subjects and objects of discipline and surveillance; they are expected to perform absolute loyalty to the institution; and they are told that through this training, they will transition from being civilians to officers (and, as I outline in Chapter 3, “warriors”). This kind of institutional arrangement encourages specific worldviews and behaviors, which, I argue, are real and consequential. Connecting these concepts to theories of organizational socialization allows space to consider how socialization within organizations and groups plays a role in violence, specifically. Taken together, these theoretical perspectives provide a roadmap for understanding how the hiring and training processes at police departments shape violent behavior.

FIELD SITES AND METHODOLOGY

This dissertation draws on a combination of ethnographic and interview data collected over the course of one year, starting in February 2018. Conducting ethnographic field work allowed me to see, and often experience, the entire hiring and training process, from when a candidate expressed initial interest at a career fair to their graduation from the academy. This method provided me with the opportunity to participate in conversations with potential recruits, watch applicant testing and interviews, and experience the transformative processes that occur within the academy context. I watched as the cadets’ demeanor, posture, tone of voice, self presentation, and ideologies developed and changed. Conducting interviews, in addition to the participant observation that I completed, allowed me to contextualize what I was seeing in the field and better understand the interpretive frames (Pugh 2013) and “mental maps” (Luker 2008) that my respondents carry with them to navigate and understand their lives.

In the section that follows, I begin by providing an overview of my field sites and data.

Next, I describe how I gained access to the four police departments included in this study. Lastly,

I reflect on my own embodiment and positionality in the field.

Field Sites and Data

I conducted field work at four police departments in one southern state: Rollingwood PD,

Terryville PD, Hudson PD, and Clarkston PD1. I spent over 600 hours participating in, and observing the recruiting, hiring, and training of new cadets. I observed applicant testing and interviews, recruiting events, classroom instruction, and scenario-based training, and participated in physical conditioning, defensive tactics, and shooting drills. The extent to which I was able to participate in training depended on my level of access at each department. I also conducted 40 in-depth interviews with officers who work in hiring, training, and patrol units.

Each agency varies in size, they serve cities that differ in their demographic compositions and political leanings, their training academies vary slightly in length, and the extent to which historically underrepresented populations work as officers varies between each department. The departments also have quite a bit in common: the hiring processes at each department are similar; they recruit at many of the same events; they all teach the same 600 hours of state-mandated instruction to cadets; they each have instructors who specialize in classroom curriculum, defensive tactics, and firearms, respectively; and they have each added a substantial amount of training to their academies that is not mandated by the state, primarily focusing on department- specific policies, physical training, tactics, and scenario-based training. Below, I provide a general overview of these four departments and my access at each. Following these descriptions,

I include Table 1, which outlines the specific characteristics of each department.

1 To protect anonymity, I assigned pseudonyms to all departments and respondents.

Rollingwood Police Department

As of 2013, Rollingwood PD’s roughly 1,500 officers served a population of over

800,000 residents. Like most departments, Rollingwood PD’s police force is primarily composed of white men. The city’s Hispanic and Asian populations are much larger than their representation on the police force. Rollingwood PD first hired women as patrol officers in the

1970’s, and as of 2016, women compose roughly 10% of their police force.

Rollingwood PD oversees their own training academy, which runs for eight months. They typically run two academies per year, with anywhere between 50-120 cadets in each class. I spent a total of 213 hours at Rollingwood PD. Initially, the officers in Rollingwood PD’s hiring unit were much more open to my conducting research there than the officers at the training academy. The lieutenant overseeing the hiring unit granted me access to every event I asked to attend. I traveled around the state (and on two occasions, to neighboring states) to career fairs with recruiting officers, attended recruiting events at the office, sat in on applicant interviews, watched applicant testing, and spent time with officers as they conducted background investigations of candidates. Once I gained access to the academy, the commander initially told me that I could attend five “classes” of my choosing. However, as I spent time with the training staff at the academy, they continued to invite me to – and indeed, insist that I attend – additional parts of training. I ended up spending roughly 150 hours observing training at Rollingwood PD’s academy. The command staff, however, would not allow me to participate in the training, citing risks to the city’s liability.

Terryville Police Department

Terryville PD’s roughly 400 officers serve 300,000 residents. Roughly half of Terryville

PD’s officers are Hispanic, and the other half are white. Just a handful of Terryville PD officers

are Black or Asian. Women comprised just 10% of the officers hired by Terryville PD between

2005 and 2011. Following a lawsuit that accused the department of sex discrimination, the most recent classes of cadets have included higher numbers of women. Women comprised roughly

20% of the academy class that I observed.

Terryville PD oversees their own training academy, which runs for eight months.

Terryville PD graduates an academy class once per year, with somewhere between 20-30 cadets in each class. My access to Terryville PD was by far the most comprehensive of the four departments that I studied. I conducted 220 hours of field work at Terryville PD, almost all of which was spent observing and participating at the academy. I attended classroom instruction – topics covered included arrest, search and seizure, criminal code of procedures, professionalism and ethics, multiculturalism, racial profiling, force options, and de-escalation, among others – observed scenario-based training, and participated in physical fitness training, defensive tactics, and some firearms training.

Hudson Police Department

Hudson PD’s roughly 3,000 officers serve one million residents. Just over half of Hudson

PD’s police force is white, about a quarter is Black, around 20% is Hispanic, and less than five percent is Asian. Although Hudson PD accurately represents the Black and Asian populations in

Hudson, white officers are overrepresented and Hispanic officers are underrepresented. When compared to Rollingwood PD and Terryville PD, Hudson PD has a much larger population of

Black officers. Women comprise roughly 18% of the police force at Hudson PD.

Hudson PD oversees their own training academy, which runs for eight and a half months.

Hudson PD typically runs three concurrent academy classes, beginning a few months apart, with between 30-50 cadets in each class. Although I spent only 40 hours conducting field work at

Hudson PD, my experience there was the most immersive. I spent the first week of this class’s academy as a cadet. This meant I followed the institutional rules dictating behavior, self presentation, movement, and discipline that are imposed on police cadets. This included: walking only along the right side of the hallway, standing when someone of superior rank (which, for cadets, means everyone) walked into the classroom, getting into formation in the morning to raise the flag, dropping down to do push ups when someone in the class broke a rule, wearing my hair in a low bun, taking out my nose ring, and exercising for hours on end as part of a hazing ritual. Because this academy was so large, and I looked the part, the training officers and more senior cadets all assumed I was a cadet, and interacted with me as such. After one week, however, the commander overseeing the academy told me that I could no longer attend the academy training, though he did not clearly articulate a reason for this change of heart.

Clarkston Police Department

Clarkston Police Department’s roughly 5,000 officers serve 2 million residents. Clarkston

PD’s police force is the most demographically diverse of the departments I studied. A little less than half of the police force is white, a quarter is Hispanic, a quarter is Black, and a little less than 10% is Asian. However, when compared to the city’s demographics, white officers are still overrepresented and Hispanic officers are underrepresented. Women comprise roughly 15% of the police force at Clarkston PD.

Clarkston PD oversees their own training academy, which runs for six months. Clarkston

PD typically runs four concurrent academy classes, beginning a few months apart, with around

60 cadets in each class. I conducted 30 hours of field work at Clarkston PD’s training academy, which included observing defensive tactics, firearms, driving, and scenario-based training.

Rollingwood Terryville Hudson Clarkston

Size of Police Force 1,500 400 3,000 5,000

Size of City Population 800,000 300,000 1 million 2 million

% Women 10 10-20 18 15

% Black 9 3 25 23

% Hispanic 21 48 18 44

% Asian 2 0 2 6

% White 70 49 54 45

Length of Academy 8 months 8 months 8.5 months 6 months

Size of Academy Class 50-120 20-30 50-60 60-70

# of Academies/Year 1-2 1 3-4 3-5

Table 1: Description of field sites (Source data drawn from https://www.governing.com/gov- data/safety-justice/police-department-officer-demographics-minority-representation.html; departmental websites; and field work for this project).

Interview Respondents

This dissertation also draws on 40 in-depth interviews with police officers who work in hiring, training, and patrol units at nine different police departments. In addition to conducting interview with officers at the four departments outlined above, I also interviewed officers at

Fairview Sherriff’s Office, Bristol PD, Marion PD, Riverdale PD, and Greenview PD. Bristol PD is located in a southwestern state, while the other four are all located in the same southern state in which I conducted field work. These departments range in size from around a dozen to several thousand officers.

Interviewees were recruited during field work, through personal contacts, or snowball sampling. All interviewees were asked questions about their motivations for pursuing a career in law enforcement, their impressions of police officers prior to entering the field, their career trajectories, how they felt about the current political climate around policing, and what they thought about diversity in policing. The interviews lasted between 45 minutes and 2 hours and were conducted in a location of the respondent’s choosing, typically their office. Although the majority (31) of interviews were conducted in person, due to logistical and travel constraints, nine interviews were completed over the phone.

The officers interviewed for this study varied in their level of experience in law enforcement and in their specialty areas (i.e. recruiting/hiring, training, or patrol). As a result, parts of the interview catered to these specificities. For example, in interviews with officers who work in recruiting and hiring, I asked questions about the department’s recruiting strategies, what the hiring process entailed, and about the demographic composition of recent cadet classes. In interviews with officers who had just graduated from the academy, I asked them about their time in the academy, their first arrest, and their experiences on patrol thus far.

Of the 40 police officers interviewed, 34 are men and six are women. The uneven gender ratio of police officers in the sample is a consequence of the gender composition of policing generally. On average, women comprise roughly 12% of the officers at police departments in the

United States (2011). The respondents range in age from 23 to 65. The majority of respondents are white, though the sample includes a larger percentage of racial-minority officers than are represented in U.S. police forces generally. Table 2, below, includes more detailed demographic information, including age, race, gender, years in law enforcement, and department name for the police officers interviewed.

Pseudonym Race Gender Age Time in Law Enforcement Police Department Adam White Man 25 0 (Fired) Rollingwood Adrian Hispanic Man 42 20 years Terryville Alan White Man 49 24 years Bristol Allison White Woman 38 15 years Clarkston Bill Black Man 49 18 years Rollingwood Brandon Black Man 36 10 years Riverdale Bruce White Man 49 24 years Bristol Charles White Man 65 38 years Greenview Chris White Man 44 21 years Rollingwood Christina Hispanic Woman 37 10 years Rollingwood Claire White Woman 23 <1 year Rollingwood Daniel Asian Man 35 12 years Clarkston Dennis White Man 48 27 years Fairview Diego Hispanic Man 42 16 years Rollingwood Douglas White Man 45 22 years Fairview Elisa White Woman 27 0 (Quit) Rollingwood Greg White Man 34 11 years Clarkston Jacob South Asian Man 29 3 months Rollingwood James White Man 29 3 months Rollingwood Jim Black Man 48 26 years Marion Joey White Man 29 3 months Rollingwood Kevin White Man 48 20 years Terryville Kyle White Man 36 9 years Bristol Lauren White Woman 40 19 years Bristol Mark Hispanic Man 39 12 years Rollingwood Martin "Other" Man 42 21 years Rollingwood Michael Black Man 51 9 years Rollingwood Mitchell White Man 42 20 years Clarkston Nathan Black Man 45 15 years Rollingwood Patrick White Man 32 3 months Rollingwood Paul White Man 47 18 years Rollingwood Phillip Black Man 58 34 years Clarkston Richard White Man 53 35 years Greenview Rick Hispanic Man 53 32.5 years Terryville Rob White Man 37 11 years Rollingwood Robert Bi-racial (white/black) Man 53 28 years Clarkston Scott White Man 55 36 years Greenview Steve White Man 46 18 years Rollingwood Terry White Man 49 23 years Terryville Tricia Black Woman 28 6 months Rollingwood Table 2: Demographic information of police officer respondents

Data Collection and Analysis

While in the field, I continually took notes about what I saw, heard, did, and learned.

During classroom instruction, this was easy to do. I had a desk, notepad, and pencil in front of me, and taking notes did not seem out of the ordinary in a classroom setting. When I observed more hands-on training, I discretely took notes on my cell phone. Cadets are not allowed to have their cell phones with them at the academy – they must leave them in their cars or in their lockers

– so this was more challenging in certain settings than in others. Pulling out my cell phone and taking notes broke the institutional norm. For example, a few times, cadets playfully commented that “it must be nice” to have my phone, pointing out that I had a privilege they did not. As a result, I tried to be discrete while I took notes, or went to the bathroom to write down key words and thoughts. On days when I participated in hands-on training, I spent time during our lunch break and at the end of the day jotting down as much as I could in my notepad. I used the notes that I took throughout the day as blueprints for the comprehensive field notes I later completed.

Whenever possible, I typed up my complete field notes at the end of each day. Some days, this simply was not possible, and I caught up as soon as I could in the next couple of days.

Each day of field work at an academy, I woke up somewhere between 4:30am-6:30am, got to the campus by either 6am, 7am, or 8am (depending on the department), spent 10 hours there, which often included strenuous physical activity in intense heat, drove back to where I was staying – either a hotel, AirBnB, or friend’s house – showered, cooked and ate dinner, and began to write up my notes. Each evening, I sat down to start writing my field notes around 7:30pm, roughly 14 hours after I had woken up to start the day. As anyone who has done ethnographic field work knows, it is not possible to write comprehensive notes from 10 hours in the field in just three

hours, which is the amount of time I had before my body began to shut down and demand sleep.

Some days, then, I focused on writing up detailed notes on one part of the day, and finished the rest of the notes the next day. Typically, I had a few days of field work followed by a couple of days off, and I used those days off to catch up on notes. When I had one or two full weeks of field work, it took about a week of writing all day each day to complete my notes.

I used a standardized format for each of my field notes. At the top of the page, I included the following information: the participants who are included in the note and their positions at the department, the department name, the type of event or training that day (ex: defensive tactics; career fair; criminal code of procedures), the date, the time frame, and the location. I assigned a number to every person I met in the field so that my field notes were anonymized. Next, I created a summary section, where I noted emerging themes, conversations or observations that were important, and any methodological points of interest. The body of the document included my comprehensive descriptions of what happened each day. Throughout, I denoted points to follow up on or questions I wanted to ask participants. This practice allowed me to begin thinking about and analyzing what I was seeing, hearing, and feeling while I was still in the field.

I conducted interviews throughout my year in the field. For some of my respondents, this meant that our first interaction was the interview. For other respondents, we had known each other for almost a year by the time I conducted the interview. The interviews I completed at the beginning of data collection helped me become familiar with the structures, power dynamics, politics, and norms of the institution. Several months into my field work, I knew the jargon, embodiment, and rules of the spaces, and had been vetted by other officers. The dynamic of the

later interviews, then, was more cordial and familiar. All interviews were recorded and then transcribed either by me or by Landmark Associates, Inc., a professional transcription service.

I coded and analyzed my field notes and interview transcripts using the MAXQDA software package. I used a multi-step coding process, as outlined by Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw

(2011). First, I used “open coding” to identify salient themes in the data. I identified dozens of codes in this process, including “deadly force,” “always being watched/cameras,” “bad guys,”

“body language/hunch/instinct,” “command presence,” “control/authority,” “diversity,”

“integrity,” “media,” and “officer safety.” Then, I engaged in a “focused coding” process to further refine and group these codes, and re-read and analyzed the data again. Throughout this process, I maintained a thematic memo document, in which I further examined insights, themes, and questions that arose during my analysis.

Access

Gaining access to police departments was an iterative, continuous process. Initially, I experienced significant resistance to my project from the command staff and police officers at academies. I learned that the first key to gaining access to police departments was being vetted by officers. My first meeting for this project was with Diego, a sergeant at Rollingwood PD’s academy, whose contact information I got through a friend who is an officer there. At the end of the meeting, I asked if I could participate in, or at least observe, the academy training. Diego smiled and, without hesitation, shook his head “no.” I tried to negotiate access, asking if I could attend any parts of the academy, but Diego continued to deny my request, pointing to “city legal,” “releases,” “workers comp,” and ultimately just telling me that “it’s not open to the public like that.” During that meeting, however, Diego suggested that, since he did not know the

answers to the questions I asked about the hiring process, I should reach out the lieutenant in charge of the hiring unit. Luckily, the lieutenant overseeing Rollingwood PD’s hiring unit enthusiastically agreed to a meeting, and allowed me to observe the recruiting and hiring process there. When I was conducting field work in the hiring unit, a new sergeant took over at the academy. The combination of the change in leadership and having a lieutenant’s approval of my project gave me access to the academy as well. Once I had Rollingwood PD’s approval, I received almost no institutional resistance from any other department in the state.

Institutional approval did not, however, always mean that the officers were thrilled about me being there. In general, officers at hiring units were remarkably open to me and accommodating of my project. However, the reception I received from officers at each academy

I studied varied quite a bit. At Terryville PD’s academy, for example, the instructors were always polite, and they became more candid, friendly, and comfortable around me as I continued my research there. After several months of field work, they referred to me as the “intern,” and eagerly asked me when I would be returning next. In contrast, for the first several days at

Rollingwood PD’s academy, the instructors either ignored me, avoided me, or disdainfully asked if I was a journalist. For the first full day there, I sat in a chair in the corner of the gym while the group of five men in charge of defensive tactics training stood in a circle 10 feet away from me, not acknowledging that I was there and replying in bare-minimum sentences if I tried to engage them. Needless to say, it was an awkward first few days there.

During scenario-based training, when patrol officers came to Rollingwood PD’s academy to volunteer as actors in role-plays, this initial apprehensiveness, skepticism, and abrasiveness happened all over again. At Rollingwood PD, for example, an officer I knew introduced me to a

white woman patrol officer volunteering that day. I explained my project to her, and her immediate response – within 30 seconds of meeting me – was, “So are you pro or anti-police?”

This question was not particularly surprising: I was coming from a liberal city (Austin), I was in a Ph.D. program for sociology, and I had a gold nose ring, all of which could reasonably be read as politically liberal and thus, anti-police. I received a version of this question many times, and I always answered carefully, but honestly, explaining that I thought their job is difficult, it is unclear what society wants from the police, and I would not be good at the job, but I disagree with many parts of the institution. This testing of me and border-making around the institution faded away as I got to know officers, but even then, they would often plead with me to “tell their story right” or to “do them justice” in whatever I wrote about them. Notably, Rollingwood PD, where I experienced the most resistance – and sometimes hostility – at the beginning of field work is also located in the most politically liberal city of the departments that I studied. Officers there often complained that they did not feel supported by their city or union, and expressed skepticism about what they perceived to be liberal, skewed local reporting. Their initial suspicion of me, then, was rooted within the context of a larger contention with the city’s politics.

The turning point in access happened on the fourth day of my field work at Rollingwood

PD, for two reasons. First, when Rob, one of the tactics instructors asked me why I was allowed to be there, I explained that a friend of mine who recently graduated from their academy put me in touch with Diego, their sergeant at the time. “Oh!” Rob says, laughing, “why didn’t you just say you were friends with [Claire] Phillips?” The next day, he shows me a text conversation between he and Claire after I had left, in which he asks her about me and – he points out this particular line – she responds, “she’s super cool!!” Having a friend who was an officer at their

department, and her vouching for me, proved instrumental in my access to these instructors. The fact that I had a friend working as an officer meant, I think, to these instructors that I did not hate cops, and thus, was safe to have around.

Second, one of the officers at the academy vetted me first, which opened up access to the rest of the academy staff. I later learned that on my first day of field work, the sergeant overseeing the firing range sent Neil, one of his officers, to vet me. On the second day of field work, Neil acknowledges the initial hesitancy among the officers, telling me, “I broke the silence. It was pretty apparent that no one was talking to you.” He tells me that he’s given everyone “the lowdown” on me, so I can expect a much warmer reception the following morning. I realize then that he typically would not have been in the defensive tactics gym all day, since he is a firearms instructor. “Would you have been in here all day if I wasn’t here?” I ask him. “No,” he says, “but you gotta understand, you’re an outsider.” On the first day, a few officers make comments suggesting that I was sent by the 7th floor – referencing the Chief’s office – as a spy, so I joke with Neil, “Did you tell them I’m a spy?” He laughs, “No, I told them you were cool.” For the next few weeks, the officers are candid about having initially felt suspicious. Referencing my first day there, Rob says, “Yeah I walked in and immediately: hostile. Is she media? A journalist?” David, another instructor, laughs and adds, “Yeah, do I need my lawyer present?”

The other key to gaining access was my willingness to physically suffer alongside the cadets. Police officers, particularly in the academy context, highly value discipline, commitment, and grit. The training officers and cadets respected that I willingly participated in long runs, in formation, in over 100-degree heat, in defensive tactics training that involved pain and the

potential for injury, in heavy weight training in an outdoor gym in the summer, and in smoke sessions (work outs used as punishment) that lasted anywhere from 20 minutes to three hours.

My commitment to my project, and to experiencing the academy as genuinely and fully as I could, made it easier for the officers and cadets to relate to me. The cadets and I had something in common: we were both pushing ourselves to our limits to accomplish a goal. Theirs was to be a police officer, and mine was to complete the best dissertation that I could.

Positionality and Embodiment

My gender, race, age, appearance, education level, and being from Austin shaped my experience in the field in several important ways. With the exception of Hudson PD (where I dressed exactly like a cadet), I stood out as an outsider at these departments by not wearing a cadet or police uniform. Most of the time, I was the only person at my field sites who was not employed by the department, and thus, I sometimes garnered a considerable amount of attention from those who did not know who I was or why I was there. Although the command staff gave me approval to be there, they very rarely announced this to their officers or cadets, so it was up to me to introduce myself and my project. On multiple occasions, officers pointedly, and somewhat abrasively, asked me “Who are you?” The cadets, who have no power in these spaces, usually just stared at me until they were told that they could talk to me. At Rollingwood PD, the command staff explained my presence to the cadets after a few months of my field work.

Initially, then, whenever I entered the classroom, the class president, unsure of whether or not I was important, would command “ON YOUR FEET!” and the entire class would immediately stand at attention until I sat down. Walking across a room in complete silence while 50 cadets in

uniform stand at attention, staring at you, felt remarkably uncomfortable. Eventually, however, the officers and cadets knew who I was, why I was there, and were more at ease around me.

Being a white woman in these spaces presented opportunities and obstacles throughout the project. The police officers and cadets at these field sites were usually men – and more often than not, white men. Providing help to small, young, white women falls within police officers’ lexicon of legible and legitimated job tasks, and often, after gaining access, officers were eager to provide information and volunteer for interviews. The wide age gap between me, who was 27 at the time of field work, and many of the officers, who were mostly in their 40s or 50s, introduced a paternal dynamic, whereby respondents frequently compared me to their own daughters in terms of age and career interests. I also found that being a young, white woman student meant that many respondents interpreted my presence at these departments as non- threatening. I did not look like the stereotypical image of a professor (older male), and thus, often, I felt that the officers did not take me or my project seriously. This, I think, turned out to be beneficial, as it meant that officers were generally quite candid, and openly discussed their thoughts about gender, race, diversity, and use of force, among other things. Finally, my being a woman substantially helped me get to know, and spend time with, the women cadets and instructors. The women cadets often worked out, ate lunch, and partnered up in defensive tactics together, so my being a woman gave me access to these female-dominated, or sometimes exclusively female, spaces.

However, my being a young, white woman also meant that I was subject to deeply gendered conversations and commentary by the men officers at my field sites. Officers initiated conversations with me that I suspect, if I were a man, they would not have. For example, one

officer talked with me at length about his and his wife’s difficulty in getting pregnant, their experience with IVF, and their decision to adopt a child. Another officer frequently told me stories about his son and showed me pictures of his family. Other times, officers talked about my body or made comments with sexual undertones. For example, one afternoon, when I was sitting in the defensive tactics gym, with my legs crossed at my ankles and the heels of my feet visible out of my sneakers, a sergeant tapped my shoulder and told me that my heels were nice and well- groomed. That same sergeant also told me multiple times that I seemed “high maintenance.” On other occasions, men officers or cadets told me that I had a “cute nose,” asked if I had “any other piercings” aside from my nose, inquired about what “kinds of guys” I date, asked if I was “into women,” made allusions about how, since I am a Gemini, I must “be wild,” or talked about the way my body moved while I shot a gun.

Rebecca Hanson and Patricia Richards examine this kind of gendered and racialized harassment in the field (2019), showing its prominence, and arguing that its general absence from ethnographic narratives2 illuminates the concerning ways in which the discipline requires ethnographers to write their bodies out of their research. By examining women’s experiences in the field, whose work has often been marginalized within ethnography, these scholars “disrupt dominant field narratives and raise questions about the taken for granted assumptions that undergird ethnography” (2019, 5). In addition to highlighting the unequal structures embedded within the research method itself, these experiences illuminate how some of the men at my field

2 Feminist scholars, including Patricia Hill Collins (1989), Kimberle Crenshaw (1991), Donna Haraway (1988) and Dorothy Smith (1987), have long pointed to the body as an important source of knowledge production and methodology.

sites conceptualized women’s role in these spaces. I was not an officer, so the only other way to interact with me was to sexually objectify me and my presence there.

Over the course of my field work, I experienced shifts in my own embodiment. After going through academy training and being around officers for hundreds of hours, I started to take up more space in a room, I stood up straighter, I felt physically stronger, and I became more cognizant of strangers in public. At the beginning of my field work, I felt near-constant anxiety at academies from the endless yelling, the rules structuring movement and appearance, the intense physical work outs, and the tactics drills. By the end of the year, I became conditioned to the environment, and none of these things phased me. Most notably, I became much more comfortable with violence, including watching graphic videos of officers in fights or shoot outs, observing cadets fight their instructors, or participating in tactics training. Towards the end of the year, I looked forward to defensive tactics, and started to enjoy the physicality and intensity of fighting. Whereas before, I could not have imagined myself harming someone – even in a situation in which they were posing a threat to my safety or life – I started to think about myself as being capable of violence. Even now, one year later, my physicality still presents reminders of my embodied experience in the field. I now go to the gym four times a week to power lift (which began at the academy), I notice police cars and officers immediately wherever I go, and I look directly at people who glance at me in public spaces. These experiences highlight the transformative power of being trained to think and act in the ways that policing requires.

DISSERTATION OVERVIEW

The main goal of this study is to understand how the institutional structures of police hiring and training contribute to patterns of racist police violence. In this dissertation, I examine

who makes it into this institution and what they are taught when they get there. In the first chapter, I answer the following question: How do police departments decide who to hire? I draw on field work at hiring units to examine the practices that dictate who is an ideal candidate for policing, highlighting how race and gender shape this process. When I began field work, I felt it was important that departments demographically diversify their forces, and I thought I would find that organizational practices systematically and directly advantaged white men. What I found instead, and what I outline in chapter two, is a more elusive process that works to sustain this white, male institution, even without white men. Police departments hire applicants, regardless of gender and race, who share a worldview that is rooted in binary beliefs about individualism, morality, and violence. At the end of this chapter, I call into question the usefulness of demographic diversity initiatives in changing institutional patterns of inequality, arguing that there needs to be a reconceptualization of what it means to be a good police officer for there to be a change in patterns of police violence.

In the third and fourth chapters of this dissertation, I focus on the academy training to examine how cadets are taught to think about, and embody, state power. In the third chapter, I answer the following question: How are police cadets taught to conceptualize their relationship with the public? The academy instructors frequently issue warnings to cadets about the dangers of policing, including showing graphic videos of officers being beaten, run over, and shot to death on duty. In this chapter, I show that these warnings are part of an effort to frame the relationship between the police and the public as a war. Three components constitute this framing: (1) instructors establish an enemy, who is ruthless, violent, unpredictable, and deserves punishment; (2) cadets learn how to identify this enemy by relying on gender and race-coded

constructions of criminality and innocence; and (3) cadets are encouraged to adopt a warrior's mentality, which includes heightened suspicion and understanding violence as necessary for the greater good. In this chapter, I show that cadets are taught to view the world in a way that pits them against an enemy, to conceptualize their enemy as a man of color, and to think about violence as a moral necessity.

In the fourth chapter, I focus on the body and violence to answer the following question:

How are police cadets taught to use force? I show that the academy trains cadets to use their bodies to control, incapacitate, and hurt people. When video footage of officers surfaces on the internet, they are often criticized for using an aggressive tone, touching a civilian’s body in a forceful or violating way, and escalating the level of violence. In this chapter, I show how these violent interactions are conditioned through repetition and institutional disciplining. Instructors urge cadets to use a loud, deep voice to give commands, to get physical at the first sign of noncompliance, to forcefully position people’s bodies to communicate dominance, to fight in ways that hurt people, and to shoot as soon as they perceive a threat. I also highlight the ways in which the tactics training is rooted in a system of sexual domination. These findings illuminate why police officers continue to touch people forcefully, shoot unarmed civilians who flee, move suddenly, or reach into their pockets to grab a phone: their bodies are conditioned to do so.

In this dissertation, I show that the police violence is rooted in, and enabled by, institutional ideologies and practices. I approach racist police violence not as an individual-level decision or a result of characteristics of a community or demographics, but as an institutional outcome. I show that the ways police departments conceptualize the job, and thus who is suitable for the work, teach cadets to think about the public, and condition bodies to engage in violence

can explain why, despite decades of reform efforts, the police still hurt and kill Black people at disproportionate rates in this country.

Chapter 2: Hiring Good Police Officers

When video footage of a police officer engaging in blatantly excessive and/or racist violence becomes public, the officer’s department typically labels them a “bad apple.” The department’s spokesperson usually explains that this officer is an anomaly, an exception to the rule, and a bad officer. Just as in all jobs, they reason, you are going to have some “bad apples.”

Police departments have created lengthy and in-depth hiring processes in an attempt to weed out these “bad apples.” According to this way of thinking about police violence, identifying and eliminating “bad apples” during the hiring process will ensure that racist and excessive police violence does not happen. If a bad officer is excessively violent, corrupt, unethical, and/or racist, then what makes a good officer, and how do departments determine which applicants belong in either category? In this chapter, I answer this question by examining the discourses and practices that structure the hiring process at these departments.

I begin from the basic premise that police departments genuinely want to hire good people, and do not have an institutional interest in hiring applicants who are overtly racist or egregiously violent. The officers I met in the field often used the phrase “one bad apple spoils the bunch,” to articulate their understanding that when one officer does something racist, it sullies their own personal, and occupational, reputation. These officers explained that high-profile cases of racist police violence undermine their legitimacy and authority, and contribute to resentment towards the police, none of which is beneficial for them. Jim, a 48-year-old, Black officer who works as a recruiter, brings this up during our interview, explaining, “If there’s one officer that does something bad, it affects all the police departments when they show it on the news …. Even

though it occurred in another state, it still affects us, because it’s frowned upon …. It’s like, ‘All police officers are like that.’” Similarly, during my interview with Joey, a 29-year-old, white officer at Rollingwood PD, we talked about Eric Garner, a Black man killed by an NYPD officer in 2014. Pointing to the way that one officer’s actions reflect on all officers, Joey tells me that in cases like Garner’s, “because of the way the media spins it …. everyone thinks that all cops are like that.” Bill, a 49-year-old, Black sergeant at Rollingwood PD’s academy, tells me, “Every mistake that's done by any police officer across the country, we're painted under the same bridge,” adding, “I don't think a racist cop should be in police work.”

This is not a story, then, about police departments engaging in hiring practices that ensure that only white, violent, racist men are offered employment. The police officers I met express a disapproval of blatantly racist behavior, and the hiring process, which I describe in this chapter, includes a lengthy background investigation phase that would likely reveal a history of public participation in racist or violent practices. Police departments are not, as they once were, recruiting officers directly from patently racist, violent organizations, like slave patrols or the Ku

Klux Klan (Hadden 2003). Nor are they, according to existing research, recruiting individuals who are demonstrably psychologically distinct from the general public (Bennett and Greenstein

1975; Z. W. Oberfield 2012; A. B. Smith, Locke, and Fenster 1970). Through my field work, I instead found that a more subversive process works to sustain this white, male institution, even without white men. Instead, I argue that the way in which departments conceptualize the good officer, and the hiring practices that test for this, contribute to patterns of racist violence.

I have separated this chapter into three sections. I start by providing an explanation of the hiring process at the departments I studied. Next, I describe what the officers I met in the field

are looking for in candidates for police work. In their discussions of who is suitable for police work, these officers reveal what kinds of people are categorized as having the potential to be good officers. Rather than referring to a vaguely good person, this construct describes a person with a specific personality, motivation for pursuing policing, political leaning, and affinity towards violence. Finally, I outline how, during the hiring process, officers determine which candidates do, and do not, meet the criteria of being a good officer. In this final section, I show how officers use their own discretion to apply understandings of what makes a good officer to the hiring process. I bring together the previous two sections – which outline procedures and discourses – in my explanation of how officers decide who to hire.

My research reveals that being categorized as a good officer is not exclusive to white men. Throughout this chapter, I provide examples of white men who are denied entry to the institution – often by women and men of color – and of women and men of color who are enthusiastically hired. You do not have to be a white man to be a good officer, but you do need to demonstrate allegiance to this white, male institution. I argue that the ways in which these officers conceptualize who is, and/or will be, a good officer orients police to continue to engage in racist violence. Racist police violence, then, cannot be resolved simply by hiring more gender and racial minorities or by more carefully scrutinizing applicants. I instead argue that there needs to be a reconceptualization of what it means to be good police officer.

CONSTRUCTING AND HIRING A GOOD POLICE OFFICER

Applying to become a police officer can take anywhere from four months to over a year to complete. Each department I studied requires similar steps, though sometimes in a different order. The process I present here is a generalized example of the practices at these departments,

and follows similar procedures to most police departments around the country (Cochrane, Tett, and Vandecreek 2003). In the first section, I discuss official procedures by providing a step-by- step explanation of how one gets hired to be a police officer. These procedures are the formal rules that dictate how hiring works at these departments. In the second section, I focus on discourse by explaining how police officers conceptualize an ideal candidate for policing. A good police officer, according to my respondents, has the right qualities, the right motivations for pursuing law enforcement, the right political leanings, and a willingness to use the right kind of violence. In this section, I do not evaluate whether or not these qualities are in fact necessary for doing police work. Rather, I consider these officers’ descriptions of ideal policing candidates to be a discourse, or a way of thinking and talking about suitability. In the third section, I examine informal practices by outlining how officers decide who, among the large pool of candidates, is suitable for the job. In this section, I show how the organizational practices at these departments grant access to some, while closing the door for others.

In my analysis of these three elements, I show how the official procedures, discourses, and informal practices that structure hiring at police departments rely on a very specific understanding of what it means to be a good police officer. This way of conceptualizing and evaluating suitability results in an academy class of individuals with remarkably similar ways of seeing, thinking about, and interacting with the world. This occupational worldview, I argue, situates the institution in a way that makes racist violence possible, and indeed, likely.

Official Procedures

The hiring process at police departments is extensive, thorough, and time-consuming.

This process, according to the officers I met, reveals any red flags, so that only those who are

suitable for the work are hired. Phillip, a 58-year-old, Black, newly-retired deputy at Fairview

Sherriff’s Office, explains that during the hiring process, “departments are pretty good at weeding out bad apples. Something is gonna happen, some red flag is gonna come up or whatever, that they would get weeded out.” Larry, a 49-year-old, white Captain at Terryville

PD’s academy, similarly tells me that they have “strict standards” for hire, explaining that “If we just get that one bad apple, [it] can ruin it for all of us.” Larry points to different steps in the hiring process that help them weed out bad apples: “We really look into the backgrounds….

They’re very thorough. During the oral board there’s specific questions that we ask to see what kinda character this person has.” Given that, according to my respondents, the hiring process is a major mechanism for eliminating bad apples, what does the process actually entail? In this section, I outline each step in the hiring process to explain the path that applicants take from the initial interest form to receiving an offer of employment.

The first step in the hiring process is filling out an application or interest form online.

Each applicant must be a United States citizen, between the ages of 20.5-45 years, and, depending on the department, have a high school diploma/GED or a certain number of college credits. Immediate disqualifiers include illegal drug use, poor credit history, a criminal record, a history of driving violations, and a dishonorable discharge from the military. A large percentage of applicants (at Terryville PD, nearly one quarter of the applicant pool) are disqualified at this initial stage.

Those who make it through the preliminary screening move on to applicant testing, a one-to-two-day process that includes a physical fitness test, a written test, a personality test, and a one-on-one meeting with the applicant’s assigned background investigator, whose job I will

describe shortly. The physical fitness test varies between departments, but can include completing a 1000- or 2000-meter row, push ups, sit ups, a bench press, a vertical jump, a 300- meter sprint, a 1.5 mile run, clearing a five-foot wall, and completing an agility course. The written tests are created by third-party testing companies that make bids to the city governments for the contract to supply tests. These exams typically include sections on reading comprehension, verbal reasoning, and quantitative skills. Although prior law enforcement experience is not a requirement for hire at any of these departments, at Rollingwood PD, this test includes a short section asking questions specifically about policing procedures. Applicants also take a written personality test and are required to earn a certain score, though the hiring officers I met did not have a clear sense of what this test evaluated. If applicants fail any one of these tests, they are disqualified. Finally, in a meeting with their assigned background investigator, applicants go over their completed applications, and are asked probing questions in an effort to evaluate the accuracy of the information that they have provided thus far.

Once applicants have passed their testing days, they are scheduled for a board interview.

During the board interview, each applicant sits at a table across from three police officers (at

Terryville PD, a staff member from the city’s Human Resources department also attends), who ask them a series of interview questions for about an hour. Among other questions, the board asks the applicants why they want to work for this department, if they have experience working as a team, and to describe their strengths and weaknesses. At Terryville PD, roughly 8% of those who make it to the boards phase fail their interview and are disqualified.

The next stage of hiring can take anywhere from four weeks to six months. Depending on the size of, and resources available to the department, background investigations are either done

by officers working as background investigators full time, or by retired police officers working part time for the department. Each applicant is assigned a background investigator, who spends weeks or months delving into their lives to determine if they have been honest, and if there are any disqualifiers the department should know about. Honesty, in this context, mostly means consistency. If any inconsistencies emerge, they are treated as evidence of dishonesty. For example, during the course of a background investigation at Rollingwood PD, one officer found that an applicant had not mentioned an ex-husband in her background history. This omission was met with deep skepticism and resentment by the background investigator, who repeatedly complained to me that this applicant would only ever give her the “bare minimum information.”

Each applicant completes a background history statement, which is a 25-40-page questionnaire that asks for the last ten years of employment, housing, education, and romantic relationship history, including the names and contact information for all previous employers, landlords, roommates, neighbors, and romantic partners. Applicants must also include information about financial debt, disclose any history of disciplinary action in school or work, divulge family members’ arrest histories, detail all traffic violations and/or collisions, note any illegal activity engaged in (regardless of whether or not it resulted in law-enforcement contact), list property or accounts that have been repossessed, describe their typical use of alcohol and history of illegal drug use, list all law enforcement agencies to which they have applied, and provide five additional personal references who have not been listed anywhere else in the packet.

Background investigators send questionnaires to every person (family members, previous employers, co-workers, ex-partners, etc.) listed in the packet, schedule phone calls with anyone with whom they want to talk more extensively, and, in some cases, conduct in-person interviews

with neighbors and complete unannounced home visits at the applicant’s current residence. One cadet at Rollingwood PD told me that a background investigator visited his father’s neighbor’s house in a bordering state to ask them questions. Applicants are required to answer every question in the form, and if they skip or miss one, their background investigator will highlight it, call them, and insist on getting an answer. If any of the applicants’ previous employers, friends, family members, or neighbors do not fill out their questionnaire, their application is held up until they do. A significant percentage of applicants wash out during this phase of the hiring process.

The applicants who make it through the background investigation have two final steps to complete before they receive an offer of employment. First, applicants must pass a polygraph exam. According to the recruiting officers, the polygraph exam provides one final opportunity for the department to test the applicants’ honesty. Honesty, once again, mostly means consistency. If anything comes up in the background investigation that concerns the hiring officers, they instruct the polygraph examiner to ask about it. If the polygraph examiner determines that someone is lying, even if they have been consistent in their story previously, they can be disqualified. In cases where the polygraph administrator is not sure if someone is lying, the applicant’s response is categorized as inconclusive. In those cases, the hiring officers use their discretion to determine if the applicant should be disqualified.

There is very mixed evidence as to whether or not polygraph exams can actually detect dishonesty (Harris 2018), and the cadets I interviewed often mocked the exam once they were hired. During an interview with one cadet at Rollingwood PD, for example, he told me he was disqualified from another department after his polygraph because he failed the question asking if he had committed arson. He laughed as he told the story, suggesting to me the absurdity of him

being an arsonist. He then passed the polygraph exam at other departments, including at

Rollingwood PD.

Following the polygraph exam, applicants must complete a physical exam and a psychiatric evaluation, both of which are organized by the department. At Terryville PD, just 5% of the total applicant pool made it past this entire hiring process, making them eligible to receive an offer of employment.

Discourses

Police officers want to hire the best applicants to join their forces. What, then, does it mean to be a good candidate for police work? In this section, I present officers’ accounts of what it takes to be suitable for police work. According to the hiring and training officers I interviewed, in order to be considered suitable for police work, applicants must have the right qualities, the right reasons for pursuing law enforcement, the right political leanings, and a comfort with enacting the right kind of violence. The officers I met explain that it takes a special kind of person to be a police officer, and in this section, I describe the elements that comprise this conceptualization of suitability. Importantly, police officers explain that applicants must meet all of these parameters in order to be considered a good fit. For example, an applicant may have the right personality traits, but not have the right motivations for pursuing the career and lack a willingness to use violence. While the hiring officers may express fondness of that applicant, and label them a good person, they will not consider them qualified to be a police officer.

The Right Qualities: Integrity, Honesty, Responsibility, Discipline, and Teamwork

Police officers value a specific set of personality traits in their understandings of what it means to be a good officer. A good police officer has integrity, and is honest, disciplined,

responsible, and a reliable team member. The hiring and training staff at the departments I studied repeatedly invoked these five character traits in discussions about what kinds of applicants are most qualified for the job, and which cadets are most successful in the academy.

Officers tied these traits to the tasks, responsibilities, and authority involved in police work, explaining that in order to be a good police officer, one must demonstrate a competence and commitment to each of these qualities. In this section, I outline why, from officers’ perspectives, these traits are important for doing the work of policing.

Having a strong sense of integrity and a commitment to honesty were by far the most- cited qualities in my discussions with officers about what kinds of people are best suited for police work. Officers stress that having integrity and being honest are essential because an officer’s word is used in court as official testimony. If the public does not think that officers have integrity and are honest, they explain, then they have no legitimacy or authority.

The emphasis on integrity and honesty came up in my interview with Adrian, the sergeant who oversees recruiting at Terryville PD. Adrian is 42 years old, Hispanic, and has worked in law enforcement for 20 years. As was usually the case with the officers I met in recruiting and hiring units, Adrian is friendly, outgoing, and accommodating. For example, before the interview, he gives me detailed written instructions on where to park, and following the interview, invites me to join him, another officer, and the office administrator for lunch at a nearby restaurant. When I ask Adrian what they are looking for in applicants, he immediately points to honesty and integrity:

We like to say this: There's no perfect person. There's no saint …. We're just

lookin' for a person who's honest, who has a sense of loyalty, and who will own

up to what they've done. There's certain things that you can't have done …. [but] a

lot of it really is the honesty. I think that's the biggest thing, their ethics and

morals, because the department is trusting this person to potentially go into

somebody's house, somebody's vehicle, have contact with all these people, and to

do everything correctly, be honest about it, not lie …. The department has to be

able to trust this individual that they hired to go into that house and not steal

anything. If somebody is coming through the application process and they're lying

to the background investigator from the beginning, how can they trust that person

to go out there and be honest to the citizens that they're serving?

Adrian explains that the department needs to be able to trust officers to be honest while they are on duty. He points to the high level of authority that police officers have in their daily work, and explains that having integrity and being honest are paramount to doing the job ethically.

According to the officers I met, a good officer also shows a high level of personal responsibility. Jim, for example, brings up personal responsibility when I ask about the conversations he has with potential recruits at career fairs:

They [desirable recruits] have that understanding of, “Okay, this is what’s gonna

be expected of me. They gonna expect for me to be responsible. They gonna

expect for me to be on time. They gonna expect for me to be completely honest.”

…. You have to be responsible, because you have peoples’ livelihoods …. If you

have bad child support, that’s a problem, because that’s you not taking care of

your responsibility. If you don’t take care of that responsibility, what makes us

think you’re gonna take care of this responsibility?

Jim explains that demonstrating a lack of responsibility indicates that an applicant will not be a good police officer. Jim uses the example of failing to pay child support as a proxy to indicate a lack of personal responsibility. Without responsibility in your own life, you cannot be trusted with the responsibility involved in police work.

Officers also explain that having discipline is required to be a good officer. Disciplined officers, they explain, follow the rules, which makes the department run as its supposed to. This comes up in my interview with Jacob, a 29-year-old South Asian officer who, at the time of the interview, had been working patrol for about three months. I watched Jacob go through the academy, where he performed at the top of his class academically, physically, and tactically.

Jacob attended the Naval Academy, served in the Navy for several years, and, when he entered the academy, immediately started campaigning to be elected class president. Jacob mentions the importance of discipline in the military and the police:

It’s important because you need to be able to trust someone to do what they’re

supposed to do when they’re not being spoon fed …. I was in the Navy—we had

years of that, so now going into law enforcement, it’s not very difficult …. That

stuff is second nature, but for a lot of people, this is new to them …. If you’re not

making sure things like your TASER is charged, then you might need to use it to

save my life, and you can’t.

Jacob explains that when someone has discipline, they will do “what they’re supposed to do when they’re not being spoon fed.” This came up in other contexts, where respondents explained that officers need to have discipline so that they can make “good decisions” and follow the rules when they are on the street, unsupervised. This was easier for Jacob, he says, and for other

applicants with previous military experience, because they already understand how to perform discipline and follow institutional rules, with an understanding that doing so may have life-or- death consequences.

Finally, according to these officers, police work requires that officers are reliable team members. Police officers often work with partners or on teams, and explain that it is vitally important that they can rely on one another, especially in stressful situations. Paul, a 47-year-old, white sergeant at Rollingwood PD’s training academy, brings up the importance of teamwork:

For law enforcement, teamwork comes into play that when you’re out on the

street …. I have to have confidence in the person who goes with me to the scene

…. [for example] I show up at a burglar alarm, and their front door’s been kicked

in, and I’m waiting for somebody else to show up. Then you show up, and I say,

“Hey, Bert. You and I are going into this house to clear it, to make sure there’s

nobody in there.” That could potentially be a life-or-death situation. So, I have to

have confidence in you to work together with me …. As simple as being able to

work together, to handle people’s problems and stressful situations to the actual

life-and-death situations of, “We’re in a scrap. I can count on you to give 100

percent just because I am.” And that if something were to happen, and I get hurt,

you’re not gonna leave me. The teamwork creates bonds, and that bond is trust.

Paul explains that being able to rely on other officers is not only key to completing tasks in police work, but can be a matter of life or death. In his response, he highlights that each officer needs to know they can trust one another to work as a team, so that their coordinated efforts are done in a way that keeps them safe and accomplishes whatever task is at hand.

The police officers I met explain that good officers have integrity, and are honest, disciplined, responsible, and reliable. According to my respondents, police officers must be honest so that the institution maintains its legitimacy and authority, disciplined so that they will comply with orders, responsible so that they can handle the complexities of the job, and a good team member so that they can be trusted by other officers. Those who do not demonstrate these qualities are considered ill-suited for police work. Of course, not all officers – even those who are considered to be good officers – are honest, disciplined, responsible, and good team members all of the time, and thus, this combination of qualities is part of a discourse about suitability.

These descriptions reflect an ideal personality for policing.

The Right Reasons: A Calling to Protect the Innocent

The kind of person who should be a police officer, according to my respondents, feels a calling to protect innocent people from evil. In reality, of course, just as with any other job, people decide to become police officers for many different reasons. However, in the ways that they talk about motivations, police officers place a strict boundary around what kinds of motivations are acceptable and unacceptable. Having the “right reasons” for pursuing a career in policing, according to these officers, indicates that someone is a good fit for the job and will persist through the academy and into patrol work.

When I ask police officers why they pursued this career, they talk about wanting to protect, serve, or help people, and often refer to police work as a “calling.” Joey, for example, invokes these motivations in explaining why he pursued a career in policing after leaving the

Marines:

Just that higher calling. Protecting those who can't protect themselves …. I had

smaller friends growing up that were getting bullied and I just hate people that

prey on other people …. I wanna do what I can to protect people.

This desire to protect people came up in nearly every interview I conducted. Chris, a 44-year-old, white lieutenant overseeing the hiring unit at Rollingwood PD, similarly tells me that he pursued policing because he liked “the fact that you could actually help people.” Diego, a 42-year-old,

Hispanic sergeant at Rollingwood PD’s training academy, says he “wanted something in a

‘giving back,’ or ‘helping others’ field.” Other officers tell me that they felt a “personal calling to do something emphasizing giving back and helping people,” that they wanted to “interact with the community and help people,” or that they aspired to “be the person that people call when they’re in need.” In their explanations of why they pursued law enforcement, officers emphasize a calling to help and defend innocent people.

If feeling a calling to protect the innocent is framed as the right reason for pursuing policing, then any other motivation is framed as wrong. In a conversation with David, a Hispanic officer in his 40’s, he acknowledges this binary. David works as a defensive tactics instructor at

Rollingwood PD’s academy, and although notably suspicious of me in the beginning of my field work, he became quite candid later on. During the hours I spent with him at the academy, he talked to me about the psychology podcasts he enjoys, his fantasies for retirement, and his and his wife’s efforts to adopt a child. On this afternoon, David and I stand next to each other in the gym while the cadets learn how to escape pins on the ground. David asks if I have found that motivations for becoming a cop differ depending on the race and gender of the officer. I tell him that most officers and cadets say that they want to protect or help people. David rolls his eyes.

“Of course they do,” he says, “they don’t want to be honest,” because it “doesn’t sound good” to say that actually, you just really needed a job and health insurance, or honestly, you like driving fast and putting bad guys in jail. David acknowledges that within the institutional discourse dictating moral motivations, it “doesn’t sound good,” or is incorrect, to say that you want to be a police officer for any other reason except to protect or help others.

In my conversation with David, he points to two kinds of reasons for pursuing law enforcement that are wrong. First, officers are expected to pursue the career for reasons tied to morality. Good officers think about policing as a calling, not just a job, and thus, pursuing this career for the pay or benefits is wrong. Second, although adrenaline, power, and violence are a part of this job, they are not supposed to be the reason why officers pursue the career.

This first kind of wrong motivation – pay and benefits – comes up in my interview with

Rob, a 37-year-old white defensive tactics instructor at Rollingwood PD’s academy. During my field work, Rob incessantly criticizes the cadets, often complaining that they are stupid, lazy, and lack common sense. After my field work ended, he would text me every few months to complain about the cadets in the new class, and to let me know how many of them had quit or been fired.

During our interview, I ask Rob what makes someone a stand out cadet. He explains that

“mindset” is important, and, referencing unsuccessful cadets, complains:

The people that just show up ‘cause they’re here for some health insurance or they

think it’ll work for a while and they’ll find something else because this city has a

competitive job market, obviously not going to be in it for the right reasons.

Rob explains that cadets who go into this field for the pay or benefits are not in it for the right reasons. According to this way of understanding police work, one should go into this occupation because they have a calling, a passion, or a life purpose to do so.

The second kind of wrong reason – adrenaline, power, and violence – comes up during a

“professionalism and ethics” class at Terryville PD’s academy. The instructor, a white man who works as a commander overseeing the narcotics unit, has been at Terryville PD for 32 years and has taught this class for the last ten years. At the beginning of the class, he instructs the cadets to introduce themselves: “Tell us your name, where you’re from, if you have a degree, if you have any prior military or law enforcement experience, and why you want to be a police officer.”

After we have all introduced ourselves, he walks over to the white board and synthesizes the reasons that the cadets gave for pursuing a career in law enforcement. “It sounds like y’all said you want to be cops because of the brotherhood” – he writes each reason on the board, in a column, as he says them aloud – “and actually you all were more honest than usual, so I heard some of you say the adrenaline.” He goes on, “teamwork, camaraderie, service, and I heard a few people say to be a good example or a role model that you didn’t have growing up.” He seems pleased with the reasons the cadets have provided and commends the group, “Y’all joined the police department for the right reasons.” He then lists a few wrong reasons for entering the field.

“What I didn’t hear,” he says, “is that you wanted to be a cop to shoot unarmed ….” he pauses briefly, “I’ll say minorities. Or that you wanted to beat people down …. I didn’t hear anyone say any of those reasons.” In this comment, the commander makes a direct reference to the bad apples that they are trying to eliminate during the hiring process. Good officers are not racist, and they do not use violence unnecessarily. He articulates the occupational discourse framing the

right and wrong motivations for pursuing a career in law enforcement. Although he uses examples that no one would actually say out loud, even if those were their motivations for entering the field, he does highlight the ways in which there are acceptable and unacceptable ways of expressing motivations for pursuing policing. The acceptable reasons, he notes, do not include a desire for power or enacting racist violence.

There are discourses dictating the right and wrong reasons for pursuing many different careers. Medical doctors, for example, are probably supposed to go into the field because they want to save lives, not because they want money and power. Within sociology, we expect researchers to pursue academics because they have a passion for knowledge production and understanding social inequality, not because they want prestige, recognition, or to spend the summers in their vacation home. Scholars have noted that this emphasis on serving the community is often invoked in expressed motivations for pursuing many different kinds of public work, including police work (Z. Oberfield 2014; Perry and Wise 1990). The fact that the police have a discourse framing motivations for pursuing police work – and, one that centers on passion – is not necessarily unique. What matters here, though, are the assumptions about criminality, worthiness, and human value that are embedded in this way of articulating the motivation for pursuing policing. The underlying assumptions of this motivation make a distinction between who is deserving of protection and who is deserving of punishment, and frame police officers as the deciders of who belongs on each side of this line.

Often, this binary is verbally articulated by police officers, like when Joey, quoted above, tells me that he chose to pursue police work so that he could protect vulnerable people from bad people who may “prey on” them. This binary comes up in classroom instruction as well, like

when Dylan, a white firearms instructor in his 40’s at Terryville PD, warns cadets that they need to carry their firearms in order to protect lives, and that sometimes, they will need to “take lives in order to protect others.” The lives being taken, of course, are those of the bad guys, as Dylan says, in order to “protect others.”

Other times, this binary is acted out in scenario-based training3. At Rollingwood PD, the cadets play out this binary in a shooting scenario. The cadets are instructed to perform a routine traffic stop right next to an elementary school, which, in reality, is a small, cabin-like building next to the driving track on the academy’s campus. I watch as two cadets drive over in a patrol car, and pull over their instructor driving a white Honda Accord. As soon as the cadets exit their vehicle and walk towards the Accord, the driver gets out and shoots at the cadets with a simulation-round revolver. The unexpectedness of the rounds makes their sharp *pops* sound even louder. The cadets flinch and their bodies stiffen with surprise. After the driver shoots off one round, he walks in front of his car, onto the grass, and towards the “elementary school.” The first time I watch the scenario, the cadet taking lead immediately yells “GUN!”, draws his pistol, and shoots at the driver. He tries to get some cover behind the Accord, while the other cadet also draws his gun. After a few seconds pass, the instructor yells “man down,” and the driver falls to the ground, pretending that he has been shot. The cadets keep their pistols aimed at the driver for a moment, until the instructor tells them to holster their pistols and debrief with him.

When the scenario is over, the instructor first asks, “was there a deadly threat?” He answers his own question: “Absolutely.” He then asks, “Well he wasn’t shooting at you anymore

3 Throughout the academy, cadets participate in scenario-based training, which tests their ability to apply classroom and tactics skills to law-enforcement scenarios. Their instructors design the scenarios, officers at the department volunteer as “actors,” and officers (either their instructors, or officers volunteering) evaluate their performance. The scenarios vary in intensity from intervening in a verbal argument between civilians in the park, to arriving at an ambush scene. 54

after that first shot, so why did you keep shooting? Was there a deadly threat?” The cadets hesitate. He again answers his own question: “Absolutely there was! The bad guy was walking towards what?” One of the cadets responds, “An elementary school, sir.” “Right,” the instructor confirms, going on, “You signed up for this job, it is your job to protect those kids. You knew you could get in a gun fight with this job. The bad guy signed up for this too, by shooting at cops. Those kids in there, they didn’t sign up for this. It is your job to stop him from getting into the school. So yes, there is still absolutely a deadly threat.” The instructor’s feedback to the cadets highlights a clear binary between who deserves punishment, and who deserves protection, positioning officers as the deciders – in real time – of who belongs in these categories. This scenario borders on being a caricature of this good vs. evil binary. Few would disagree that someone should intervene in the possible outcome of children being shot at school. What this scenario highlights, however, is that police officers conceptualize certain people as being worthy of protection, and others as being worthy of punishment, and that their job is to decide who belongs on either side.

This is perhaps most pointedly illustrated by the American police flag, pictured below, which, resembling an American flag, features black and white stars and stripes, with a blue horizontal line down the middle. This blue stripe represents the police, who are the “thin blue line” standing between chaos and order, or between the evil and the innocent. According to this way of seeing the world, there are innocent people, and there are bad people, and the police are supposed to intervene between them. This means that the occupation is rooted in an understanding of criminality that is individualized and intentional (not systemic), and of people that categorizes them as either worthy, or undeserving, of protection.

Figure 1: The American Police Flag

Good police officers, according to my respondents, pursue this career because they feel a calling to protect and serve. Those who want to be police officers because it pays well, or offers health insurance and retirement plans are pursuing police work for the wrong reasons. Although power, authority, and using force are all a part of the job – and as I argue later, candidates need to demonstrate a capacity for this – these aspects of the job should not be cited as reasons why someone has decided to be a police officer. This discourse frames policing as a selfless, sacrificial career, and those who do it as heroes.

The Right Politics: Conservative

During my field work, the conservative politics of the institution revealed itself in many ways: in conversations officers have with one another, in the apparel they wear, in the news they watch on television while at work, and in their affiliations with certain groups, like the military and the National Rifle Association. A good police officer, then, is politically conservative, or at minimum, is willing to work in a politically conservative environment.

One way in which the conservative political leanings of these departments materializes is in the news channels they watch while at work. Most notably, Fox News is often shown on televisions or computers at hiring and training units. The television in the back office at

Rollingwood PD’s academy, for example, was always turned to Fox News. One afternoon, a white defensive tactics instructor in his 40’s makes a derisive comment about a staff member who anonymously complained to the command staff about this. They are going to keep watching

Fox, he proudly tells me, despite the complaint. At Rollingwood PD’s hiring unit, I sit with

Nancy, a white officer in her 40’s, for a few afternoons as she conducts applicant background investigations. As she starts to review the first applicant’s pre-polygraph questionnaire, she turns to me and says, “I’m gonna turn on Fox News, hope you don’t mind. I just need background noise.” “No worries. Your office, your rules,” I say. After a pause, I ask her, “Out of curiosity, what do you like about Fox News?” She tilts her head, considering the question, “I guess I would describe myself as Republican, so I just think Fox News is less biased than some of the other news channels.” A few moments pass while she flips through papers, and she clarifies,

“Actually, I guess I would describe myself as conservative.” I look around her office and notice a toy shaped like Donald Trump’s head displayed on her bulletin board and a large Donald Trump- branded pen.

This conservative ethos permeates the hiring and training units in many other routine ways. Cadets make jokes about how they think California should be “cut out” of the country.

One cadet at Hudson PD tells me that he is from California, but left and came to the south because of “California politics.” When I arrived at a Clarkston PD sub-station for a ride out, three bumper stickers are prominently displayed on a filing cabinet that read, respectively:

“EXTREMELY DEPLORABLE4,” “EXTREMELY RIGHT WING,” and “God bless our troops.

Especially our snipers.” Officers often reference their membership to the NRA and display

Marines, Army, Navy, and Air Force flags in offices and in the departments’ gyms.

My presence at these departments – a PhD student in a sociology department at UT

Austin, sporting a gold nose ring – often served as a foil for officers and cadets, where they periodically poked fun at me for being from Austin, where all of the “hippies” and “liberals” lived, often adding that they would never live there. This not only served as a foil, but also as a reminder that I was not one of them. I did not meet the requirements to be a good officer, and thus, could not be a full member of the club. During a meeting with the sergeant – a white man in his 40’s – who oversees the training academy at Hudson PD, he, seemingly out of the blue, asks if I’m a “gun nut.” Feeling confused by the abrupt change of topic and pointed question, I respond, “Am I a gun nut? I’ve shot guns, and I’m surprisingly a good shot, but I don’t own any guns.” I talk about a research project I worked on previously about license-to-carry laws in

Texas. The sergeant says, “Hmm…you live in Austin, you’re in graduate school, you’ve got a nose ring …. you must be pretty left-leaning, right?” I laugh, mostly at my own naivety in thinking that officers would not notice the way in which I give away my own politics, and confirm that I am left leaning. “What’s it like for you to hang out with cops all day, then? Since you’re left leaning and we tend to be conservative,” he asks. I am pretty used to it, I tell him, and explain that my mom’s side of the family is from rural East Texas, I spent time with a lot of conservative gun owners during my last research project, and I have talked with dozens of cops

4During a speech at a fundraiser for the 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton said, “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’” In response, those in support of Donald Trump re- appropriated the phrase, adopting the moniker to describe themselves.

so far for this project. We talk about how most officers live outside of the cities they work in, and he tells me that, in his experience, most cops “may be left-leaning on some issues,” but they

“love their guns” and are “mostly right leaning.”

The officers I met in the field describe themselves, and their colleagues, as being conservative, and they express this political affiliation in their conversations, their clothes, the kinds of flags or stickers they display, and the news channels they watch. The institution, through its discourse about politics and the ways in which officers express and display political leanings, assumes that all officers identify as such. To be a good officer, then, means to identify as politically conservative, or at minimum, to be willing to work in an explicitly politically conservative space.

The Right Kind of Violent: Fighting Back

Lastly, a good police officer must be willing to respond to violence with violence.

Policing, according to the officers I met, requires that, when faced with a threat, officers stand their ground and fight back. Running away from, or avoiding, a physical confrontation is framed as cowardly, and is considered a major indication that someone is ill-suited for the job. These officers reveal the importance of fighting back by expressing concern about cadets who have never been in a fight. Ideally, an applicant has been in a physical confrontation before entering the academy – specifically, one in which they defended themselves or another person – so that other officers know that they will stand their ground and fight back while on duty.

During one day of field work at Clarkston PD’s academy, I stand in a large gym with

Eric, a Hispanic defensive tactics instructor in his 40’s. Eric’s left arm is covered in a tattoo sleeve, he has a black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and he often talks passionately, to me and others,

about the importance of tactics training. He tells me that he travels around the world teaching tactics to other police departments. On this day, I watch the cadets run through their defensive tactics final exam. Eric expresses concern about cadets who have “never been in a fight.” He complains about how sometimes, applicants who have been in a fight, but were actually not the

“assailant,” are disqualified because the record does not show that they did not initiate it. A lot of the military guys, he says, have been in fights, or the guys who have been in combat sports, but otherwise, there are many cadets who have not been in a fight.

This concern about cadets who had never been in a fight comes up during conversations I have with officers about whether or not I would be a good police officer. I attended seven career fairs with the two full-time recruiting officers at Rollingwood PD, and at one, Michael, a 51- year-old, Black officer who previously served in the Army, asks me, “You gonna be a cop after this?” I joined Michael, and his recruiting partner, Nathan – a 45-year-old, Black officer who also previously served in the Army5 – at career fairs in and around the state. That day, in response to Michael’s question, I laugh and say, “No, I don’t think so. I want to be a professor.”

“Why not?” Michael asks. I tell him that “to be honest, I actually don’t think I’d be very good at it. I don’t do well under pressure.” I turn the question around on him, “Do you think I’d be a good police officer?” “Well,” Michael says, leaning his head to the side, “you definitely have the

5 The hiring units at the departments I studied were far more gender and racially diverse than the rest of their police forces, and in particular, than their training academy staff. Although this could be perceived to be a progressive practice, the positions within the hiring unit were not considered prestigious and the leadership in the units were usually white men. The hiring units often assigned recruiting events by race and gender, for example sending Black officers to historically black colleges and universities and Hispanic officers to predominately Hispanic regions of the state, suggesting that the high level of diversity in the hiring units is a marketing strategy to attract applicants. In contrast to the hiring units, the training academy staff was composed almost entirely of white men. During one of my last visits to the hiring unit at Rollingwood PD, one of the retired officers, an older white man who worked as a background investigator part time, brought this up. He explained, “I mean, we went over there [the academy] for a meeting, and here [the hiring unit], there’s a ton of diversity. Over there, I was like” – he points his finger out, like he’s pointing at people – “white male, white male, white male, white male. Like, where is the diversity over there? Y’all can’t hire a Black man, a Hispanic woman, nothing?” 60

communication down. You can clearly talk to people. But, I’m not sure how you would react if someone punched you. Have you ever been in a fight?” “Nope, never,” I say. His lips tighten, his smile pulls to the right side of his face, and he lets out a “Hmmm.” Given my answer, he is not so sure, his face tells me.

Throughout my year in the field, officers expressed concern about cadets who come into the academy without ever having been in a fight. They could not be sure, they explained, that these cadets would stand their ground and fight back. Never having been in a fight before indicated to these officers that someone was non-confrontational, cowardly, or meek, all of which were thought to be incompatible with police work. This way of thinking about who will make a good officer, then, frames violence as a necessary part of the job.

According to the officers I met and interviewed, good police officers have the right personality, motivations for pursuing the career, political leanings, and affinity towards violence.

To not have these things means that you are conceptualized as unsuitable for police work. If you are not honest, disciplined, responsible, and a good team member, that means you are deceitful, lazy, careless, and unreliable. If you are not pursuing this career because you feel a calling to help protect the innocent from the bad, that means you are either selfish or power hungry. If you are not politically conservative, that means you probably do not hold individuals accountable for their criminality, that you support government hand outs, and that you associate with people who are anti-police. Lastly, if you are not willing to stand your ground and fight back when faced with a physical threat, that means you are a coward. This suitability discourse is positioned alongside binaries, where applicants are either a good fit or they are not; there is no in between.

In the next section, I show how hiring officers distinguish the good officers from the rest of the applicant pool. In each section, I explain that hiring applicants with these specific ways of seeing, talking about, and interacting with the world has important implications for the persistence of racist police violence.

Informal Practices

The police officers I met express a deep investment in hiring candidates who they believe are good, brave, hard-working, committed people. How do these officers determine which applicants are good, brave, hard working and committed to the job? In the first section, I outlined the official procedures structuring the hiring process. In the next section, I described the hegemonic discourse that frames the qualities, motivations, political leanings, and affinity towards violence that police officers use in their conceptions of what kinds of people should be officers. The hiring officers take their jobs very seriously, and go to great lengths to determine who does, and does not, embody and perform this ideal. The hiring officers exercise a great deal of discretion in selecting recruits. As part of their jobs, they must must translate the official rules and hegemonic discourses into practices. In this section, I outline the informal practices that officers engage in to decide which candidates will be good officers, and which candidates should not be permitted to do this job.

Hiring Applicants with the Right Personality

During the hiring process, officers evaluate whether or not applicants have the right personality traits to be good at police work. In this section, I explain how the hiring officers determine which applicants have the right personality for the job, highlighting the kinds of behaviors that they categorize as red flags.

As previously noted, applicants are repeatedly evaluated on their honesty. If an officer determines that an applicant has omitted information, been misleading, explicitly lied, or been inconsistent in the information they provided, they label the applicant as dishonest and disqualify them. During my field work, a number of applicants were disqualified for dishonesty. I spent several days at Rollingwood PD’s hiring unit with Nancy as she interviewed candidates and conducted background investigations. Nancy is about five feet tall, has blonde hair, and round, large blue eyes. She has a vibrating energy, and is constantly moving and talking. She tells me that her nickname in the unit is “black widow,” because she is such a brutal and thorough background investigator. Jason, a white applicant in his 20’s, is assigned to Nancy, and by the end of her investigation, he is permanently disqualified from Rollingwood PD. Before Jason’s board interview, Nancy and I sit in her office as she flips through his initial background packet, highlighting anything she thinks may be a red flag. Jason has been disqualified from three other departments, but she does not yet know why.

The day prior, after Jason completed his physical and written test, Nancy met with him and asked why he was disqualified from these other agencies. Jason said he did not know because the agencies would not give him that information. The next day, Diane, a white sergeant in her 30’s who leads this interview, asks Jason why he was disqualified by three other agencies.

Jason divulges information in his response that he did not mention during yesterday’s one-on- one meeting with Nancy: at one of the agencies, he could not get through the polygraph. It was three hours, he says, and he could not sit still. Diane asks which part of the polygraph he failed.

The two most important sections, he says: when he was asked if he is a gang member and if he has ever killed anyone. Everyone’s eyes widen and heads shift back slightly, including mine.

Nancy tilts her gaze in confusion, and she chastises Jason: “You never said any of that yesterday when I asked you, and I specifically asked you why you were DQ’d [disqualified]. See, that’s the kind of stuff that just isn’t going to work, Jason. It’s going to get you DQ’d fast.” Jason starts to sweat as he tries to defend himself and apologize to Nancy, stuttering while he explains that he did not know she wanted that level of detail yesterday. “Of course I did! I specifically asked!”

Nancy shouts. Diane interrupts, trying to intervene in Nancy’s reprimand, and asks Jason about the second agency. Jason says he was initially disqualified for a few months due to marijuana use. He continued the application process when he was eligible again, but was then disqualified during the background investigation. He tried to find out why, but they told him that they do not give applicants that information. Nancy throws her arms up in the air and, looking flabbergasted, shouts “Again, Jason! This is the first I’ve ever heard of this marijuana-use DQ. This is going to get you DQ’d if you keep it up!” Jason uses a lot of “I apologize” and “ma’ams,” trying to explain himself, but Nancy does not cool off. After the interview, back in her office, she bemoans, “nothing pisses me off more” than when someone lies and then tries to backtrack on it.

Now, she explains, she thinks he is being deceptive and does not trust him. “What else could he be lying about?” she asks.

Several weeks later, I spend a day at Rollingwood PD’s hiring unit and catch up with

Nancy about her ongoing background investigations. When I get to her office, she slams her hands on then desk and tells me she “has to” update me on Jason. She tells me that Jason got disqualified from the other departments because he admitted to selling his prescription Adderall.

Selling a controlled substance is an automatic disqualifier at Rollingwood PD, so on top of the fact that he sold drugs, she tells me, he also lied about it. “Nothing pisses me off more than

someone lying to me” she gripes. Even now, weeks later, Nancy’s tone elevates, her cadence quickens and her head swivels back and forth as she recounts her irritation and resentment about

Jason lying to her. She glances at her office door, which is open, and in a hushed voice, tells me that Diane reprimanded her after Jason’s board interview for “not keeping cool.”

Nancy tells me that when she “likes people,” she calls them on the phone to break the news that they have been disqualified, but otherwise she just emails them. She tells me that because Jason lied to her, she “has no respect for him [Jason],” so did not bother to call him.

After receiving the email from Nancy, Jason called her to find out why he had been disqualified.

Smirking, Nancy plays me the recording of their three or four-minute phone conversation6.

When Jason asks her why he has been disqualified, she tells him that she called the other departments and found out that he sold Adderall. “What? Really?” he asks incredulously. There were several inconsistencies during the process, she says, again complaining that he was not

“forthcoming.” Sounding defeated and confused, Jason says “okay,” thanks her, and hangs up.

The moral element that officers attach to honesty is highlighted by Nancy’s intense emotional reaction to Jason’s inconsistencies. From Nancy’s perspective, Jason withheld information from her, which means that he is deceitful, untrustworthy, and lacks character. She does not respect him anymore, she tells me. Although Jason fits the mold for a police officer in many other ways – he is a young, relatively athletic, white man who feels a calling to help others, has broken up a physical fight, and presents markers of a conservative political identity – he is, according to Nancy, a liar, and liars cannot be police officers. Jason does not fulfill the conceptualization of a good police officer, and as a result, he is disqualified from the department.

6 The hiring officers explained to me that they often recorded their phone conversations with applicants so that they had a record of what was said. 65

While honesty and integrity are qualities that applicants must actively perform during the hiring process, primarily by being consistent and displaying good intentions in the information they provide, having discipline, being responsible, and being a good team member are evaluated through proxies or during interviews. Having a clean criminal history, drinking alcohol only sparingly, and either never having used drugs or only using them within the department’s allowed parameters (this is based on the number of times a drug was used, what kind of drug, and the time passed since last use) are all markers that an applicant is responsible. Having their finances in order, however, is the primary marker that an applicant is responsible. This means that applicants need to have a good credit score, not have let anything go to collections, need to pay their child support, and, if they have debt, need to pay it consistently. This emphasis on financial responsibility comes up in my interview with Bruce, a 49-year-old, white lieutenant in

Bristol PD’s hiring unit. When I ask Bruce “what kinds of things usually disqualify people at the background stage of things?” he responds:

Backgrounds is a potpourri of things. It’s everything from poor finances in the

sense of, you know, if you’ve had multiple collections, multiple credit stuff,

bankruptcies. We’ve had some of that recently. We’ll have stuff that comes in the

background …. a bankruptcy six months ago and they couldn’t pay their bills and

went to collections and all sorts of stuff. They’re not responsible.

Bruce, and other officers, explain that poor finances are an indication of a lack of responsibility, and could be a red flag for being easily corruptible as officers. The credit check that departments require from applicants, then, serves the function of helping officers evaluate whether or not, according to their way of understanding it, the applicant is responsible.

Although parenthood is culturally considered a major responsibility, aside from paying child support, being a parent did not enter the calculus of evaluating an applicant’s personal responsibility. Having children only came up in the interviews I witnessed with women applicants, and was discussed as a liability, rather than an asset. During Jessica’s board interview at Rollingwood PD, the interviewing officers warn her about the incompatibility of a police officer’s work schedule and family life. Jessica is a white, 44-year-old applicant with two children and is interviewed by Diane, Nancy, and Michael. Diane explains to Jessica that for the first several years, she will have to work evenings or nights, and that this will be difficult with children. Nancy chimes in, warning that Jessica is going to have to adjust to the academy schedule, and get used to telling her kids that “Mommy can’t play right now.” Nancy talks about another woman she hired into the current academy who she says is really struggling to make it work with her family. Diane openly acknowledges the gendered assumptions in these warnings, explaining, “Would we be asking a male candidate these questions? No.” Diane goes on, justifying her line of questioning: “Women are different when it comes to children. It’s just not the same for men and women. It’s women’s instinct to take care of everything,” making it harder for them to do this job. Michael adds that they want to make sure Jessica is “mentally prepared” for this. I asked several officers if their departments offered any kind of subsidized child care options to help resolve this problem for parents. All of the officers I asked about this reported that their departments did not assist with child care, though one officer added that sometimes cadets’ wives will take turns babysitting.

Discipline is primarily demonstrated through expressing and embodying a commitment to physical fitness and having the willingness to endure pain to prove that commitment. In the

hiring process, applicants must pass a physical fitness test, and during the board interviews, are asked to describe their physical fitness regimen. The officers on the board are usually unsatisfied with whatever the applicants describe, and insist that they take physical fitness seriously before the academy so that they do not struggle there.

During the physical fitness test, applicants are encouraged to push themselves as hard as they can, and to finish the exam even if they fail a portion of it. At Rollingwood PD, applicants are required to complete a 2,000-meter row within a period of time dictated by their height, weight, and sex. I watch this as part of the larger applicant testing process at Rollingwood PD.

The hiring officers have set up 20 or so row machines in a cleared-out room that looks like a cafeteria. The applicants have all changed into work out clothes, and each sits on their assigned row machine, waiting to begin. I stand on one end of the room with a few of the hiring officers, who periodically pace down the aisle between the row machines, checking applicants’ performances and and urging them to keep going. Before they begin, Tina, a white officer in her

40’s, advises, “If you feel like you need medical attention, or you are going to throw up, raise your hand and we will come to you.” I ask Chris, the lieutenant who oversees the hiring unit, if its common for applicants to vomit during the fitness test and he confirms that almost every time, someone vomits, and every now and then, someone faints or needs oxygen. Tina tells the applicants that once the exam begins, if they stop early for any reason, they will be disqualified.

Tina is about 5’7”, thin, has small, condensed facial features, and a blonde pixie cut. She has a slight southern accent and a firm, embodied confidence. When the row test begins, she shouts at the applicants to keep going and to push harder. As she walks by applicants who are struggling – their breathing strained, shoulders slumped forward, and faces flushed – she contorts

her voice deeper and sharper, yelling “Come on! Let’s hustle!” “Do not quit! You didn’t come here to quit! You don’t want to go home a quitter!” and “Keep it up, 300 meters left!” One of the applicants raises his hand, an officer rushes over with a trash can, and he vomits. At the end of the exam, another applicant says he thinks he might need medical attention, but after sitting and resting for a few minutes, recovers. This exercise tests the applicants’ basic level of physical fitness, but it also tests whether or not they are willing to endure pain, and to complete the task regardless of this pain. The hiring officers want to know if these applicants have been training in preparation for this test – which demonstrates motivation and discipline – but they also want to know whether or not the applicant is a “quitter.” A good police officer does not quit, and will endure physical pain to be a part of the institution, demonstrating discipline.

Lastly, the hiring staff emphasizes to applicants the importance of teamwork in policing.

During the board interview at Rollingwood PD, each applicant is asked the following series of questions during their board interview: “What do you think are the most important qualities to be a good team member? What qualities do you have that makes you a good team member? How do you maintain a good working relationship with your co-workers?” Applicants’ responses are usually short, vague, and focus on workplace contexts. One interviewee, for example, responds that its important to listen, follow orders, respect the chain of command, and have good communication skills. Another interviewee says good team members are honest, hard working, educated, and trustworthy.

In the interviews that I witnessed, none of the applicants talked about sports teams during this line of questioning, which I suspect is because interviewers focused on workplace contexts in their phrasing. However, being on a sports team did come up in several conversations with

officers and cadets when we talked about the yelling, berating, and physical punishment involved in the academy training. Those who had military experience told me that they felt completely comfortable with this kind of interaction with supervisors. Those who did not have military experience talked about how their time playing football, for example, meant that they did not mind being yelled at. During lunch on the second day of the Hudson PD academy, for example, one cadet told me that because his dad was a football coach, he interpreted the yelling at the academy to mean that the instructors “cared about” them. This stands in stark contrast to my experience: I was totally shaken by the incessant shouting when I began field work. In conversations with cadets, I would explain that I had been on dance teams my whole life, but had never been yelled at like that before. By the end of field work, I was entirely unmoved by it.

At each step in the process, the hiring officers evaluate whether or not they think applicants have the right personality for policing. During the background investigations, board interviews, and physical fitness test, hiring officers evaluate applicants on their honesty, integrity, discipline, responsibility, and reliability. These hiring practices create a structure that enforces the suitability discourse, requiring a performance of suitability from applicants.

Hiring Applicants Who Are Passionate About Police Work

Throughout the hiring process, officers continually evaluate if applicants are there for the right reasons. Applicants are expected to say that they are pursuing this career because they feel a calling to protect and serve their communities. The hiring practices, then, require applicants to articulate the ideal institutional discourse around motivations.

The first question the board asks each applicant during their interview is “Why do you want to work in law enforcement?” The vast majority of applicants describe wanting to help

others, serve their community, and have an impact on crime. The desirable response is that the applicant has always had an interest in the police, they looked up to officers growing up, and as an adult, they want to have a positive impact on their community. Trevor, a white applicant in his late 20’s, articulates this narrative in his board interview. Before he enters the interview room at

Rollingwood PD, Trevor’s background investigator briefs the other officers on the board. His background investigator is a white, retired officer who looks to be in his early 60’s. Diane leads the interview, and one other officer – a Black man in his 40’s – sits on the board. Trevor is

“pretty typical,” his background investigator reports: he’s in the Navy, has a wife and kids, no criminal history, has smoked weed ten times or less in high school, his parents “seem cool,” and his wife “seems nice.” “Do you have any concerns?” Diane asks. “Nope,” he replies.

After a few minutes of small talk and introductions, Diane asks Trevor why he wants to get into law enforcement. He has always been interested in law enforcement, he says, since he was a kid. When he was younger, “it was for the kind of childish reasons of wanting excitement,” he explains. As he has gotten older, though, he thinks that law enforcement is

“really needed now,” and that pursuing this career is part of his “life’s purpose to help others.”

Diane, trying to ensure that Trevor is in it for the right reasons and urging him to articulate the hegemonic discourse, follows up on his answer, asking “Is it a calling?” “Yes, ma’am,” he replies. The board of officers nods in recognition, and they move on to the next question.

When applicants’ explanations of why they want to be a police officer do not match this narrative, they are met with suspicion, and are accused of getting into policing for the wrong reasons. Jessica experiences this heightened suspicion during her board interview at Rollingwood

PD. Jessica is one year away from the age cut off of 45, and, at the time of her interview, was in

the middle of a divorce from an officer at Rollingwood PD. She had work experience in the restaurant industry and in personal training. The board of officers spends a significant portion of her interview pressing her about why she wants to be a police officer, and in particular, why now, in the midst of her divorce from an officer. She tells the board that this is something she has always wanted to do, but got invested in her career as a chef, and did not think that she and her husband, who has been an officer for 15 years, could swing the schedules of both being officers.

The officers continue to press her: why now? Why is she making this career change in the middle of her divorce from an officer, especially since she is now becoming a single mom? Jessica repeats that she did not think it would have been possible when she was married because her husband’s schedule, and since she is about to age out, now is the time to do it.

A few weeks later, I find out that Jessica was disqualified for inconsistencies in her background history statement having to do with her marriage and work history. Telling me what happened, Nancy again calls into question Jessica’s motivations for applying. “I couldn’t figure out why she wanted to be a cop now,” she says, again noting that, to her, it seemed like odd timing. Nancy tells me she asked Jessica’s ex-husband if policing was something that she seemed “passionate” about – nope, he said, she had mentioned it a few times in passing, but never talked about it as a passion. Nancy determines that Jessica, who had pursued other careers and could not acceptably articulate her motivations for entering law enforcement, does not have a passion for policing. Those who do not discuss their path to policing as being fate-like, in their blood, or a calling – as Jessica did – are met with skepticism and distrust.

Expressing a commitment to helping and protecting innocent people, and feeling a personal calling to do so, are required to be considered for the job. Applicants must articulate this

discourse in order to be read as well-suited for police work. Through the board interviews, hiring officers determine whether or not applicants are there for the right reasons, and regard those who do not articulate this discourse with suspicion and resentment.

Hiring Politically Conservative Applicants

During the hiring process, the officers interviewing and investigating the applicants do not ask explicitly about politics. In one interview, in fact, an officer interrupted an applicant mid- sentence when he started to say Donald Trump’s name. In the exchange that followed, the interviewing officer reprimanded the applicant, telling him that “we do not talk about politics” in these interviews. The applicant apologized, and tried to explain his point: he has avoided political topics, like talking about Trump, at work. The recruiting and hiring officers do, however, make references to one another about how they perceive an applicant’s political leanings, demonstrating that they do use markers from the applicant to evaluate where they stand politically. For example, at the time of her interview, one applicant had blue hair, and the officers made several comments to me and to one another about how she clearly would not be a good fit.

During one of the days I observed board interviews, an officer made reference to the fact that most officers live in conservative counties outside of the moderate or liberal cities that they patrol. Before the applicant comes into the large classroom at Rollingwood PD for his interview, the background investigator, a Hispanic woman in her 30’s, briefs the rest of the board. She tells us that the applicant’s name is Kyle, he is 31, from the east coast, and has already been a cop there for four years. Before that, he worked for the Republican party for three years.

Rollingwood PD is located in a politically liberal city, so another officer on the board, also a

Hispanic woman in her 30’s, jokes, “And he wants to come to here?” Laughing, the background

investigator says she will just tell him to live in the counties north of the city, both of which are conservative, “where we [officers] all live.” She moves on: there have been no problems with his application, she says. There was a complaint filed about him at his current department for pulling someone over “because they were Black,” but it was dropped. The other officers nod, say

“okay,” and move on. They do not inquire about it during the interview.

Once they are in the academy, instructors often make reference to their own political leanings in a way that assumes they share an understanding and affiliation with everyone in the room. During a multiculturalism class at Terryville PD’s academy, for example, Lieutenant Rick

Lawrey gives away his conservative politics throughout his instruction. Rick is white, tall, and, judging by the grey sprinkled into his hair and his 36-year career in policing, seems to be in his late 50’s. He has a charming southern accent, dropping the G’s off of words like “looking” or

“morning,” and when he lectures, he teeters from foot to foot, alternating his weight. During his instruction, he describes the chief’s decision to assign an LGBTQ liaison as “bowing down to a politically active group,” expresses dismay as to how anyone would advocate for the dismantling of ICE, and mocks the city’s new District Attorney, who is choosing not to pursue low-level drug charges. During the class covering their force options policies, which happened to land on the same day as the midterm elections, Davis, a white instructor in his 30’s, encourages the cadets to vote. Then, leaning one elbow on the podium, turning his body to the side, and smirking, he says,

“You’re all voting for [Republican candidate for senator], though, right?” Everyone laughs. The woman who works as the academy’s administrator is standing in the doorway when he says this.

She laughs, but notes, “You’re not supposed to say anything political!” The instructor goes on,

explaining that he is voting all Republican except for a few Democrat judges he knows from times he has testified in court.

Identifying with conservative politics is not a requirement to be hired at a police department, and certainly, not every police officer would identify as such. However, there is an operating assumption within the institution that officers are politically conservative, and thus, the institution itself takes on a politically conservative identity. The implications of this institutional political leaning are important for how we understand the persistence of racist police violence.

Identifying with conservative politics means that, mostly, those who make it – and stay – in the institution have a negative view of social activism, discount marginalized groups' claims about inequality, and lack an empathetic view towards systemic poverty and crime.

Hiring Applicants Who Fight Back

Along with conservative politics, the ideal candidate for policing is also willing and able to use a certain kind of violence. Policing, according to the officers I met, requires that, when faced with a threat, officers stand their ground and fight back. Running away from, or avoiding, a physical confrontation is framed as cowardly, and is considered a major red flag that someone is ill-suited for the job. The hiring officers I met were very committed to disqualifying candidates with a history of egregious violence. However, they also do prioritize military veterans with combat experience and want to hire applicants who have been in a fight before.

During my field work, I saw or heard of several applicants being disqualified for having violent histories. For example, one day at Rollingwood PD’s recruiting office, I ask Logan, a

Black officer in his 40’s who works on background investigations full time, about the status of each of his investigations. Logan tells me he is waiting on an email from “someone for an

interesting BI [background investigation].” “What’s going on with that BI?” I ask. It is a

Brazilian man who worked as a police officer in Brazil, Logan says, and everything was looking pretty good until he talked to the applicant’s ex-girlfriend, who gave a lot of information that the applicant had withheld. Logan tells me that according to the ex-girlfriend, at some point during their break up, the applicant threatened to kill her, so she filed a complaint with the local police department. There are discrepancies, Logan explains, between their accounts, and there is limited information available from the local police department. I ask if he is going to be disqualified.

Most likely, Logan says, but the sergeant has to sign off on disqualifications. In this case, and in others where applicants demonstrated patterns of domestic violence, issuing of violent threats, or repeated disciplinary actions around using force inappropriately on the job, the institution indicated a disapproval of this behavior.

At the same time, though, departments prioritize military veterans and prefer applicants who have experience fighting. These departments devote a significant amount of time and resources to recruiting military veterans, and once they applied, give them an advantage in the process. The majority of full-time recruiters and trainers at these departments are veterans themselves, and during the four months I spent with recruiters at Rollingwood PD, five of the 13 career fairs attended were at military bases. Departments in the United States, including several of those included in this study, that follow civil service processes give military veterans bonus points in the testing process, increasing their chances of getting hired (Weichselbaum and

Meagher 2017). Rollingwood PD’s command staff changed the age limit from 40 to 45 years specifically so that they could accommodate applicants who had retired from the military.

Men and women of color are overrepresented in the military, so recruiting directly from the military has been an effective way to demographically diversify the police force. Indeed, one recruiting officer once told me that all of the departments in the state were “competing over the handful of Black guys leaving the Army.” Although officers of color certainly face unique obstacles in policing, the applicants of color who are successful – many of whom come from the military – fit the requirements for an ideal candidate. It is the conceptualization of the ideal officer that structures the requirements for hire that are the problem, not the bodies that fill the uniforms. Often, military veterans have already mastered the habitus required of police work, and thus, fit in to the institution seamlessly.

This emphasis on hiring veterans reveals something important about what kinds of backgrounds, experiences, and dispositions are considered to be a “good fit” for policing. In particular, military veterans, who, according to the officers I met, can control others, command compliance, and use violence in institutionally-approved ways, are top picks for departments.

There is evidence to suggest that this concerted effort to hire military veterans increases the chance of violent outcomes: studies have shown, for example, that officers with military experience are more likely to be involved in a shooting, fire their gun while on duty, and have a use-of-force complaints filed against them (Reingle Gonzalez et al. 2018; Weichselbaum 2018).

In addition to military experience, police departments look for candidates who have experience fighting. Hiring officers ask each applicant whether or not they had been in a physical confrontation and, if so, to describe what happened. I was initially unsure if there was a correct answer to this question. However, after watching several interviews and talking about the question with recruiting officers, it became clear that there was, in fact, a correct answer. The

best answer an interviewee could give was that yes, they had been in a physical confrontation, but it was either in the context of a combat sport, or, if it happened in the real world, the interviewee did not initiate the fight. The hiring officers are trying to ensure that the interviewee is not reluctant to use violence when it is provoked, and that, when presented with the opportunity, they will fight back.

During Jason’s board interview, he talks about a fight he was involved in during high school. Diane leads the interview, with Nancy and Michael on each side of her, taking turns asking follow up and clarifying questions. Michael asks Jason, “Have you ever been in a physical confrontation?” Yes, he says. “What happened?” Michael inquires. Jason was at a bonfire, he explains, when someone hit his friend over the head with a beer bottle. The two men started to fight, so Jason got in the middle of it. Michael clarifies, “Did you break it up, or were you fighting too?” Jason shrugs, tosses his head back and forth, and says he did throw a couple of punches. Michael tells Jason that he will absolutely get punched in this job, and it is important to know that he will react. He cannot run away from the problem, Michael explains. In response to this question, other applicants recounted experiences intervening in physical altercations between parents, participating in Jiu Jitsu or professional fights, or for one applicant with prior law enforcement experience, times he went hands on while on duty.

Applicants who have not been in a fight before are at a disadvantage. I watch this happen during Chase’s interview. Before the interview begins, Javier, Chase’s background investigator, briefs the other officers on the board. Chase is a 43-year-old white man from Pennsylvania,

Javier says, he has a wife who is “one of those ultrasound girls at the doctor’s office,” has two kids, owns a construction business with his dad, and is a “smart dude” – he has a degree in

engineering and graduated with a 3.7 GPA. Diane leads the interview, but Javier and Logan also alternate asking questions.

About ten minutes into the interview, Diane asks Chase if he has ever been in a physical confrontation. Chase says he has been in a few verbal arguments in high school, but other than that, nope, no physical altercations. Repeating the usual warning, Diane tells Chase that he will be punched in the face on this job, and it is important to know how he will respond. “Are you going to shy away from it, or engage it? Are you going to cower up into a tiny ball?” she asks.

Chase says he is not a particularly aggressive person, and Diane interrupts to push him, asking,

“Can you be?” “I can be,” he says, trying to reassure her, “but I mean, I can control myself. I wouldn’t over-respond.” Unsatisfied, Diane keeps up the line of questioning, “There may be a time that you are fighting for your life. Do you think you’ll be able to handle that?” “Yes, I think so,” he says. Chiming in, Javier asks if he has any experience with martial arts or Jiu Jitsu, and

Chase says no, he does not. At the end of the interview, Diane brings up Chase’s response to this question again. She tells Chase that he will get “tested” in the academy, and if “you are not ready to protect yourself, then you won’t be able to protect your partner, or the citizens.” She suggests that before the academy starts, he makes it to a martial arts class, “take a few hits, so you know you can take it. Are you going to curl up in a ball?” She emphasizes that it’s important that he

“knows” how he will respond, “none of this ‘I think’ or ‘I hope.’ I know I can handle myself.”

At the end of the interview, Chase leaves left the room and the officers discuss any concerns they have about him. Diane expresses unease about his response to the physical altercation question. She says she is worried that he continually said he “hoped” or he “thinks” he could handle a fight. Javier says he bets that if Chase makes it to the academy, he will be “the

guy” who repeatedly has “did not engage” on his evaluation forms during scenario-based training. Diane agrees, and says she thinks he will “crawl into himself and disengage” if a fight presents itself. “He’s gonna have to get angry,” she says.

Although officers expressed concern about any applicant – including men – who had not been in a fight, they specifically brought up gender in interviews with women. Importantly, they emphasized the importance of standing their ground and fighting back even with women who openly indicated an interest and willingness to fight. Women, unlike men, were assumed to be less willing or able to fight, and thus, the hiring officers repeatedly emphasized to women that because of their gender, they would be tested in the academy and patrol settings.

This came up in Jessica’s board interview when Nancy asks about her regular exercise regimen. Jessica tells the board that she does Jiu Jitsu, runs, lifts weights, and also works as a personal trainer, and indeed, these hobbies are visible in her physique. Jessica scored in the top percentile on her physical fitness test for the department. Michael jumps in, warning Jessica that

“especially being a female in the academy,” the instructors are going “to push her to fight,” and that she will have to “mentally wrap her head around it.” Jessica responds that she has competed in Jiu Jitsu and enjoys sparring. With an air of caution, Michael inquires, “so do you enjoy that?”

Later on in the interview, Michael expresses concern about how Jessica may respond to someone punching her in the face, which he says “will” happen at some point in the job. “Are you going to react or freeze?” he asks. Jessica then describes herself as having an “aggressive” personality, but clarifies that she does not mean violent, she means type A. Michael again asks the question: how will you react when someone hits you while you are on the streets? He holds his hands up and tells her not to answer that question, just to think about it. “When you have to fight for your

life,” he says, it is much different than the controlled environment of Jiu Jitsu. The concern that the hiring officers bring up to Jessica – that she will stand her ground – is very similar to the warnings issued during Chase’s interview. The important difference, however, is that the hiring officers specifically bring up gender in Jessica’s interview, telling her that because she is

“female,” the academy instructors will “push” her to prove that she can fight.

This warning directed towards women applicants – that they will be tested for their willingness and capacity to respond to violence with violence – also comes up at a women’s recruiting event at Rollingwood PD. At the event, I sit with ten other women in a small classroom at the back of the recruiting office, drinking bitter coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. The event is led by five women officers, two of whom are Hispanic, and three of whom are white, and the civilian woman who works as the recruiting coordinator, who is white. The officers outline the application process, discuss the structure of the training academy, and go over the department’s benefits. The event, up through then, is almost identical to their regularly-held recruiting events, which are not specifically targeted towards women.

At the end of the presentation, however, the officers answer questions and offer advice about being a woman officer. One of the attendees asks if, at the academy, instructors pair you up by size when you learn how to fight. A drawn-out, excited, resounding “Noooooooo” rings out among the officers standing at the front of the room. Each officer clamors over the others, trying to chime in immediately, and they interrupt one another to get their point in. Christina, a

37-year-old, Hispanic officer says, “It won’t be like that on the streets!” Diane warns the attendees that “they will test you in the academy because you’re a female,” and adds, “they want to know that you can handle yourself, that you’ll keep fighting. With female cadets, they want to

know that you have a willingness to keep going and keep fighting, so you have to know going into the academy that they will mentally test you.” Again, the officers emphasize to women applicants that by virtue of being female, the instructors – the vast majority of whom are white men – at the academy will “test” them to make sure they will “keep fighting.” In order to be a police officer, applicants must be willing to use violence to respond to violence. Women, of course, can and do engage in violence, but they are not culturally expected or encouraged to do so. Thus, in the application process, the hiring officers take pains to ensure that the women who are hired are able and willing to fulfill this job requirement.

In order to be considered a good fit for policing, applicants should express a willingness to respond to threats of violence with violence. Recruiters press applicants on how they will react

“when they are punched in the face,” and make evaluations of their character and suitability for the job based on whether they would engage the violence or “run away” from it. What constitutes protection, violence, and aggression is, of course, rooted in racialized and gendered understandings of behavior. However, all applicants, regardless of gender and race, must express a commitment to this way of understanding and enacting violence in order to be hired. This requirement for hire means that applicants who avoid physical confrontation are considered ill- suited for the job. What results, then, is that those who do make it into the institution and out on to patrol think about violence as a reasonable, and necessary, response to any threat.

CONCLUSION

During the year I spent conducting field work, the police officers I met often asked me if

I was going to apply to their departments when I was done with my project. Sometimes this would be a playful dig, like when, after spending hundreds of hours at Rollingwood PD’s

academy, a lieutenant joked, “you know, it would be more cost effective for you to just get a job here.” Cadets at Rollingwood PD make more than double what I earn as a graduate research assistant, so, laughing, I responded, “You’re not wrong.” Other times, officers were more serious, earnestly inquiring about my plans after graduate school and wondering why I did not want to be a police officer. I usually explained – and this was an honest, though incomplete, answer – that I did not think I would be a good police officer, and that, actually, I was not sure I would make it through their hiring process. Over the course of the year, I would periodically scroll through a mental rolodex of my friends, family members, colleagues, and acquaintances and I could only identify a handful of people who might be qualified, according to the institution’s parameters, to be police officers. I would like to think that my social network is full of ethical, smart, reasonable, kind, hard-working people, so I felt confounded by this, wondering what exactly departments were looking for in ideal candidates.

As I outline in this chapter, police officers conceptualize good police officers in very specific terms, which I argue has important implications for understanding patterns of racist police violence. According to the officers I met, an applicant who will be a good police officer has the right personality, the right motivations for pursuing police work, the right political leanings, and a willingness to perform the right kind of violence. A good police officer has integrity, and is honest, responsible, disciplined, and reliable; they feel a fateful passion to protect innocent people from evil; they identify with conservative politics, or at least, are comfortable with working in a conservative space; and, they demonstrate a willingness to respond to violence with violence. The procedures and practices that dictate the hiring process evaluate the extent to which each applicant fulfills these requirements.

While these qualities, motivations, political leanings, and affinity towards violence are generally characterized as positive, I argue that this narrow and specific way of conceptualizing suitability for police work contributes to racist violence. Applicants who are honest, disciplined, responsible, and good team members, in the ways that the police define these qualities, are also comfortable with structured, hierarchical institutions, will follow commands from superiors, and are likely to feel intensely protective of their teammates (i.e. fellow officers) and the institution.

Applicants who pursue this career because they feel a calling to protect the innocent from evil also understand human worthiness in binary terms, where certain people are bad and deserving of punishment, and others are innocent and worthy of protection. Applicants who are politically conservative tend to have a negative view of social activism, dismiss marginalized groups’ claims about inequality (especially with regards to police violence), and subscribe to an individualized, as opposed to systemic, understanding of poverty and criminality. Finally, applicants who are willing to respond to violence with violence will define avoiding or backing down from a fight as cowardly. This combination means that the candidates who make it into the institution are already likely to use force when presented with any physical threat (real or imagined), to conceptualize people who commit crimes as bad and deserving of their fate, to individualize racism so that "bad apple" arguments are valid, and to not take seriously activists’ claims about racist police violence.

In this chapter, it is not my goal to villainize individual officers or to argue that every police officer will end up committing racist violence. In fact, I am pushing in the opposite direction in an effort to de-individualize understandings of racism and violence. I instead argue that conceptualizing the good police officer in this way, and structuring the hiring practices

around this construct, creates the perfect storm for institutionalized racist violence to continue.

The way that police departments conceptualize good police officers, and the structures that evaluate applicants along these parameters, helps explain why attempts to more carefully scrutinize applicants or to demographically diversify departments have not led to meaningful institutional changes. Neither of these reform efforts challenge the ways that police officers construct, and test for, suitability for police work. Doubling down on current hiring practices will exacerbate the problem, and the women and men of color who are hired by departments, despite not being white men, are deemed suitable by this white, male institution. The findings presented here are consistent with existing research, which shows that increasing the number of women and racial minority officers has not meaningfully changed the actual job tasks or improved the perception of police in communities of color (Benton 2020; Fielding 1999). In order for there to be changes to the institution, and a decrease patterns of racist police violence, I argue, there needs to be a reconceptualize of what it means to be a good police officer.

Chapter 3: Warriors or Guardians?

On my last day of field work, about two weeks into February, I attend Terryville PD’s academy graduation. I have spent hundreds of hours with the cadets in this class: we ran miles together in sweltering heat, I helped them study for exams, we fought each other during tactical training, we ate lunch together, and we sat next to each other in the classroom for dozens of hours. The graduation takes place at the convention center downtown, and the large auditorium is filled with the cadets’ family and friends. I glance around the room and recognize what are now familiar facial features on the cadets’ parents, grandparents, and children. During the ceremony, the Chief of Police pins a shiny, silver badge onto each new officer’s uniform, and then gives a short speech. He emphasizes that this is a celebration, and a major accomplishment for these new officers. He says that this class is coming into policing at a “different time and context,” then pauses dramatically, scanning the crowd, “a different world.” These officers will need to be

“problem solvers,” and “public servants,” he says. He explains that today, police officers have to be “warriors and guardians,” that they need to be “the kindest” people, but also be ready for “a battlefield.” I had heard this phrase – “warriors and guardians” – many times during my field work, and had come to expect its invocation in conversations, instruction, and speeches about the police in contemporary society.

The way that the Chief of Police characterized the the role of police, as being both warriors and guardians, is rooted in a larger debate about law enforcement, crime, and danger.

Conceptualizing police officers as warriors primarily emerged in the 1980’s during the War on

Drugs, when the prevalence of crack cocaine helped to justify aggressive policing in racial

minority neighborhoods (Forman Jr. 2018). Framing the job tasks as warfare and officers as warriors reflects a traditional, highly masculinized, image of the crime-fighting officer, who runs towards danger and puts bad guys in jail (Herbert 2001; Susan Ehrlich Martin 1982). Scholars have pointed to the problematic nature of police officers thinking of themselves as warriors. Seth

Stoughton, a former officer himself, explains that by approaching the world as warriors, “officers are locked in intermittent and unpredictable combat with unknown but highly lethal enemies”

(2014, 217). As a result, officers “learn to treat every individual they interact with as an armed threat and every situation as a deadly force encounter in the making” (Stoughton 2014, 228).

Warriors dominate, take territory, and kill enemies, none of which, these scholars argue, should be part of a police officer’s role in society.

The “guardian” officer lies on the other side of this discursive binary. The image of the

“guardian” officer has emerged in the last few decades, alongside a push for community policing in the face of repeated instances of racist violence. In contrast to the image of the warrior, the guardian officer “emphasizes a moral obligation to protect innocent lives, grounding police work not in dominating, but in protecting others” (Carlson 2019). Community policing draws on this understanding of the police role, framing police work as problem solving, rather than crime fighting, and encouraging citizen involvement and oversight. This approach to the job challenges the masculine, dominating, crime-fighting image of policing, which has created significant resistance from individual officers and the institution (Bradford and Pynes 1999; Chappell and

Lanza-Kaduce 2010; Herbert 2001). Steve Herbert notes that community policing “implies a definition of the police role that runs counter to the masculinist crime fighter image,” and is “so inconsistent with their masculinist self-image that many officers refuse to redefine their role”

(2001, 56). These different ways of conceptualizing police officers reflect a debate about what the role of officers ought to be – should they be fighting crime and catching bad people, collaboratively engaging and serving communities, or, as the Chief says, both?

Although they are often discussed in opposition to the other, both the warrior and the guardian constructs reflect an investment in masculinized performances that are rooted in systems of patriarchy and white supremacy. The images of the warrior and guardian are flip sides of the same coin: the warrior reflects a dominating masculinity, which creates the need for a guardian to perform protective masculinity. This way of conceptualizing the guardian, or the

“good” man as a foil for the “bad” man, has been used to justify many violent practices. In the context of war-making, state actors use the image of aggressive, violent (i.e., bad) men to necessitate the protection of women and children by good men. Iris Marion Young explains,

“Good men can only appear in their goodness if we assume that lurking outside the warm familial walls are aggressors who wish to attack them …. The protector must therefore take all precautions against these threats” (2003, 4). In the United States, white men – including police officers – who carry guns in their everyday lives explain this practice by pointing to the threat of racialized others, and their moral imperative to protect innocent lives, primarily referencing women and children (Carlson 2015; 2019; Shapira and Simon 2018; Stroud 2015). Men – again, mainly white men – invest and engage in violent fantasies through video games, film, and role plays to protect their version of America from the threat of women, racial minorities, and liberals

(Gibson 1994; Jeffords 1993). The role that women play in this narrative – as vulnerable innocents who need men’s protection – is highlighted in the privileging, and historically, the requirement, of heterosexuality in the U.S. military (Britton and Williams 1995). In each of these

studies, men contextualize their violent practices within a frame of economic decline, liberal threats, crime, and terrorism to construct versions of masculinity that depend on notions of innocence, sacrifice, and protection.

In this chapter, I examine the way that the warrior-guardian construct takes shape at police academies to better understand how the police think about their relationship with the public. I show that during their academy training, cadets are taught that in order to be guardians, they must first be warriors. In other words, cadets learn that they must use violence in their efforts to protect the innocent. This way of approaching their role means that they conceptualize their relationship with the public as a war. I begin by examining how the warrior framework necessarily requires an enemy – the “bad guy” – who officers conceptualize as evil and wanting to harm innocent civilians and police officers. I explain how cadets are conditioned to be intensely afraid of this bad guy. Then, I outline how, through their training, cadets are taught to identify their enemy in gendered and racialized ways. I highlight the ways in which this racialized way of understanding danger is complicated for Black officers. Next, I explain how cadets are encouraged to adopt a warrior mentality as part of their transformation from civilians to police officers. In the last section, I examine the obstacles women officers must navigate within the warrior guardian construct.

Instructors’ framing of themselves as warriors teaches cadets that they have a ruthless, unpredictable, violent enemy, that this enemy is identifiable by behavior, appearance, and location, and that they must adopt a warrior mentality. Cadets leave the academy having been trained to feel intensely fearful of their enemy, to profile danger based on gender and race, and to consider violence the necessary response to this threat. Although this process requires extra work

for cadets who do not embody the conventional image of the white, male warrior-guardian, these lessons are taught to all cadets, regardless of gender and race.

BAD GUYS

Throughout the academy, in almost every class I attend, an instructor makes reference to

“the bad guy.” This bad guy is ruthless, malicious, commits crimes, and has a disregard for humanity. He (the concept is gendered as male) is unpredictable, violent, carries weapons, and harms others for his own gain. Bad guys want to take advantage of, and hurt, innocent people, and, specifically, police officers. During lunch, instructors reminisce about being young and eager to “catch bad guys.” During defensive tactics training, instructors call the role of the person being arrested “the bad guy.” In the hallway on the way to a scenario, I hear an instructor eagerly ask the cadets, “Y’all ready to shoot some bad guys?” During debriefs after cadets run through scenarios, the instructors describe whoever committed “the crime” as “the bad guy.”

This “bad guy,” then, is referenced throughout their training, in many different contexts.

Instructors sometimes use more colorful language when describing this “bad guy,” frequently referring to them as “shitbags,” “shitheads,” or “dirtbags.” This comes up when

Dylan, the range master at Terryville PD, teaches the cadets about the “fundamentals of marksmanship.” Dylan is white, in his late 40’s, and one of the largest human beings I have ever seen. He is about 6’6”, his shoulders are roughly the width of a refrigerator, and, sitting across from me at the kitchen table at the academy, he regularly eats two large, rare T-bone steaks for lunch. While giving a presentation to the cadets about how to shoot their pistols in low light situations, Dylan references the fictional person shooting at an officer as a “shithead,” and then, rolling his eyes, corrects himself, “Whoops, I meant person,” and the class laughs. On pepper

spray day, when each cadet is sprayed in the eye with OC (pepper) spray, an instructor at

Terryville PD jokes that OC spray works “80% of the time on shitbags, and 100% of the time on us [officers].” He repeats this phrase several times throughout the day to warn the cadets that OC spray does not always have an effect on “shit bags,” but it will always affect you. On

Policemag.com, which advertises itself as “the law enforcement magazine,” and a “community for cops,” the crowd-sourced “cop slang dictionary” defines a shitbag as “a person who, if he/she werent [sic] human, would be a bag of shit. Just a low down, felony committing, wife beating, shoplifting, breaking and entering, forgery and uttering sleaze ball.” Although the officers I met did not ever explicitly define “shitbag,” “shithead,” or “dirtbag,” the way in which they used these descriptors is consistent with this definition.

Bad guys are framed as police officers’ enemy, and as their biggest threat. Instructors tell the cadets, starting on the very first day of the academy, that they should be afraid of bad guys, and that if they let their guards down, even for one second, they could be killed. During introductions on the first day of the academy at Hudson PD, the command staff urges cadets to take the training seriously, and warns them that, as officers, there is a strong possibility that they may be killed on duty. In his introduction, Commander Roger Carson, a tall, white officer of 36 years, invokes this sentiment. Roger tells us that this is “Police Memorial Week” nationally, and that today, the department will “honor our own” officers. “Eighty-six officers have been killed on duty in our department’s history,” he says. Portraits of each fallen officer line the main hallway of the academy, and he, along with other instructors, encourage us to read “their stories” so that we do not meet the same fate. Reading their stories will “keep you alive,” he warns. The

“wall of honor” at each academy – and indeed, each academy I visited has one – is displayed

prominently and regarded with deep reverence. At Hudson PD, the chores that cadets complete include dusting the eighty-six framed photos of these officers daily.

On the second day of the academy at Hudson PD, the instructors begin covering the state- mandated curriculum. The first class is called “team building,” and Lisa, the officer who oversees testing at Hudson PD’s academy, teaches the course. Lisa is Black, around 5’6”, in her

40’s, and has a magnetic smile. She reads directly off of the PowerPoint slides, lecturing about the importance of compromise, diversity, and adaptability in teamwork. Towards the beginning of the course, she tells us that a few of the cadets in the last class dropped out of the academy after an incident in which two officers at the department were ambushed in a shooting, resulting in one of their deaths. She recounts that one of the cadets told her that they were “not prepared to die.” Eyes wide with intensity, she warns, “Y’all need to start wrapping your head around it now, or you need to find a different occupation.” To be a police officer, she tells us, means that you might die any day of the week, at any moment.

The academy instructors bring these verbal warnings to life by frequently showing videos of police officers being brutally beaten and killed. In one video from 1998, which I have been shown almost ten times during my field work, the footage from a dash camera shows Deputy

Dinkheller, a young, white man, pulling over Andrew Brannan, a middle-aged white man, for speeding. Brannan gets out of the car, starts dancing, and then repeatedly verbally threatens the deputy. The deputy shouts at Brannan to “GET BACK!” over and over again. Brannan returns to his truck and retrieves a rifle, all while the officer continues to scream “GET BACK!” “GET

OUT OF THE CAR!” “PUT THE GUN DOWN!” Brannan aims his gun at the deputy and shoots several times, while Dinkheller attempts to return fire. As Brannan shoots, the video

captures Dinkheller’s guttural, panicked screams and strained breathing as he dies at the side of his patrol vehicle.

Each time I see this video, sitting in a dark, still room with 25-60 cadets and officers, I dread the end, when I know I will hear Dinkheller’s screams and exacerbated last breaths. When the video ends, a dense, silent fog hangs in the air and a wave of nausea grips my stomach. A cadet turns the classroom’s florescent lights back on, and the instructors ask some version of the question, “What went wrong here?” The take home message is that any stop, any situation, any interaction in this job could be your last. These videos, which instructors show over and over again, force cadets to watch as people wearing uniforms very similar to theirs, are killed. These explicit, violent videos put meat on the bones of the instructors’ verbal warnings, visually showing that any officer, at any time, could meet this same fate.

In addition to the dangers involved in officers’ every day tasks, instructors warn cadets that now, more than ever, police officers are being targeted. During one day of field work, Paul, a 47-year-old, white officer at Rollingwood PD, tells me that being a police officer is more dangerous today than it has ever been. The cadets are spending this entire week running through scenarios, and during breaks, I sit in the large conference room and chat with instructors. During these two weeks, the academy staff manages 60-120 cadets and several dozen officers volunteering as “actors” and evaluators. At any given time, there are up to 14 scenarios running simultaneously all over the campus.

In response to Paul’s comment, I ask him, “Do you think the job is more dangerous now than it used to be?” “Yes,” he says, “I think so.” “Compared to when?” I press. “What do you mean?” he asks. “Well,” I explain, “you’re saying policing is more dangerous now than it used to be.

When was it less dangerous?” He struggles through his response, and attempting to clarify my reasoning, I say “It seems like there was just as much, if not more, political unrest in the 1960’s, which included some animosity towards law enforcement, right?” “True, there definitely was,” he agrees, “but that was a movement,” he explains. He elaborates, “It wasn’t a feeling of hate directed specifically towards cops. If cops got in the way of a protest, then yes, there was some conflict, but cops weren’t just getting ambushed because people hated them and wanted to kill them, like they are now.” The next day, while I stand in the gym watching a pair of cadets run through a scenario, Paul enters the room, stands next to me, and leans his shoulder down to my height – he is a full foot taller than me – to show me his phone, without saying a word. He is showing me an article from PoliceOne.com, a website that officers visit for law-enforcement- related news and information, titled “Gunman Ambushes 2 NJ Law Enforcement Officers Sitting in Vehicle.” I read the title and nod, acknowledging his point. “This is the kind of stuff I’m talking about,” he says, referencing our prior conversation, “Now we have to worry about this kind of stuff.”

This feeling that the nature of the relationship between the public and police has changed, and that as a result, officers are at an increased risk of being ambushed, also came up repeatedly in classroom instruction, including during the basic firearms class at Terryville PD. Dylan begins the instruction by emphasizing the importance of practicing shooting in order to become proficient. He then flips to an image, included as Figure 2 below, that I have seen several times at in several different academy classes:

Figure 2: Photo of Harris County Sherriff Deputy Ambush, source: Godofredo A. Vasquez, Houston Chronicle.

The image shows a white SUV police vehicle, with the front passenger door ajar, covered in blood. Red crime scene tape cuts across the middle of the photo, and two men, one of whom is clearly a law enforcement officer, examine the ground around the car. The green grass, blooming trees, and sunshine beaming through the photo contrast sharply with the blood smeared across the length of the car and dripping out of the front seat. The photo shows the remnants of this person’s last moments before a panicked, violent death.

Dylan asks the class what they see in this photo, and encourages them to use the “cop eyes” that they have been developing over the last five months. This was a chief deputy at Harris

County Sheriff’s Office with decades of experience in law enforcement, Dylan says, noting that this kind of thing could happen to any one of us at any time. As a “patrolman,” he notes, you will have between 100-150 contacts with people in one shift. Contacts where someone wants to 95

actually kill you are rare, he says, but in this deputy’s case, based on one of those contacts, someone felt motivated enough to ambush and kill him. This “happens a lot,” he says, contradicting his earlier point, and emphasizing the warning implicit in this photo. The lesson, once again, is that there are bad guys out there who will hate you because you are a police officer, and they will hate you so much that they will try to kill you.

It is important to point out that police officers do indeed face dangers as part of their job, and I am not arguing that the instances captured in dash cam footage or photos that I describe are fake or imagined. Police officers are physically assaulted and killed while on duty, and the photos and videos that instructors show in class are from real incidents (see Figure 3 for information about the number of officers killed annually in the United States). I am not claiming that being a police officer does not come with certain risks, and it is not my goal to deny, dismiss, or diminish the fact that every year, police officers are assaulted, hit by cars, and shot while on duty.

The position I do take, however, is that the intense emphasis on this outcome, the warnings around it, and the institutional response to this reality reveals something important about how the police operate. Police departments have chosen to respond to this danger by waging war. Officers’ belief that this kind of violence has gotten worse over time (a trend that is not supported by the data collected on felonious killings of police), and the expressed feelings of eminent danger help to explain the appeal of the “warrior” occupational narrative. Officers think of themselves as crime fighters, who run towards danger for the greater good. In order to think of themselves as real officers, and as warriors, there needs to be an enemy. This narrative – that

there are bad guys who are out there hunting down officers – works to legitimize the warrior approach to policing, and the violence that is enacted in the name of public safety.

0 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020

# of PO's feloniously killed # of PO's killed in ambush

Figure 3: Number of police officers feloniously killed and ambushed in the United States, by year (Source data: FBI’s Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted).

At the academy, cadets are taught that not only do bad guys take advantage of, harm, and kill good people, but they also have a particular interest in hurting and killing police officers.

Instructors repeatedly tell stories of police officers who were killed on duty, they warn cadets about the possibility of their untimely and violent deaths, and they show graphic videos of police officers being attacked. In particular, instructors emphasize that policing is more dangerous now than ever before, and that increasingly, officers are being killed in targeted ambushes. Through these messages, cadets are taught to be intensely afraid of these bad guys.

PROFILING BAD GUYS

Although officers warn that any interaction could be dangerous and that an ambush could happen at any moment, they are not equally fearful of everyone. Instructors teach cadets who to fear and how to identify dangerous people and situations. Instructors teach cadets that they must learn how to identify their enemy by profiling based on behavior and appearance. This lesson teaches cadets what bad guys look like, what kind of clothing they wear, what kinds of cars they drive, and how they move their bodies when they are going to initiate an attack. All of these indicators are gendered and racialized in important ways.

Cadets are taught to identify body movements and behavior that are considered suspicious and/or dangerous. This warning takes shape most prominently in discussions about body language. Instructors often repeat a cautionary mantra that emphasizes the importance of reading someone’s body language: “when someone’s words and body conflict, believe the body.” Officers are most concerned with hand placement – especially if hands are in or around pockets – and what are called “pre-attack indicators,” which signal that someone is going to initiate a physical attack.

In the de-escalation class at Terryville PD, Kevin, the instructor, tells us that someone’s use of space and hand placement indicates if they are hiding something, especially weapons or drugs. Kevin is 48 years old, white, bald, and athletically built. He is friendly and approachable, and frequently tells us that being a “public servant” is his calling. During the lecture, Kevin hovers over a cadet’s left shoulder and says, “See, I’m in his personal space, so already he is pulling away from me, trying to give himself more space since he’s uncomfortable.” Kevin tells us that if someone is giving themselves more space, there might be a reason: they might have a

“gun or dope or something.” Someone’s body placement and use of space tells us a lot, he says.

Kevin explains that if a person walks away from him as soon as he arrives on a scene, this means they do not want to be around him, which indicates that they are probably hiding something. To illustrate, he asks two cadets to come to the front of the class and approach him from either side.

Kevin turns his body so he is positioned perpendicular to the two cadets, and places his hand over his pocket. “This could tell us something,” he says, referencing his hand placement. He likens this to a child trying to hide a piece of candy. This emphasis on hand placement is ubiquitous and repeatedly invoked in warnings about officer safety. In the same classroom that

Kevin teaches in, for example, a poster on the wall shows a photo of a white man with his hand behind his back, holding a pistol. Large text overlays the photo, reading “WATCH THE

HANDS: The hand you can’t see is the hand that could be holding a weapon that will kill you.”

Instructors also warn cadets to watch for indicators that someone is going to attack them.

Instructors explain that if someone swings their arms back and forth in front of their chest, tosses their head from side to side, jumps up and down, or, especially, announces “I’m not going to jail,” they are probably going to throw a punch or try to run away. Instructors emphasize the ability to discern intention – whether its lying, hiding something, or initiating violence – from the body, and encourage cadets to always, without question, trust their gut on this. The instructors assign a Sherlock Holmes-esque level of intuition to officers, framing themselves as being able to intuitively detect potential for criminality or violence in ways that civilians cannot. In his instruction, Kevin tells the class they should “always listen to your hunches.” If someone is

“exhibiting awkward behavior, they have furtive movements, or they are sweating,” he explains,

“we cannot dismiss these red flags in our job.” Kevin warns, “if your subconscious is telling you

that someone needs to go into cuffs, you need to put them in cuffs.” “Maybe the guy in front of you has a bad leg,” Kevin says, “and that’s why he’s walking strangely. Or, maybe he has a gun and he’s going to shoot a cop so that he doesn’t have to go back to jail. Do not ever question your instinct, because it’s what will keep you alive.” Cadets are taught that their lives depend on their ability to discern intention from body language, and to always err on the side of caution.

Who is considered to be suspicious or dangerous depends on their race and gender.

Officially, the cadets are told that in no situation, should they racially profile. During a lecture on the criminal code of procedures, for example, Sabrina, a white instructor in her 30’s, somewhat derisively asks the class, “Can we racially profile?” A resounding and obvious “no” fills the room. “No,” Sabrina confirms, “don’t do it.” The instructors do, however, encourage cadets to profile “criminality.” Without explicitly pointing to skin color, the instructors talk about clothing, body language, gang affiliation, and criminality to frame people of color – and in particular, men of color – as being dangerous and violent. This is not about race, they say, this is about criminality and the propensity for targeted violence. We do not question, detain, pull over, or arrest someone based on their race, instructors tell cadets. We do these things, instructors explain, based on what they are wearing, their gait, what kind of car they are driving, whether or not we think they belong in this neighborhood at this time of day or night, if they walk away when we arrive, if they avert our glance, and if they touch their pockets, among other things.

The topic of profiling comes up at Terryville PD during a state-mandated course titled

“multi-culturalism,” which is taught by Lieutenant Rick Lawrey. As part of the course content,

Rick provides a definition of “discrimination,” which he explains is “acting on your prejudices.”

He says he hopes that individuals who discriminate are eliminated in the hiring process at the

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department, and that “people like this don’t need to be here.” When officers are accused of discrimination, he explains, the department investigates those claims. Following a frustrated sigh, he tells the class that although he thinks discrimination is bad, he “struggles with” the discussion around profiling, warning that, as a cop, “if you don’t know how to profile, you need to learn.” Rick immediately adds, “we do not racially profile,” but we do profile based on “body language, appearance, and mannerisms.” “If you can’t profile someone who wants to hurt or kill you,” he says, “that’s a problem.” Racial profiling, he explains, is a form of discrimination and

“we don’t do that.” We do not profile based on “skin color, gender, or language,” he says, “but if they look like a burglar, then that’s good profiling.”

The next day, Rick talks about immigration policy, telling the class that “you can tell by appearance if someone is an illegal alien.” “Not from their skin color,” he adds, “but from what they’re wearing or how they’re behaving.” He clarifies: if you initiate contact with someone because you think they’re an “illegal alien,” then that is racial profiling, but if you stop them because you suspect criminal behavior, then that is good police work.

This talk of criminal profiling instead of racial profiling also came up at Rollingwood PD when the cadets learn how to conduct frisks and searches. Tyler, a white defensive tactics instructor in his 30’s, explains that the only reason you frisk someone is because you believe that they have a dangerous weapon. Tyler is stoic and, with the exception of a few moments over my year of field work, is totally unapproachable – he stands with his feet far outside hip width, his hips swayed forward slightly, arms crossed in front of him, with a toothpick sticking out the side of his mouth. Today, he talks about the purpose of a frisk, and outlines the situations in which conducting a frisk is appropriate and necessary. He explains that you do not need to frisk every

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person you meet while on duty. He gives an example: if you stop a woman for jaywalking while she is trying to cross the street in a hurry to get her two kids to school, he says, you probably do not need to frisk her. Just give her the citation and move along. If, however, you are in an area of town like the southeast part of the city (where the majority of the city’s black and Hispanic population lives), where you know there is a high crime rate and gang presence, and you stop a man for jaywalking, and he is wearing red sweats and a red hat, then yes, you should frisk him, he instructs. You should “key in on what you know,” in making that decision, he explains.

Tyler thus identifies what kinds of people pose a threat to officers. A mother taking her kids to school is not a threat. Importantly, he does not mention in what part of town this woman lives or what she is wearing. In the second example, a man, who lives in the Black and Hispanic part of the city and is wearing red sweats and a red hat, is a threat. Implied in this definition of criminality is that the threatening person is himself Black or Hispanic.

This way of conceptualizing criminality and violence stands in stark contrast to the reality of who is most likely to kill police officers. Although officers use racially coded language to teach cadets to be wary or suspicious of black and brown men, officers are most likely to be killed by a young white man. This is apparent in the videos that instructors show at the academy of officers being assaulted or killed, where the assailant is most often a 30-40-year-old white man. This pattern is confirmed by national trends. In 2018, for example, 55 officers were feloniously killed. Of those 55 incidents, 31 of the alleged offenders were white, 23 were Black, and one was Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander. In the last ten years, there was only one year (2010) in which the majority of the alleged assailants were not white. Between 2009-2018,

57% of the assailants were white, and 97% of them were men (“Officers Feloniously Killed”

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2018). During my observations, cadets were not given this information. This inconsistency reveals the way in which the war/warrior occupational narrative of policing is rooted in white supremacy. The enemy is not necessarily those that pose the highest actual threat to police officers, but rather those who are understood – within a white institutional frame – to be the biggest threat.

Black Officers and the Racialized Bad Guy

This gendered and racialized way of conceptualizing the enemy positions Black officers, particularly Black men, in a bind. The Black officers I met in the field expressed an investment in this white, male institution, often justifying policing practices in communities of color or defending high-profile police shootings of Black men. At the same time, though, they also described instances throughout their lives where they were subject to racist policing. Black officers, then, must contend with the reality that their own institution conceptualizes people who look like them as the enemy.

The Black officers I met often pointed to crime, class, or suspicious activity, rather than race, in their framing of police surveillance and violence in communities of color. For example,

Robert, a Black officer in his 40’s at Clarkston PD, talked about high crime rates in low-income neighborhoods – without ever explicitly naming race – in his discussion of policing practices:

Most people in certain areas of certain neighborhoods, they don’t like policing

because, in most cases, police officers are in the poor-income neighborhoods. In

most low-income areas, you do have more crime. Wherever you have more crime,

you’re gonna have a certain type of police order. Do you let people run ragged, or

do you enforce the law more so than other places? In places that’s really enforced

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laws, you’re gonna have a movement of retaliation towards people that don’t

wanna respect police. That retaliation gets publicized more than, say, probably

people in your class [referencing the researcher’s PhD program] that when they

saw a neighborhood police officer, they might say, “Thank you for what you do.”

There’s people that’s not in school, that’re hangin’ out under the tree and when

they see the police, they probably won’t say a word, and they’ll go the other way.

Robert references income and education level in his explanation of why the police enforce the law differently depending on context. Robert uses coded language to talk about communities of color, pointing to low-income neighborhoods with high crime rates, and contrasting the researcher – a white woman in a PhD program – to someone in these described neighborhoods who is not in school and “hangin’ out under the tree.” Robert explains that the police need to enforce order in these high-crime, low-income neighborhoods, justifying practices of over- policing in communities of color by pointing to crime and community resistance to policing.

Tricia, a Black officer in her 20’s at Rollingwood PD, also pointed to criminality and community resistance, instead of race, to explain police surveillance of Black communities.

Referencing a recent experience while on patrol, Tricia explains:

I told this 13-year-old, “Don’t play a victim of society. Don’t do this” …. He was

like, “Yeah, but I don’t see a lot of black cops, so when I’m hanging out with my

friends, and there’s these white officers just driving around looking at us cuz

we’re black kids in this neighborhood.” I’m like, “I understand. I get where

you’re coming from, but I also didn’t play victim. I also went over there and

greeted those officers and said, ‘Hey, I live over here. What’s up?’ I spoke to

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them.” I said, “Don’t sit here and look at the news and think that every officer is

that …. They know that something’s going on, and that’s why they’re canvassing

this area. It’s not because of you. Sometimes they may be looking at you, but

that’s not always the case.”

Tricia recounts telling a 13-year-old Black boy that he should not be wary of police officers, and instead of “playing the victim,” he should introduce himself. She tells him not assume that officers are surveilling him and his friends because they are Black. She explains that the officers are probably canvassing the area – meaning, looking for someone who committed a crime – pointing to crime, rather than race, as the rationale for policing practices in Black communities.

The investment in this framing also came up in my conversations with Black officers about the Black Lives Matter movement. Black officers, in very similar ways to their white peers, emphasize the law in their discussions of recent high-profile police shootings of Black men. Almost always taking on the perspective of the officer in these scenarios, not the men killed, the officers I met explain that given the context, and the law and policies dictating officers’ authorities, these shootings are usually reasonable. According to these accounts, it was not necessarily about race, it was about the perceived threat to a police officer.

Bill references Alton Sterling, a Black man shot by police in Baton Rouge, LA, in his discussion of how he evaluates whether or not a shooting is justified:

If I see a bad shooting, and my initial reaction is “That looks bad,” I have to

remind myself “You're doing the same thing that society's doing.” So then I have

to sit back and wait until the facts come out, delve into the facts, and then put

myself in that officer's shoes, and determine, was that reasonable or not? …. I

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think the shooting of the officers in Dallas, so that's fueled by Black Lives Matter

in retaliation for an incident that happened in Baton Rouge [Alton Sterling], right?

So Baton Rouge happens, and other incidents, and then the march in Dallas,

[when] one person …. takes it upon himself to kill five officers. How many of

those people that were marching that day [for BLM] know that those officers

were cleared in Baton Rouge? And after looking at the facts, if I were in those

shoes of those officers, I would have shot that guy, too.

Bill differentiates himself, as an officer, from the rest of society in his ability to determine whether or not a shooting is “reasonable.” In the case of Alton Sterling’s death, he suggests that had he been in that officer’s shoes, he would have done the same thing.

Phillip similarly brings up the Black Lives Matter movement, and points to officers’ authority to use force, as stated by law:

Anything can happen out there [on patrol] …. If it comes to a thing where you

exhibit a firearm or a deadly weapon, we are authorized to use deadly force ….

Everybody sits back and they say, "Well, he should've did this. He should've done

that." That's all armchair quarterbacking. Be it the DA, be it the grand jury, be it

the defense attorney, be it the judge …. I talked [about this] at my church. We

were on a symposium one time and I happened to be one of the speakers on there

because this was when the big thing about “Don’t shoot,” Black Lives Matter, and

all that type of thing …. The way that I dealt with them is with the law. That's our

governing body is the law …. ‘Cause everybody ain't gonna like the way you

handle a certain situation …. We had the Black Lives Matter, then you had Police

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Lives Matter, All Lives Matter. I'm a Black-American and I happen to be a police

officer. All lives matter, Black, white, whatever, everybody's lives matter. I think

that we should get away from these distinctions or whatever …. Now we’ve had

situations where black males have been killed. There are maybe one or two, I may

have said, "Yeah, that was an unjustified shooting."

Phillip emphasizes the dangers of policing and criticizes the public and the rest of the criminal justice system in their judgments of officer’s actions, essentially saying, if you were not there, you cannot understand what happened. He recounts being on a panel at church about police violence, and tells me that he relied heavily on the law, our “governing body,” to explain police officers’ decisions to shoot. He talks about the law as an indisputable source of justification, explaining that police officers are allowed to act in this way. He then invokes a color-blind discourse, expressing a wish to end “distinctions” around race. At the same time, though, he tells me that at least “one or two” police shootings of Black men have, in fact, been unjustified.

In my interview with Tricia, she does not point to law specifically, but she does similarly explain that it is important to look at “both sides” of the situation, and expresses frustration about

Black people “playing the victim” when dealing with the police:

People make it like they want to disobey everything they [officers are] saying.

Then, all of a sudden, they want to go to the news and be like, “He did this to me.

He did that.” Oh, but you didn’t play the part where he [the officer] told you

multiple times to not do this, or don’t move or make sudden movements …. I tell

Black people all the time, I tell my friends, “Do not play the victim. Do not.” I tell

my brother and my younger siblings, because they always want to send me videos

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of something happening and I’m like, “Dude, you knew better. You’re grown.

You guys want to play victim.” They’re like, “Oh, they [the police] were wrong

for doing this.” I was like, “No, the person was wrong, but you have to look at it

both ways.” I try to tell them. I’m like, “Sometimes we’re not right when we’re in

blue, and they’re not right when they’re playing the victim.”

Tricia tells me that when her siblings or friends, who are Black, send her videos of interactions between Black people and the police, she encourages them to look at it from “both” sides, and says that sometimes, the civilian was “wrong” in the way they dealt with the police. She uses the phrase “playing the victim” several times throughout our conversation, explaining that Black people ought to behave better and take responsibility for their role in these violent situations.

At the same time that these officers rationalize patterns of racist policing practices by pointing to the law, to the dangers they face on the job, and to Black civilian’s behavior, they also tell me about their own experiences being profiled, pulled over, and handled forcefully by the police because they are Black.

When I ask Tricia if she felt comfortable around officers while growing up, she tells me she “didn’t have an issues,” and suggests that, “When you treat officers with respect, they give the same respect back.” However, later in the interview, she recounts being pulled over repeatedly by a white officer while she was in high school:

I had an officer who would stop me every day from school and give me a ticket,

and there was no reason whatsoever. I found out he was one of my classmates’

dads. His son called me the N-word, and I cursed him out. Then I guess he told

his dad who I was, and I got tickets every day. I was like, “You’re abusing your

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power cuz I know your son told you.” It was after cheerleading practice. I’m like,

“There’s no reason why you should be stopping me every day. Out of all these

people who leave, all these other cars, and you stop me every day.”

Tricia explains that after a boy at school lodged a racial slur at her, his father – a police officer – started to pull her over after school every day. She explains that this clearly had to do with the fact that she is a Black woman who resisted racial degradation by a white boy, saying there is

“no reason why” he should have been stopping her, and only her, every day after school. Tricia contextualizes this one experience within law enforcement generally, explaining that she has not had any other issues, and because she has family members who are officers, she knows that this is not how officers are supposed to act.

Bill, the Black sergeant who talked about the shooting of Alton Sterling in our interview, recounted being pulled over by a white officer while he was in his Army uniform:

I was in the Army then, and a buddy was driving me to Newark airport, and I was

in my class A uniform …. A state trooper pulled us over, and the reason he pulled

us over was for making furtive movements on the turnpike. Not until I got into

law enforcement, did I know there's no such thing, that wasn't PC [probable

cause] or reasonable suspicion …. But, backing up, there was a lot of snow on the

ground, mixed with salt and all that crap. His car was covered in grime, and the

trooper wanted to search the car, and he put us both on the hood of the car, even

though I was in my dress greens [Army uniform]. And he left us on the hood of

the car, with our arms spread, while he searched the car. He didn't find anything,

let us go, and then I got to the Newark airport, and it looked like I had been

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rolling around in the mud in my dress uniform, and I was really pissed. I'll never

forget that day. I don't hold it against the state police, per se. It's that trooper ….

Knowing what I know now, I know why he stopped us: just because it was two

black guys …. He automatically assumed that we were transporting drugs, so he

searched my car, and then left me with a filthy uniform. I was embarrassed.

Bill talks about being racially profiled by this officer, who, he says, assumed they were transporting drugs. He recounts feeling angry and embarrassed, but says that he blames the individual officer, not the state police generally. Later in the interview, he tells me that it’s

“tough being a Black cop,” and that he and other Black sergeants talk about “this stuff” and get into heated conversations. He explains, “some of them think the institution is racist, but I disagree.”

Black officers, in similar ways as their white counterparts, point to criminality, income, education level, or levels of compliance in their explanations of why Black communities are over-policed and Black people are killed by the police. However, at the same time, these officers recount their own experiences of being racially profiled by the police. In their descriptions of these experiences of racism, these officers tend to individualize the behavior, pointing to racist officers or racist actions, rather than placing blame on a racist institution or system. As Bill points out, this is not necessarily true for all Black officers – as he says, some of his Black peers think that the institution is racist. This perspective, however, was not represented in my interviews and field work.

At the academy, cadets are taught how to identify “bad guys.” Instructors teach cadets to read body position and movements to discern intention, particularly potential for violence, and to

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always follow their gut . Certain movements, positions, and physical reactions, cadets are taught, should raise suspicion, caution, and often, a violent response. Cadets are taught to always, unquestionably follow their gut if they think someone is hiding something, avoiding them, or intending to harm them. To not do so, they are told, could cost them their or their partner’s lives.

Although instructors insist that the cadets should never racially profile, they encourage them to profile based on behavior, appearance, and geographic location. The cadets are taught to attach meaning and intention around criminality and danger to the way someone walks, what they are wearing, what kind of car they are driving, and what neighborhood they are in. This way of conceptualizing danger presents complications for Black officers, who both subscribe to this way of thinking while being subject to it themselves.

ADOPTING A WARRIOR MENTALITY

During their training, cadets are taught that in order to win the war against bad guys, they must adopt a warrior mentality. A warrior is wary of every person they meet, always prepared for violence, willing to stand their ground and fight back, and will do whatever it takes to win. Even in situations in which they use verbal de-escalation techniques, cadets are encouraged to never drop their guard, always anticipate violence, and constantly remain cautious. Adopting this warrior mentality, cadets are taught, is an essential part of their transition to seeing and moving through the world as police officers. Cadets are taught that to be a guardian, or to protect other people, they must first be warriors. Although these concepts are discursively treated as binary concepts, in practice, the warrior concept encapsulates the guardian concept, where violence becomes the only and best way to protect others from evil.

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This way of constructing these concepts within and in contrast to the other comes up in my interview with Paul. I ask Paul what he thinks the role of the police is in the United States.

He immediately brings up the warrior-guardian construct in his response:

I know the public right now is thinking only two things, “guardian” or “warrior”

…. I think right now …. they’re [the city] trying to do more restriction for the

police. And somebody has come up with this “warrior-guardian.” If you wanna

use those terms, you have to have both, and each. I think what the city wants right

now is just the guardian. And what the police want, which is fine, is the guardian,

but you have to have the warrior. The guardian comes across in how do you

interact with people? How do you talk to people? The willingness to help people,

and go out of your way to help. Whereas the warrior is that I have skillsets that I

need for survival that without, then I jeopardize myself. And if I do that, why am I

doing this job? If I have no warrior skillsets, then the city is jeopardizing the

entire police force. If that happens, then the criminal element will take over, and

you’ll have cities like Chicago or Philadelphia or what-not …. It’s a dangerous

job. You gotta have people that can handle the danger. You have to have people

with skillsets that can fight and shoot and control a scene. But, at the same time,

you have to have the guy, or person, that can interact with people and do it in a

way that is pure service. But you cannot take the warrior out.

Paul defines what it means to be a guardian and a warrior, explaining that there are two distinct skill sets required to be an officer. He acknowledges that these are discursive concepts

(“Somebody has come up with this ‘warrior-guardian’”), and defines the guardian approach as

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primarily describing an officer’s desire to help people. He concludes by saying that “you cannot take the warrior out” of policing, highlighting the way in which violence is integral to the job.

At the academy, cadets are repeatedly told, in many different contexts, that they need to adopt a warrior mentality. At Terryville PD, for example, this comes up during the Force Options class, where the cadets learn when and why they should use force. Kevin teaches this class, and the first PowerPoint slide he shows features a quotation credited to Heraclitus, a 6th century BCE

Greek philosopher. The quotation reads: “Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn't even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.” “What does this mean to you?” Kevin asks the class. One cadet talks about the importance of bravery, and another says that not everyone is cut out for this job. Working as a police officer, according to

Kevin, means that you are a warrior: you are one of the few who goes into battle and uses violence to win the war. Kevin explains his own interpretation of the quotation, emphasizing that this job is a “calling” and, likening policing to war, explains that “not everyone can do this job.

Not everyone is a warrior.”

Kevin goes on to tell the class that being a warrior is a mentality more than anything else, and highlights that a warrior is something that you become. He asks the class, “When do you start becoming a warrior?” One cadet says “through training,” another explains “when you develop the mentality,” and a third responds, “once you have something worth protecting.”

Kevin uses both hands to point to his head and tells us, “It’s between your two ears. It’s a mindset. It is who you are. This is who you are.” “When you’re out on the streets,” he says, referencing patrol work, “and it’ll probably happen in your first week, you’ll have to use force.

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And you will have already made decisions about who you are before you get to that call. You’ll have already decided that you’re going home tonight. He might be a bad guy who is 6’4”, but you’ve decided that you are a warrior and a guardian and that you are going to win this fight no matter what it takes, and it may take deadly force.” He tells the class that they need to make the

“mental shift” and decide that they are “this person,” meaning someone willing to do whatever it takes to survive. He invokes both concepts – the warrior and the guardian – but defines them both as potentially requiring severe violence, including killing someone. Kevin explains to the class that being a warrior means that you approach every situation with a willingness to use violence and to win the fight at any cost.

Following this message, Kevin shows the class two videos. The first is a montage of police officers being killed, while a man’s voice delivers a speech in the background about brotherhood and healing as a team. Some of the officers featured in the video are shot, while others are beaten or hit by cars. The title of the video on the PowerPoint slide is “Law

Enforcement Motivation.” At the end of the video, the man narrating says, “Either we heal together or we die as individuals.” The second video is titled “Your Life or Theirs,” which Kevin says shows us a “good example of a fight.” Kevin points to the tactics the police officer uses, explaining that he “had good ground control,” “did a reverse take down, mounts, strikes, and uses his TASER, all like how you’ve been taught.” These videos hammer the point: there is a common enemy who wants to kill police officers, and that in order to survive, the cadets must become warriors.

This way of conceptualizing the warrior role as a mentality comes up at Terryville PD’s eight-hour de-escalation class. Although at the time of my field work, the state did not require

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de-escalation training, all of the departments I studied opted to include a four- to eight-hour course about de-escalation techniques in their academies. In public discourse, de-escalation training is conceptualized as instruction that provides officers with techniques to verbally diffuse a situation so that physical force does not become necessary. In practice, however, I found that these departments’ de-escalation training consisted of wandering, dis-jointed lectures, covering a range of topics that mostly centered on ways to anticipate a physical attack and reassurances that this training did not “water down” officer safety.

At Terryville PD, Kevin teaches this portion of instruction. He begins by introducing the topic of de-escalation, explaining that although de-escalation is “nothing new,” “public perception is everything, and they [the public] perceive use of force to be out of control.” About an hour into his instruction, Kevin flips to a slide showing statistics of how many police officers die in the line of duty. Repeating an oft-used mantra in policing, he reminds the class that, as officers, their number one goal “is going home each night.” Kevin then flips to the following picture, Figure 4, of General James Mattis:

Figure 4: General James Mattis 115

The following text is overlaid on the photo: “Be polite. Be professional. But have a plan to kill everybody you meet.” Kevin acknowledges the intensity of the quotation by asking the class,

“What do you think a civilian would think of this if they just walked into the room right now and saw this without any context?” The cadets all laugh. “Right, exactly,” Kevin responds, “How would they react?” One cadet calls out, “Appalled.” Another notes, “They wouldn’t get it.”

Kevin asks the class, “What does this quotation mean?” One cadet raises her hand and suggests that it means to expect the best from people, but to know that “it could turn bad.” Yes, Kevin confirms, “Every call should start out polite and professional, but it could end up like that,” he says, pointing to the last line of the quotation, suggesting that even if an interaction initially seems innocuous, you may end up killing someone. Kevin again warns, “Even though we’re talking about de-escalation today, I’m not watering down officer safety. Do not ever drop your guard.” Kevin suggests that police officers should be “polite” and “professional,” but reminds the cadets that the potential for violence is always present, and to be prepared for it.

Warriors, according to academy training, do not negotiate with the enemy. This way of thinking about winning comes up repeatedly in the de-escalation instruction cadets receive.

During the de-escalation class at Rollingwood PD, Paul emphasizes that the communication techniques they are teaching “will not always work.” He introduces the SAFER acronym to the class, which he explains represents “five times when words fail.” Each of the letters stands for one situation in which you should not try to communicate verbally, and should instead “act.”

Paul clarifies, “I am not telling you that you can’t go hands on,” but “if the opportunity allows and officer safety allows for it, try to talk to people.” In his instruction, Paul reminds the cadets that although they can try to use verbal strategies, they still need to be prepared for violence.

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After this discussion, Paul shows several videos to illustrate his point that trying to de- escalate in dangerous situations can get you killed. He shows the video of Deputy Dinkheller, which I described earlier in this chapter, prefacing it by saying, “I hate going to funerals. Don’t make me go to your funeral because you were using your words when you shouldn’t be.” When the video ends, John solemnly ask the class “How many times were there huge safety violations in this video? Why didn’t the deputy shoot him when he had the opportunity? He [Deputy

Dinkheller] didn’t have to die, if he had followed this training, and used force when he needed to.” In this same vein, he plays another video, which shows an officer pulling someone over on a traffic stop. The video shows the officer asking the driver how much he had to drink, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, the driver draws a gun and shoots at the officer. John uses these videos to deliver a visceral lesson to cadets: verbal techniques should be used with caution, because if used inappropriately, they could cost you your life. Warriors do not negotiate with their enemy, and neither, according to this training, should officers use verbal strategies in the place of physical control and violence.

This approach to policing, which emphasizes the presence of a war and a commitment to violence, is ubiquitous in the academy setting. At Terryville PD, one cadet’s passcode to get into his phone is “KILL.” When a classmate tells me about this, she adds, “Not his birthday, or l-o-v- e, or his mom’s birth year, just k-i-l-l.” At Rollingwood PD, a large sign covering one of the walls in the DT gym reads: “THE MORE YOU SWEAT IN HERE, THE LESS YOU BLEED

OUT THERE.” During morning formation at Rollingwood PD, the class president reads off the names of any officers who were killed on duty the day before. Flags for every branch of the military hang in the gyms at most of the academies I visited, and officers who volunteer as actors

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during scenario-based training wear T-shirts and hats that feature military branches and gun brands. The sense that officers are warriors, who use violence to fight evil, fills these buildings and the people in them.

Women Warriors

Both the image of the warrior and the guardian are rooted in masculinist ideas about using violence to protect the innocent, who, in the context of war, are most often conceptualized as women and children. Women officers are expected to act as warriors on patrol – and indeed, the woman cadets and officers I met enthusiastically embrace this worldview – but this masculine institution positions women impossibly within the warrior-guardian framework.

During my field work and interviews, women cadets and officers explained that they need to work harder than men to prove themselves as warriors. This is made difficult by the fact that their male classmates “take it easy” on them during tactics training, not exerting their full strength during fights, and men officers’ desire to protect women officers while on patrol.

However, when women overcame this barrier, and performed violence better than men, they were subject to informal discipline. Women cadets and officers, then, are stuck in a corn maze, where they must navigate dizzying expectations to be both protected and protectors.

The women cadets and officers I met explained that they often felt the need, as women, to prove themselves in both physical fitness and defensive tactics training. Consistent with the literature on tokens in the workplace (Kanter 1993), these officers did not want to be considered liabilities, especially as women. Performing badly as a woman in this space reflects poorly on all women officers. Tricia, a Black cadet in her 20’s, tells me that during the physical training, she felt frustrated because “as a female, I felt like you had to prove yourself even more.” This sense

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that women need to work harder than men came up on the second day of Terryville PD’s academy, when the two women instructors there – Faith and Sabrina – pulled all of the women cadets into a separate room to have “a talk.” Faith is Hispanic, in her 30’s and oversees the physical fitness training at Terryville PD. When she talks, the left side of her mouth rises more than her right, creating an uneven peak. During this talk, Faith covers a range of topics: she shows us how to arrange our hair in a proper bun, warns us not to engage in sexual or romantic relationships with fellow cadets or other officers, and commiserates about the difficulties of being a woman officer. Echoing Tricia’s statement, Faith repeatedly insists that “as a woman, you have to work twice as hard to be taken seriously.”

It becomes difficult, though, for women to prove themselves as physically strong and capable of fighting within the warrior-guardian construct, which dictates that men ought to protect women. This translates into men “taking it easy” on women during defensive tactics training and expressing a feeling of obligation to protect their women colleagues while on patrol.

Susan Martin (1994) noted that this protective dynamic is both gendered and racialized, where white women, especially those who are considered attractive, are more likely to be protected by men from the dangers of patrol work. Martin (1994) explains that white men officers expected that both Black and white women would be liabilities on patrol, but they drew on racialized stereotypes to conceptualize white women as “pets” or “mothers,” while considering Black women to be “lazy.” There were only a handful of Black women cadets at the academies I studied, but I did find that when men cadets and officers expressed feelings or displayed actions of protectiveness, it was usually directed towards smaller-statured white women.

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This first scenario – where men cadets “take it easy” on their women classmates – plays out at Terryville PD during an afternoon of tactics training. The cadets are assigned a cover partner each month, who they are required to be with at all times, mimicking being within eyesight of their partner at all times while on patrol. There is an odd number of cadets in the class, so when I am there for field work, the instructors pair me up with whoever does not have a cover partner that month. Today, I am paired up with Marcus, a 6’3”, 200-pound veteran in his

20’s. Marcus is Hispanic, reserved, and his eyebrows are arranged in a near-constant furrow. For context, I am 5’3”, weigh 125 pounds, and have no prior military or tactical experience. During lunch, one of the cadets realizes I am paired with Marcus and makes a joke about it, assuring me that Marcus will “go easy on me.” Craig, a white cadet in his 30’s, quickly replies, “Nuh uh, I already got in trouble for doing that. We’re not supposed to go easy on the girls!” Throughout the day, I hear women cadets complain several times about men cadets “taking it easy” on them during tactics training. Rachel, a white cadet in her 20’s, tells me that she likes getting paired up with Haley because she still goes “hard on her,” so she doesn’t have to worry about a “guy going too easy” on her.

I experience this gendered dynamic myself during defensive tactics training. One afternoon, I am paired up with Collin, a white cadet in his early 30’s. Collin is about 5’10”, thin, and, unlike the rest of his class, has a delicate Southern California intonation in his speech. The goal of today’s training is to learn how to stop someone who is aggressively approaching you.

Per our instructions, Collin and I take turns playing the role of the aggressor or the officer.

Dozens of times, I quickly and forcefully walk towards him. As soon as I get within arm’s length, he whips his hand up and hits the middle of my forehead with the meaty part of his lower

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palm. Collin repeatedly apologizes as he does this, and tells me he will go lighter. Each time he apologizes, I insist that it is fine, it does not hurt, and he should complete the exercise as it is designed. By the end of the hour, I have a red mark in the middle of my forehead, and Collin again apologizes. The next day, Collin says that when he got home from the academy yesterday, he told his wife he felt bad because he had to hit “a girl” in the head a bunch of times. He says his wife made fun of him for “hitting a girl,” and told him he should have taken it easy on me.

Within the warrior-guardian framework, men are not supposed to hit women, they are supposed to protect them. In this situation, Collin was required to hit me, a woman smaller than him in stature with almost no experience fighting. Collin and his wife’s discomfort with his hitting me highlights the discordance that arises for men when they are required to fight women.

Relatedly, men officers described feeling especially protective over their women colleagues while on patrol, pointing explicitly to gender in these conversations. At Clarkston PD, while watching the cadets go through tactics drills, I talk with Lieutenant Brad Lewis and Alex, a defensive tactics instructor. Lt. Lewis oversees the tactical training at Clarkston PD, and has been very friendly and accommodating of my research. He is tall, white, muscular, looks to be in his 40’s, and has a deep, booming voice with a slight southern accent. Lt. Lewis asks me what my research is about and I tell him that I am interested in how departments are working to recruit more women and racial minorities and how they train cadets in tactics. He latches on to the part about women, and begins talking about several women cadets and officers.

During the conversation, Lt. Lewis illustrates all three components of this gendered maze. First, he points out a woman cadet, specifically referencing her as a female, who performed poorly that afternoon during a grappling drill with her instructor. “You saw that,

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right?” he asks me. “Yeah,” I say, “she wasn’t doing much.” Invoking the way in which one woman’s performance reflects on all women, he then tells me about a “bad ass” woman officer he knows, who performed better in tactics than a lot of men in her academy class. Whenever he tells her about “shit like that,” referencing women cadets who do not perform well in tactics, “it really pisses her off.” Within the framework of tokens, this makes sense: if a woman cadet performs poorly in tactics, it contributes to the idea that all women are incompetent fighters.

Lt. Lewis then articulates the sense that women officers need to work harder to prove themselves, while simultaneously illustrating the way in which men make this difficult by insisting on acting as protectors of women. He tells me about a woman officer named Catherine he worked with on patrol. He prefaces the story by saying that she is “really beautiful.” His eyes widen and he repeats himself, “like, really beautiful.” Because she is a woman and also beautiful, he says, he thinks that Catherine felt the need to “really prove herself” tactically. “I was raised a certain way,” he says, and on their first day as partners, he opened the passenger door for her. In response, he tells me, she laughed and sternly told him to not do it again. On one of their first days working together, he got into a physical struggle with someone and “out of nowhere,”

Catherine slid across the hood of their car, tackled them, and got the man into cuffs. Waving his pointed finger in the air and slamming it down, he says “I was like, hell yeah, girl! Now that is badass!” Lt. Lewis and Alex talk about how “pissed off” they felt on patrol when someone would hit a woman officer, more so, they note, than if a male partner got hit. Alex recounts a time when his partner, a 50-something-year-old woman, got punched in the face on patrol. “Man, that pissed me off so bad!” he says. When on patrol, then, women can prove themselves

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tactically – like Catherine did – but they must overcome the obstacle of men’s insistence on treating them in gendered ways, including engaging in a protective masculinity.

When women out-perform men tactically, though, they are subject to disciplining comments. This is illustrated at Terryville PD by Haley, a white cadet in her 20’s. Haley spent years training in boxing, and as a result, completed the academy tactics training with relative ease. During one day of tactics training, the instructors teach us how to get out of chokeholds.

Davis, the instructor, calls on Haley and a male cadet to come to the front of the class so that they can demonstrate. As she walks to the front of the gym, her classmates let out a loud

“Oooooooh,” communicating sympathy towards her partner. As soon as Haley puts her partner into an arm bar chokehold, the class erupts into a chorus of “Oooooh!” and “Oh shit!” Haley’s brow furrows, her eyes tighten, and she swings her head to look at her classmates. Haley looks to

Davis and in an irritable tone, asks, “What? Was I not supposed to do it that hard?” “No, no,”

Davis replies, “You’re fine. They’re just giving you a hard time.” After Davis finishes demonstrating, he notices Haley’s facial expression has not changed, and once again says, “They were just giving you a hard time.” Women, like Haley, are supposed to perform the tactics competently, but not better than men. When they perform better than men, they take on the role as the warrior and the guardian, negating the need for men to act as protectors or rendering men as the receivers of protection by women.

This disciplining of women around tactics also happens at Rollingwood PD, when a woman instructor attempts to apply her expertise to change the tactics training there. I never meet this woman during my field work, but I sit with the men tactics instructors while they talk about her. They complain that this woman officer trains in Krav Maga, not Brazilian Jiu Jitsu

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(the martial art these instructors are experts in), and they feel that she is unwilling to learn the benefits of other kinds of martial arts. Rob, a white tactics instructor in his 40’s, says he saw the officer “creeping in the window” of the gym yesterday, and with a strong tone of irritation in his voice, says she should “just fucking come in, maybe you’d learn something.”

Not fully understanding what the issue is, I ask the instructors what they are talking about. David, a Hispanic tactics instructor in his 30’s, explains that this officer wrote a “long letter” to their command staff criticizing the tactics instructors. Rob repeatedly calls her a bitch, imitating things he would say to her: “Okay bitch, why don’t you ever come to open mat [a designated time when all officers can come practice tactics in the gym] then, if you think you know everything, bitch?” At the end of the day, I wrote in my notes: “it’s actually a little bit jarring to hear them speak about someone this way. They make fun of the cadets a lot, and they frequently talk about police officers who aren’t willing to come to open mat, or who claim to be good fighters without ever proving it, but since they’re usually talking about men, they use words like ‘dumbass’ or ‘shit bag’ or ‘idiot,’ not ‘bitch.’” The tone of the disciplining comments in this situation at Rollingwood PD are different than the ones lodged at Haley at Terryville PD, but the underlying logic of both are the same. When women officers are experts in fighting, they are highlighted, ridiculed, or disciplined in ways that are meant to correct their behavior to allow men to continue their role warriors and as protectors.

The warrior-guardian construct creates gendered dilemmas for women officers, who do not quite fit into this framework. The women cadets and officers I met explained that they have to work twice as hard to be taken seriously within this masculine institution. To prove themselves, though, women must overcome men’s insistence on protecting them. When women

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out-perform men, taking on the role as protectors, they are disciplined. Women officers are placed in a bind, then, where they can never quite get it right. They must simultaneously perform well so as not to be considered a liability, overcome men’s insistence on protecting them, but still allow men to fulfill their role as protectors by not out-performing them.

At the academy, cadets are told that adopting a warrior mentality is a key part of their transition to becoming a police officer. This way of approaching the world necessarily prioritizes

“winning” the war above all else. Cadets are taught to be wary of others, that deadly threats are around every corner, and that verbal negotiation with the enemy is not an option. Instructors mostly equate de-escalation with being “polite and professional” at the start of an interaction, and insist that cadets should always be ready for violence when and if it arises. This way of approaching the world – as warriors – is more complicated for women, who face barriers to enacting this role. The prioritizing of a warrior mentality illustrates the way in which police officers think about their role with the public: as a battle.

CONCLUSION

The warrior-guardian binary reflects a long, national debate about what the role of the police ought to be. Are the police there to fight crime and combat evil, to build relationships and serve the community, or both? Trends in police reform efforts reveal the contention in this debate. The push for community policing, an approach that emphasizes problem solving and civilian involvement, is an attempt to re-conceptualize officers as public servants rather than crime fighters. Although these constructs are often discursively framed in opposition to the other,

I argue that the guardian role is encapsulated by the warrior role. Throughout my field work at

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academies, I found that although cadets are informed that they will need to be both guardians and warriors, the way they are taught to think about the civilians they will be policing draws primarily on the concept of the warrior.

As I outline in this chapter, during their training, cadets are taught to be afraid of “bad guys,” who are conceptualized as ruthless, unpredictable, violent criminals; they learn how to identify these bad guys in gendered and racialized ways; and they are encouraged to adopt a warrior mentality. Instructors frequently warn cadets that bad guys are dangerous and armed, and show videos of police officers being attacked and ambushed to illustrate the threat that bad guys pose to officers. Instructors tell cadets to never profile based on race, but use racially coded language to tell cadets that good police work requires that they profile criminality. Cadets are taught to be suspicious and wary of certain body movements, physical reactions, clothing, cars, and perceived inconsistencies in where someone “should” be within the city, all of which rely on problematic associations between race, gender, criminality and violence. Finally, cadets are told that they must adopt a warrior mentality in order to survive. To get home at the end of each shift, instructors warn, officers need to be wary of everyone they meet, be constantly prepared for violence, and willing to do whatever it takes. Even in cases where verbal de-escalation techniques are taught, instructors tell cadets that they should be very careful in choosing to de- escalate instead of using force.

The warrior-guardian framework presents complications for women and men of color who work as officers. The construct itself is deeply gendered and racialized, where white men are the protectors of white women and children from Black men. Black women are absent from this narrative, not quite being considered worthy of protection because of their race, but not

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being considered a credible threat because of their gender. Black officers, both men and women, must content with the fact that they are taught to racially profile Black and brown people, while simultaneously having experiences of being racially profiled themselves. Women face barriers in embodying the warrior or the guardian. Women must work harder to prove themselves as capable, but have trouble doing this because men insist on taking on the protective role, either by protecting women from physical threats or by disciplining women who might take on the role of a protector of men. This dynamic may be more salient for white women, who are conventionally understood as being frail and vulnerable. However, Black, white, and Hispanic women cadets and officers expressed frustrations around their positioning in their role. Black women, though, must contend with being subject to both racism and sexism in ways that white women do not.

The use of the word “warrior” implies that there is a war. If there is a war, then there is an enemy, and violence must be used to defeat them. As I show in this chapter, the academy training at these departments emphasizes this way of thinking about the relationship between the police and public. The police are on one side of this war, and bad guys are on the other. Part of their job as officers, then, is parsing out which civilians are bad guys. Cadets are taught that the stakes of this identification process are very high: if they make a mistake and do not correctly identify a bad guy, they could be attacked and/or killed. Bad guys, they learn, are not reasonable, and thus, communicating and trying to de-escalate will not work on them. Only violence will subdue a bad guy, and thus, cadets are taught that they must use violence in these situations. This war narrative justifies the use of violence generally, and in particular, draws on conceptions of criminality to justify the use of violence against people of color.

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Chapter 4: Embodying State Power

A few months into Rollingwood PD’s academy, Hannah and I spend the afternoon learning how to use proper handcuffing technique. About two dozen cadets, standing in pairs, are lined up in two columns in the defensive tactics (DT) gym. Blue mats cover the floor and walls and white florescent lights hover from the ceiling. The police flag – an American flag with white and black stripes, with one solid blue line in the middle – hangs on the far side of the room, reminding the cadets that they will soon join the “thin blue line between order and chaos.”

This afternoon, Hannah and I are partnered up. We take turns pulling the handcuffs out of the pouch on our duty belt, holding the middle chain with our right fist, and hitting the single bar of each cuff on the hard piece of bone on the pinkie side of each others’ wrists. After about 20 minutes of this, our wrists become red and raw. We repeat the exercise five times with commands, ten times without, and then switch. Hannah fumbles over her commands, hesitating and mixing up her words. “Turn around,” she says, “Put them behind your back.” I help her along, “My hands?” Hannah is supposed to say the following authoritatively: “Turn around for me, ma’am. Put your hands behind your back, palms up. Spread your feet. Bend over at the waist. Do not move.” When everyone else starts giving commands, I can barely hear her. “Ugh sorry,” she apologizes, “I’m still uncomfortable giving commands. I need to practice it more.”

Three months later, I watch Hannah, and the other two dozen cadets in her class, complete scenario-based training at the academy. They spent the last two days in the classroom learning about the case law, criminal code of procedures, and departmental policies that dictate when and how they can use force. Before the scenario starts, an instructor tells each pair of

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cadets that they are responding to a domestic disturbance between two brothers. The cadets enter the gym and see two large men – who are actually police officers, volunteering as “actors” – shouting and pushing each other. When the cadets try to separate the two, a fight breaks out. I watch Hannah, who was uncomfortable just a few months ago giving commands to get me in handcuffs, wrestle a man who weighs at least 100 pounds more than her, shouting repeatedly at him to “stop fighting!” and to “put your hands behind your back!” Panting, completely out of breath, struggling to get out of pins, and doing her best to control his movement, she continually yells commands while using the tactics she has been taught in her training, and eventually, she and her partner get him on the ground and into handcuffs.

Through their academy training, cadets learn how to use their bodies to control, incapacitate, and hurt other people. The academy instructors teach the cadets how to use their posture, uniform, and voice to compel compliance, their bodies and handcuffs to control another person’s movement, and their bodies and weapons to incapacitate, injure, and kill someone. They practice, over and over again, until they look, sound, move, and fight like police officers. Police officers are a literal embodiment of state power, and during their training, cadets are taught how to interact with the world with an assumption of possession. When a police officer walks onto a scene, they own the space. When they speak, you listen. When they ask you a question, you answer. When they give a command, you comply. If you do not, they can physically force you to comply; and if you resist their physical manipulations or try to harm them, they have the authority to escalate the violence above and beyond yours to injure or kill you.

Sociological literature provides many different explanations for why people engage in violence. Studies of informal drug markets point to the ways that promises of economic gains

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motivate violent behavior (Contreras 2012; Venkatesh 2008). Other scholars have shown the role that group solidarity and community play in one’s decision to join a gang, which then encourages engaging in violence (Gordon et al. 2004; Stretesky and Pogrebin 2007; Thornberry et al. 1993).

Another group of authors highlight the way in which using violence can bolster reputation, particularly, though not exclusively, for men. These scholars have studied many different contexts, including the military (Britton and Williams 1995; Gibson 1994), sports (Adjepong

2016), high schools (Jones 2004; Pascoe 2011), prisons (Contreras 2012; Kupers 2001), college fraternities (Sanday 2007), and civilian firearms schools (Carlson 2015; Shapira and Simon

2018; Stroud 2015). These scholars have contributed important insights into understanding motivations for engaging in violence, but with few exceptions (Shapira and Simon 2018;

Wacquant 2006), they do not consider the role of the body. In this chapter, rather than investigating why, I examine how people learn to use their bodies to engage in violence.

In this chapter, I argue that embodying state power is learned through repeated practice and institutional disciplining. I engage with Pierre Bourdieu’s (1993) concept of habitus and organizational theories of socialization in my explanation of how the police academy, as an organization, conditions cadets’ bodies to learn violent behavior. I use Bourdieu’s (1992) concept of habitus to explain how the organization ensures that only those who look and act like police officers – particularly in their use of violence – are able to graduate from the academy.

Habitus, according to Bourdieu, structures how we think, what we say, and what we do in different social contexts. We internalize a habitus by absorbing, taking on, and embodying the social norms that dominate a social context. At the police academy, cadets must perform a police

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officer’s habitus to maintain their position in the organization, which, I argue, depends on their willingness and ability to use violence.

While the concept of habitus provides a way of understanding the internalization of ideologies, practices, and dispositions, organizational theories of socialization help explain how this process occurs within the context of an organization. Organizational scholars have highlighted the ways in which organizations shape the people in them (Chao 2012; Merton 1957;

Z. W. Oberfield 2012; Saks, Uggerslev, and Fassina 2007; Van Maanen and Schein 1979). This way of understanding organizations “tries to identify the organizational processes, mechanisms, and characteristics that enable organizations to bend individuals to their needs” (Z. W. Oberfield

2012, 2). Many of these scholars have specifically focused on police departments, studying the process whereby civilians become police officers (Bennett 1984; Susan Ehrlich Martin 1982; Z.

W. Oberfield 2012; Rubinstein 1980; Van Maanen 1975; Van Maanen and Schein 1979; Wilkins and Williams 2009). One important way that organizations shape or modify behavior is through management tools, particularly monitoring and supervision (Sandfort 2000; W. R. Scott 1992).

This approach to organizations helps explain the important role that institutional disciplining, both formal and informal, plays in shaping cadets’ behavior.

At the beginning of the academy, Hannah did not know how to use her voice to communicate authority, to position her body and operate handcuffs to confine someone’s movement, or to use violence to incapacitate another person’s body. By the end of the academy, she did. In this chapter, I focus on the hundreds of hours of tactics training that the cadets receive at the academy to explain how Hannah learned to do this. I begin by outlining how the cadets learn, through repeated practice, to use their bodies to control and hurt other people. Next, I

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explain how institutional disciplining, in the shape of negative, often gendered, consequences, reinforce violent behavior. In this section, I examine instances when cadets use either too much or too little force, highlighting the way in which consequences shape behavior and access to the institution. In the last section, I argue that the tactics training at police academies relies on a system of sexual domination. In this chapter, I show that in addition to teaching the cadets how to physically dominate other people, the tactics training at academies also weeds out those who are unwilling or unable to do so. The cadets who graduate, then, have a willingness, competence, and inclination to use force.

VIOLENCE THROUGH REPITITION

Learning to embody state power takes practice. At the academy, cadets spend hundreds of hours learning how to contort their voices and position their bodies to communicate authority and exert physical force on other people. Just as with any new skill, the cadets begin with basic exercises, and build up to more complex, and violent, drills. Throughout the academy – and as I outline in the previous chapter – instructors encourage cadets to make the ideological and moral transition from civilian to officer. Importantly, this transition is also embodied. In this section of the chapter, I outline how, through practice, cadets learn to embody the police officer by using their voice to issue commands and their bodies to control, and hurt, other people.

Verbal Control

About two months into the academy at Terryville PD, I spent the afternoon in the DT gym, practicing giving commands and applying handcuffs. When we enter gym, Davis yells “up top,” and we all scurry to remove our shoes and huddle around him. A few weeks ago, we learned how to cuff starting with the bottom ring, and today, we will learn how to start with the

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top ring. Davis picks a cadet to help him demonstrate. He reminds us to make sure our cuffs are arranged correctly in the duty belt, so that when we pull them out, they are easy to manipulate.

Throughout this instruction, Davis’s voice is congenial and familiar. He is not laughing or smiling, but his tone and volume are relaxed.

When Davis begins the demonstration of commands, his voice instantly and dramatically changes. The volume of his voice triples in magnitude, the tone deepens, the warmth evaporates, and a threatening harshness encases each word. “Turn around for me,” he instructs. The cadet turns around. “Arms behind your back, palms up,” he says. The cadet does as he is told. Davis continues: “Spread your feet. Bend over at the waist.” The cadet complies with the commands, and Davis handcuffs him. I have spent dozens of hours with Davis, often chatting and joking around. Once, for example, during a warm up for a long run in over 100-degree heat, he teased,

“Hey if you get tired on the run,” then paused as if he was going to tell me to take it easy, “then suck it up and keep running!” “Oh okay, great advice, thanks Davis!” I replied, laughing. Each time, like today, when his voice and demeanor rapidly change, I feel disoriented and nervous.

Even though I know and like Davis, I am afraid of him. Davis’s voice promises violence if the receiver of his commands does not comply immediately.

During their academy training, the cadets learn how to use their voice to compel compliance, just as Davis does during his demonstration. For most people, this does not come naturally. The cadets are taught to shout pre-scripted directives, in a specific order, in a loud, deep voice. Issuing commands is learned through practice, and is the first type of embodied control that the cadets are taught in their training.

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At Rollingwood PD, the academy class starts to develop this skill during their second day of tactics training. Rob instructs this portion of the training, using another male instructor to demonstrate. Rob tells the class that, increasingly, some officers are being “too polite,” and are

“making requests instead of demands.” He imitates this, his voice soft and unsure, hands clasped together at his waist, standing about ten feet away from the “suspect”: “Um excuse me sir, could you please turn around?” His voice returns to normal, though tinged with frustration, as he tells the class, “Don’t do that. You don’t need to be rude, but you need to be stern. You need to let this person know that you are in charge and that you have authority.” First, he says, you tell someone to turn around. His voice becomes louder and harder as he demonstrates: “Sir, turn around for me. Spread your feet.” He explains that these first few commands are also a

“compliance test.” He goes on, “Is this person doing what I’m telling them to do? Do they seem like they are going to be compliant?” Rob continues with the commands: “Put your hands behind your back, towards the sound of my voice.” The other instructor puts his hands to his sides, palms facing Rob, and lifts them up, against his shoulder’s normal range of motion. “Widen your feet more,” Rob instructs, adding that usually when you tell someone to spread their feet, they will stand about hip distance apart, where it is comfortable. You don’t want them to be comfortable, he tells us, you want to put them at a “tactical disadvantage.” Rob insists that the cadets “need to be confident,” in the way they give commands and approach someone. Rob explains that the cadets’ safety depends on their ability to communicate authority through their voice: “If you are not confident or you give someone too much time to think while you consider your options, that could up their predator drive.”

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After the demonstration, Rob instructs the cadets to pair up, spread out, and practice commands. They arrange themselves into two lines of nine, and immediately, a disjointed chorus of commands echoes throughout the gym. The cadets are supposed to give just three commands, in this order: turn around, spread your feet, put your hands behind your back towards the sound of my voice. Then, the cadets should “offset,” moving their bodies so that they can see their partner’s hands. The cadets fumble over the commands. Several continually give the commands in the wrong order, shaking their heads and tensing their lips when they realize they are doing it wrong. One cadet repeatedly yells “spread your legs,” instead of “spread your feet,” until Rob, trying to conceal his laughter about the sexual nature of the phrase, shouts “don’t say legs, that doesn’t sound right.” The cadet again yells “spread your legs,” during the exercise, then shakes his head side to side, pauses, and, correcting himself, yells “feet!”

The cadets are tested on their ability to give commands during scenario-based training7, which usually begins a few months into the academy. At Terryville PD, the cadets’ first scenario-based training comes directly after their classroom and tactics instruction about the mechanics of arrest. In one scenario, the cadets are told that they have just made the first arrest of their career, and are stopping at a gas station (for the scenario, this is just the academy gym) with their partner for a celebratory coffee. When they enter the gym, there are two Hispanic, teenage boys in civilian clothing, standing together in a corner. The two boys shake hands, one of them drops a small bag (which has cocaine in it), they split up, and then leave the building. The cadets are supposed to do the following: articulate their suspicion, notice that one of the boys was from a BOLO (be on the look out sheet), talk to them, ask for consent to pat them down, find the

7 Scenario-based training tests cadets’ ability to apply classroom and tactics skills to law-enforcement scenarios. Their instructors design the scenarios, officers at the department volunteer as “actors,” and officers (either their instructors, or officers volunteering) evaluate their performance. 135

concealed gun and brass knuckles on one of them, and arrest him. When Carmen and her partner,

Dan, complete this scenario, the instructors express concern about their tactics, particularly that

Carmen improve her “command voice.” Kevin pulls Carmen off to the side and spends several minutes telling her that she needs to work on her command presence. Echoing Rob’s warning at

Rollingwood PD, Kevin advises, “otherwise, people will take advantage of you.”

Eventually, however, through repeated practice, these commands become second nature to the cadets, even in stressful situations. At Clarkston PD, for example, during their defensive tactics final, the cadets are required to complete a tactical obstacle course. When they walk into the gym, several blue mats are arranged to create a fake hallway. The cadets should “clear” the hallway, guns drawn, to make sure no one is hiding behind the corners. There is a low wall at the end of the hallway with a “suspect” sitting on the other side, hiding from view. The first cadet to run through the scenario, a white woman, does everything correctly, according to her instructor.

She carefully approaches the wall and sees the suspect. She shouts commands for him to get up with his hands in the air, she backs away from him, and finds partial cover behind one of the walls. Following her commands, the suspect stands up. She continues with commands: “Lift the collar of your shirt up with your right hand!” When the suspect does this, a pistol tucked into their waistline becomes visible. Next, she shouts: “Turn around slowly until I tell you to stop.”

He turns around in a circle slowly. “Stop!” she yells once he has done a full circle. She yells for the suspect to slowly come over the wall, get down on one knee, then two, then lower himself onto the ground, on his stomach, and put his hands out to his sides. Once he is on the ground, body sprawled out, she handcuffs him, clears his weapon, and puts the gun in her pocket.

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Although cadets are taught to begin with verbal commands, they are repeatedly told that words will not always work. If someone does not follow verbal commands, the instructors explain, then physical force becomes necessary. This warning comes up at Terryville PD’s academy, during their de-escalation class. After showing the video of Andrew Brannon killing

Deputy Dinkheller, Kevin says, “If you give a command and they don’t comply, you must make them do it. There has to be some use of force.” In his own training, Kevin explains, he was taught to abide by the phrase “ask, tell, make.” To illustrate, he explains how he would ask, then tell, then make someone sit down on a curb: “I’d start out by asking nicely: ‘Hey man, could you just sit down over here please?’” If they don’t sit, he says, then he might ask them one more time, to make sure they understood and heard him. Now, he explains, “they are not complying, so I might raise my voice at this point and tell them” – he raises his voice and drops an octave deeper – “Alright man, I already asked you two times to sit down, so now I’m telling you, sit down on the fucking curb.” If the person still will not sit down on the curb, he says, “then now

I’m going to need to go hands on, and make them sit on the curb. Or I’m going to put them in cuffs and temporarily detain them, because they are now refusing to comply with my commands.” “Especially with suspects who do not give a shit,” he explains, “they will not take you seriously if you don’t enforce your commands.”

Physical Control

Once they learn how to issue verbal commands, the cadets learn how to control someone’s body through physically touch. The first physical skill they learn is how to handcuff and search someone. The level of physical contact that the cadets and instructors have with one another is a unique part of this job, and the initial awkwardness in the DT gym among cadets

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highlights the role of touch in policing. The amount of physical contact is so substantial, that at

Rollingwood PD, the instructors require that the cadets wear long sleeves and pants to prevent the spread of staph infections. In their last academy class, 12 cadets contracted staph infections, so the concern is not unwarranted.

During this instruction, the cadets are taught to enact a kind of touch that exerts control over another person’s movements and invades their space in ways that communicate ownership.

During one of the first weeks of tactics training at Terryville PD, I am paired with Sabrina, a

Hispanic cadet in her 20’s, to practice handcuffing and searching. She practices giving commands, but she is still new to this, so she hesitates, fumbles over her words, speaks softly, and nervously laughs. “Ma’am, please turn around and put your hands behind your back,” she instructs. I turn around and put my hands behind my back. She forcefully grabs my left wrist with her right hand and clasps my left shoulder with her left hand and presses me against the wall. She pushes her weight into it, so that that my entire chest and the right side of my face are flat against the wall. “Spread your feet for me, ma’am,” she says. She kicks the inside arch of each foot, so that they awkwardly slide out to my sides, widening my stance. My weight is now unstable, which is the goal – Sabrina has been taught to “put me at a disadvantage” while she searches me. Sabrina kneads her hands along my legs and arms, runs her thumb around my waistband, and pulls at the elastic band of my sports bra, shaking it so anything I might be hiding there, presumably drugs or weapons, will fall to the ground. Sabrina repeatedly apologizes as she searches me. Touching other people in this way is both dominating and intimate, and without any practice, it feels uncomfortable for both of us.

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After dozens of hours of practice, the cadets become skilled in the kind of controlling and invasive touch that is inherent to frisking and searching someone. At Clarkston PD, the cadets demonstrate their mastery of searching during their defensive tactics final, a hands-on tactics exam towards the end of the academy. The cadets are required to complete a tactical obstacle course, which includes chasing a suspect, grappling an instructor, and boxing an instructor, among other things, before arresting and searching a classmate. I sit in a chair next to Nikki, a

Hispanic instructor in her 30’s, in a small room, where there is a blue mat set up on the floor, and a clear, plastic bucket full of fake weapons sitting on a shelf. Nikki evaluates each cadet’s search, taking notes on a clipboard resting in her lap. Before the cadet enters the room, Nikki instructs their classmate (who will be searched) to plant several fake weapons on their bodies, making them difficult to find. When the cadet being evaluated enters the room, they find their classmate standing on the blue mat and are told to give commands, get their classmate in cuffs, and search them for weapons.

The first cadet I watch conduct a search is a tall, Black man who looks to be in his 20’s.

Droplets of sweat pour from his bald head down his face and off of his chin, in quick succession, landing either on his partner’s back, who lays on the floor in cuffs, or in a puddle on the blue mat. He issues commands to get his classmate off the ground: roll over, get up onto one knee, lean back, put your weight on your heels, get onto both knees, cross your legs at the ankle. The cadet being searched winces as his body is contorted in awkward, unnatural positions, though no one acknowledges this. The cadet conducting the search presses one foot down onto their classmate’s feet, grasps the cuffs with one hand, and conducts the search with the other. He kneads his hand on the outside of his classmate’s pockets, turns out each pocket, shakes each

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pant leg and the belt line, takes off his belt, presses his hand along his belt, takes off his shoes and knocks them on the ground, presses his fingers between each toe, peels down his socks, and glides his palm around each leg, up to his groin, his belt line, chest, back, and arms.

The cadet conducting the search is physically exhausted and frazzled, and expresses doubt about being able to find the planted weapons. Nikki tells him to slow down, take a few deep breaths, and “take care of business.” Importantly, though he expresses uncertainty about finding the planted weapons, there is no visible or vocalized discomfort or apprehension about touching his classmate in this way. This cadet is pushing his full weight onto his classmate’s ankles, pulling his arms uncomfortably behind his back, removing items of clothing, and pressing his hands over his entire body with ease. The concern this cadet expresses is about his own safety, not about the well-being of his classmate. Each cadet that I watch conduct a search does so with a level of confidence and fluidity that had to be learned through practice.

Physical Harm

After learning how to control bodies, the cadets move on to mastering tactics that are designed to hurt other people. Rob articulates this during one day of training, when he explains to the class that at a certain point, “you need to transition from arrest to damage.” The phrase

“doing damage” came up repeatedly during my field work, and described a way of approaching a physical interaction with the goal of hurting, injuring, or killing the other person. During a physical interaction, the cadets are taught, their goal should move from merely controlling to hurting someone.

At Terryville PD, this begins by learning how to use “pain compliance” techniques. The idea is that issuing pain can coerce compliance with commands. Although many departments no

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longer teach pressure points (mostly, it seems, due to ineffectiveness, rather than ethical qualms), at Terryville PD, we spend an afternoon practicing finding and pressing into points on each other’s bodies. We pair up and spend three and a half hours practicing 14 different pressure points. By the end of the day, I am sore in a new way, in very specific places throughout my body, mostly crevices between bone and tissue, or soft spots where muscles meld together. We start off with the behind-the-ear pressure point. Davis talks us through it as he demonstrates on a cadet. He asks one of the cadets to come to the front of the gym, get on their knees, and sit up straight. He tells us to maintain a tactical stance behind our partner, one foot slightly back from the other, and our body pressed against their back. He goes on: cup their chin with our left hand, hit the side of their head with our right palm, so that their head is pressed into our forearm and bicep – “like you’re holding a football,” he says – and press their head into our chest and arm, securing it. In order for a pressure point to be effective, he explains, we need to have counter pressure. Once their head is secured, we should ball up our right fist, extend our right thumb, find the soft spot between their jawline and ear and press directly in, and then up, keeping our elbow down so that we can push with some force. As he demonstrates, the cadet’s eyes tighten shut, their lips press together and widen, and they flinch. When it starts to hurt, Davis explains, tap our chest a few times or tap our partner’s leg to let them know.

I am paired up with Hannah, and I opt to go first, kneeling down and clasping my hands together. I feel Hannah’s body press against my back, and I can feel her discomfort. She does not put much pressure against me. She cups my chin, gently presses the side of my head into her forearm, and tries to find the pressure point between my jaw and ear. She presses in and up, and although I certainly feel pressure, I do not feel pain. Caleb, a Hispanic instructor in his 40’s,

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walks down our row to make sure we are all doing it right. Caleb is incredibly muscular – his body is shaped like a V, his shoulders significantly more broad than his lower half. We ask him if we are doing it correctly since I am not grimacing. He very naturally and comfortably walks behind me, cups my chin, forcefully pushes my head into his giant forearm, and easily finds the pressure point, digging into a soft space under my jaw. A sharp, piercing pain shoots through my neck. My eyes pin shut, and I tap out. “Ooooh,” I say, “Yep, that worked.” Hannah tries it, with his guidance on where to press, and gets it down.

Throughout the next several months, the cadets learn how to strike, kick, take down, and disarm, and use a baton against their classmates. After dozens of hours of practice, they are tested on these skills in the defensive tactics final. The details of this exercise vary slightly between departments, but the general structure is the same at each one. The cadets start out by doing calisthenics for several minutes so that they are tired when they have to demonstrate their ability to use the learned techniques. This “oxygen deprivation,” as the instructors call it, makes the test more difficult, and is meant to replicate “real life,” when they may have to fight someone after a foot pursuit. After a few minutes of exercises, the cadets are then put through an obstacle course, including some combination of: clearing a room with their firearms drawn, delivering baton strikes to an instructor in a “red man” suit (a heavily padded suit), boxing an instructor, getting out of a hold while ground fighting, and usually, at the end of the test, they are required to make an arrest, which includes giving commands, getting the person in handcuffs, and searching them without missing any planted weapons.

The cadets tend to have the most trouble at the grappling station, where they fight an instructor who usually has a purple or black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and at the baton strike

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station, which usually comes at the end of the course. At Clarkston PD’s academy, after grappling to get out of a mount, running laps around a “robbery suspect,” conducting a

“threshold evaluation” where they carefully clear a corner with their weapon drawn, delivering baton strikes to an instructor in a red man suit, running up and down a flight of stairs with a 50-lb bag on their back, dragging a human-shaped dummy across the room, they then put on head gear, are handed a baton, and enter the ring with an instructor. Almost a dozen instructors and cadets hold pads up in a circle around the mat, and the instructor in the ring alternates his level of aggression to evaluate the cadets’ ability to use the correct amount of force. The instructor starts out just pushing the cadet, then escalates to punching, then escalates to trying to take their weapon. In the middle of this exercise, one cadet, who is completely soaked in sweat, takes his head gear off, limps over to the trash can, and vomits. Another cadet clumsily teeters back and forth on her feet, like she is about to lose consciousness. When she gets pushed down by the instructor, she lays there, half-heartedly covering her face, unable to get up. The instructors around the mat yell at her “GET UP!” “COME ON! DO SOMETHING!” The instructors talk about her afterward – one asks the other, “Did you see her? She didn’t do shit. She just laid there,” he complains.

Most of the cadets, however, master these skills and pass their defensive tactics final. At

Rollingwood PD, the cadets’ DT final is very similar to Clarkston PD’s. In the DT gym, the overhead lights are shut off, police lights flash from the center of the room, and the loud riff of guitars and jarring pitch of heavy metal vocals echoes off the walls. This is all meant to introduce sensory overstimulation, inducing stress and creating distraction. The cadets warm up by delivering strikes to a punching bag and a completing series of calisthenics. Then, they move

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through a series of stations that test their skills in grappling, boxing, throwing baton strikes, and conducting a search. At the first station, the cadets enter the grappling ring, an instructor shouts

“FRONT LEANING!”, and the cadets drop into a plank position. One of the instructors crouches down to the cadet’s ear level and tells them to do ten push ups, counting them out loud as they do this. While that instructor is giving instructions, another instructor is on his hands and knees, crouched down so his eyes are directly in line with the cadet’s, maintaining eye contact while he leaps right to left, like Spiderman. While he hops around, that instructor holds a shock knife [a fake knife that issues shocks when it touches skin] in his hand that he keeps turning on, making it light up with white light and buzz with electricity. Another one or two instructors are also crouched down to the cadet’s level, surrounding them, pounding loudly on the mat with their fists. When the cadet starts doing push ups – down, up “ONE!” down, up, “TWO!” down, up

“THREE!” – an instructor, who is hidden from the cadet’s view, tackles them from the side and starts fighting them. The cadets should use the techniques they have been taught - shrimping, hip bridges, elbow strikes, framing with your knees - to get out from underneath their instructor.

Most of the time, the instructors, who are far more skilled than the cadets, end up on top of the cadet, with a high mount, legs tucked underneath their armpits and groin against their chest, putting their full weight and force into controlling their bodies, while the cadets try to maneuver out of it. Gordon, a middle-aged, muscular, white man is the first cadet to complete the exam. David, one of the tactics instructors, leans over to tell me that Gordon is actually the oldest cadet in the class (41 years old), but is “in awesome shape” and has “done really well with DT.”

At this point in my field work, it is difficult for me to tell whether or not the cadets are doing well. I do not yet have the knowledge to determine who is in control of the fight. To me, it looks

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like Nick, the instructor, is choking Gordon for a full minute. After Gordon completes the grappling station, I ask David how he did, and he tells me he did great. David explains that if the cadets use the techniques that they have been taught, like Gordon did, then the instructor fighting them will let up.

With some exceptions8, most cadets do not come into the academy already knowing how to embody state power. Through countless repetitions, they learn how to contort their voices to communicate authority, touch others in invasive and controlling ways, and use their bodies to hurt other people. As I have shown, the cadets make mistakes throughout their training, highlighting the way in which these embodiments and skills are, in fact, learned. By the end of their training, though, most cadets have mastered these skills, and come to hold themselves and interact with others as a police officer.

INSTITUTIONAL DISCIPLINING OF VIOLENCE

Cadets learn how to embody state power not just through practice, but also through the institutional disciplining of their performances of violence. The instructors berate, humiliate, and physically punish cadets when they do not issue commands, search effectively, or stand their ground in a fight. These performances are gendered, where embodiments of masculinity, violence, and being a police officer are enmeshed in one another. Those cadets who embody effeminate qualities, particularly as they are on display during tactics training, are subject to scrutiny, humiliation, and punishment. At its height, this disciplining also works to push those cadets who either cannot or will not participate in this violence out of the institution.

8 For those with prior military experience, some of these embodiments are already learned. 145

Disciplining Violence

Throughout the academy, the cadets are tested on both their willingness and ability to engage in violence. Instructors express extreme frustration and engage in intense displays of anger when cadets perform poorly on these tests. Whereas when a college student fails a test, a teacher may express disappointment or frustration, when a cadet performs poorly on a tactical exam, the instructors at the academy become absolutely irate, shouting, cursing, and lodging insults, all publicly. These theatrical and passionate reactions work to discipline cadets into enacting violence willingly and competently on behalf of the institution.

Before the cadets learn actual technique, they are required to demonstrate to their instructors that they willing to fight. Within the first month or two of their academy training, cadets are faced with an “unwinnable” fight and are expected to demonstrate that they have a strong “will to live” by continuing to stand up and attempting to throw punches and block strikes. At Terryville PD, this ritual takes place two weeks into their training. With only one afternoon of basic tactics training under their belt, each cadet is put in a boxing ring with a semi- professional fighter for three, one-minute rounds. I learn of this ritual when I am at the academy to attend their multi-culturalism class and introduction to defensive tactics. I get to the academy early on Tuesday morning and sit with the instructors while they eat breakfast around a wooden table in the small kitchen near the back of the building.

Caleb sits in one of the mismatched chairs tucked around the table while Dylan cooks steak in a cast-iron skillet on the stove. The instructors cook steak fairly often, especially when

Dylan is at the academy. A few weeks prior, Dylan returned from the grocery store with ten T- bone steaks for the week. The kitchen connects the front office to the hallway leading back to the

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classrooms, so the smoke billowing up from the skillet makes the entire building smell like steak and eggs. Kevin walks into the kitchen after inspecting the cadets’ uniforms during morning formation. While serving himself some eggs, Kevin outlines the schedule for today. He tells me he is surprised I did not want to be here on Thursday. “What’s happening on Thursday?” I ask.

Caleb jumps in, “That’s when they learn how to box.” Dylan laughs, “Well, it’s really more like a supervised beating.” On Thursday, Caleb explains, they go to a boxing gym and put each cadet in the ring with officers who fight competitively. There is no way for the cadets to win, he says.

What is being tested, Caleb explains, is whether or not they have the will to “not give up” and stay in the fight. Some of the cadets have “never thrown a punch,” he says, eyes wide with concern, so they need to experience getting hit and not running away from it. On Wednesday, when Caleb explains the process to the cadets, he echoes this same point, telling the class that

“the point of Thursday is to show that you have the will to live, that you won’t give up in a fight.

There’s no second place in a fight on the street,” he warns, “so you gotta get up and give it your all.” Through this ritual, the instructors are not testing skill or technique; the cadets have received virtually no training yet. Rather, they are requiring that the new cadets, especially those who “have never thrown a punch,” show the instructors that they will use violence when the institution tells them to.

When I return to the academy the following week, “boxing day” has reached a mythical status. The cadets eagerly tell me, often without prompting, how they did in the ring last week.

Hannah hardly remembers any of it – it felt like she blacked out, she says – but she knows that in the first couple seconds of the first round, her previously-injured knee got tweaked again.

Andrew, a Hispanic cadet in his early 20’s, woke up the next morning with a bloodshot red eye.

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He must have popped a blood vessel one of the times he got punched, he reasons. During defensive tactics that afternoon, I watch Aaron, a Hispanic cadet and ex-Marine, grimace in pain, grabbing at his ribs, while he attempts to do push ups with his class. I ask him about it later, and he says he popped two ribs out of place during boxing day. The referee called time, he tells me, so he dropped his arms, and his opponent got one more rib shot in. Limping and wincing and unable to fully see, the cadets express pride in what these injuries illustrate: they did not give up, they did not stay down, and they tried their best, demonstrating that they are willing to fight.

A similar exercise happens a few weeks into Rollingwood PD’s academy, during the first day of the cadets’ defensive tactics training. Previously called “fight day,” this ritual was recently re-named “will to win day.” One by one, each cadet runs around the track outside, enters the gym, jumps rope for a minute, and punches a bag for two minutes. Once they have warmed up, an instructor points towards the ring, and yells at them to put on head gear and get in. For the next three minutes, an instructor boxes each cadet, delivering strikes mostly to their chest, stomach, back, and arms. About two minutes into his time in the ring, one cadet – a tall, skinny, white, blonde man with large, round blue eyes – stumbles backwards and keels over, his head following his shoulders downward, stepwise, like it is detached. As the cadet walks into the ring,

Jason, one of the instructors, says: “Guys like that make me fucking nervous…I can see white around his entire eyeball, he’s so scared.” The cadet looks like he is going to vomit a few times during the three minutes, contracting his stomach forward and his eyelids flimsily trying to shut.

Expressing fear, cowering away, or not eagerly engaging the fight all result in instructors chastising cadets. At one point, the instructor fighting him – who is basically chasing after him in the ring – eyes wide and chin up, slams his gloves together and yells “DON’T FUCKING

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APOLOGIZE! LET’S GO!” When a few of the other cadets also struggle, either balling up in a corner, trying to run away from the instructor, or standing still, arms down at their sides, taking it, the instructors shout from outside the ring: “Do something! Don’t just stand there!” “We have enough slugs in this department, we don’t need another one.”

This intolerance for, and disciplining of, any display of either unwillingness or inability to fight also comes up during the cadets’ tactics and scenario-based training. Importantly, cadets are more harshly punished for using too little, rather than too much, force. This inconsistency in the disciplining of violence is illustrated by two separate tactics drills at Rollingwood PD. The first happens during one afternoon of tactics training, when the instructors teach the cadets how to disarm someone with a weapon. At the end of the day, the instructors pair up the cadets and tell half of them to grab either a fake weapon or another miscellaneous item that is not a weapon.

The cadets playing the officer do not know that some of the items are not weapons. The cadet with the hidden item is told to make furtive movements – like avoiding eye contact, turning around, or touching their pockets – to suggest that they might be armed, and the “officer” is supposed to notice this and disarm them. The cadets all assume that their partner is armed, and in most of the pairs, shoots them within a few seconds. Tricia’s partner pulls a black sharpie out from her pocket, and, mistaking it for a weapon, Tricia shoots her. During the debrief, Tricia explains that her partner’s hands were tucked under her shirt, so it was difficult to tell that she was not holding a weapon. Another cadet pulls a fake yellow crack pipe out of his pocket. His partner shoots him, and, realizing her mistake, presses her hand on her heart and drops her jaw open. After the exercise, Josh, a white instructor in his 30’s, debriefs the class. Josh is an ex-

Marine, has a tattoo sleeve covering one arm, and cropped, blonde hair. He has a reputation

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among the cadets as being especially tough on them, and indeed, I see this happen on multiple occasions during the academy: he often screams for the cadets to get their “sacks” off the ground while doing push ups and frequently delivers long, impassioned speeches about officer safety.

Today, Josh explains that this is a “familiar problem we face,” acknowledging the difficulty in determining if someone is armed, and acting appropriately. The instructors are not visibly angry about the cadets’ performance, and the class is not punished.

In sharp contrast, the instructors become enraged when cadets do not use force at all, or do not use enough force, during their tactics and scenario training. This is most vividly illustrated during the defensive tactics final at Rollingwood PD, where several instructors, gathered around the grappling ring, scream at the cadets for either not fighting back or not using their weapon.

The academy staff often talk to me about Lila, a cadet who has a Ph.D., specifically bringing up her degree when discussing her poor performance at the academy. The point, I think, is to communicate to me that even people with high levels of education – like me – may not do well in the academy. They remind me that despite my fancy education, I probably could not do their job. Lila does not do well in the defensive tactics final, repeatedly failing the grappling station, where she is assigned to fight Spencer. Spencer is about 5’9”, white, has a completely shaved head, and arms covered in tattoos. He has a thick Long Island accent, is Jewish, loves heavy metal music, and frequently talks about his support of gun rights and discontent with the police union. During her fight, Lila ends up on her back, with Spencer mounted on top of her, constraining her body with his legs, continually hitting her in the head. Spencer looks around at the other instructors, indicating his frustration. He is not even trying, his facial expression tells us, and he is still winning the fight by a landslide. From the sidelines, the instructors throw their

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hands in the air and scream at her: “FUCKING DO SOMETHING!” “GET OUT OF THAT

POSITION!” “YOU’RE JUST TAKING PUNCHES!” After lunch, I go to the bathroom and see

Lila packing up her locker. I ask the instructors about it, and they confirm that she was fired. She barely passed her driving test, did poorly in her firearms training, and now failed her tactics final, which are grounds for termination.

At this same station, I watch as one of her classmates, a white man in his 20’s, also struggles to fight his instructor. The instructors tell me that this cadet is “not aggressive enough.”

He fails the grappling station several times and is instructed to go rest for a few minutes, and come back to try it again. Spencer tells me that this cadet “totally panics” when he gets into high- stress situations. “I don’t know if you saw that, but he actually started to cry when he was in front leaning [doing push ups before the fight] just now.” His second time at this station, he covers his face with his forearms while he lays on his back on the mat. Fuming, Spencer shouts,

“The bad guy isn’t gonna go away because you cover your eyes! Do something, don’t just stay there! You gotta fucking fight!” The cadet manages to get out from under his instructor, draws his fake gun, and yells “bang bang,” indicating that he has fired his gun. This cadet’s embodiment of fear, of not relishing in violence, of not actively engaging it, led to chastisement.

Despite his being a tall, white, man, his unwillingness or inability to “fucking fight” led the instructors to correct the behavior to align with the institution’s requirement of enacting violence.

During this station of the defensive tactics final, the instructors often grab the gun out of the cadet’s holster and throw it across the ring. This is supposed to test the cadet’s ability to retain their weapon and to notice when someone has taken their gun during a fight. Sometimes the cadets notice, but most of the time, they do not. In each case, whenever the cadet gets out

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from underneath the instructor (if they do), the instructors yell “WHERE’S YOUR GUN?!” Eyes wide, arms out and fingers spread, the cadets whip their heads back and forth, scanning the mat for their gun. When they spot it, they run towards it, pick it up, and aim at the instructor. Some of them yell “bang bang,” indicating that they have taken the shot. Others yell, “Put your hands up!” or another similar command. Three of the cadets pick up their gun, re-holster it, and re- engage in the fight. One of the times this happens, Spencer throws his face guard in the air, splays his arms out wide, tilts his head completely back, and shouts “WHAT THE FUCK!”

After the exam, the instructors debrief the exercise, giving critiques, thoughts, and advice. Josh tells the class that they did not use the techniques he taught them, and they did not shoot. “How many of you lost your gun?” he asks. Everyone raises their hands. “How many of you knew you lost your gun?” Most of the cadets raise their hand. “Why didn’t you shoot?” he asks. The class is silent. “Why didn’t you shoot?” he asks again. Silence. The frustration in his voice intensifies, “Seriously, why didn’t you shoot? I need to know for training purposes.” One cadet explains that he wanted to give the person a chance to be compliant with commands.

Another says he had used unnecessary lethal force in other scenarios, so he was wary to use it here. “It’s you or him or her,” Josh says, “and we want it to be you. You just fought someone on the ground for two minutes, basically being smothered. They took your weapon. Why would you not shoot them?” Josh relays an important message to the cadets: if someone threatens your life, do not give them an opportunity to change their behavior; shoot them.

This message, to prioritize your life above all else, is also hammered into the cadets during their training on frisks and searches. When the cadets do a frisk or search incorrectly, they are reprimanded by their instructors. There are two primary mistakes that the cadets make during

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this training: (1) not putting someone at a physical disadvantage; and (2) missing a weapon.

Putting someone at a physical disadvantage is accomplished by making them widen their stance, bend over at the waist, or get down onto one or both knees. The goal of these tactical strategies is to make someone physically off balance, uncomfortable, and/or smaller in stature so that an officer has control of their body. At Terryville PD’s academy, Matt is criticized for not adequately putting someone at a physical disadvantage during a frisk. Matt is white, over six feet tall, weighs about 200 pounds, and has a decade of previous law enforcement experience. He is the oldest cadet in the class – in his 40’s – and takes on a paternal role, checking in on cadets periodically and offering them encouragement. During a scenario involving a frisk and arrest, the instructor criticizes Matt for “relying” on his size. During the debrief, Kevin warns Matt not to get “complacent,” and to make sure he puts the person “at a disadvantage” when doing a pat down. Kevin demonstrates on Matt, issuing commands for him to spread his feet and put his hands against the outside wall of the gym. Kevin forcefully kicks the inner arch of Matt’s feet while instructing him to spread them more. Kevin tells him to bend over at the waist, and simultaneously grabs the back of Matt’s waistline, at the belt, and yanks backward. Matt’s hands are pressed against the building, his feet are positioned far outside hip-width, and he is bent at almost a 90-degree angle. Now, Kevin says, Matt is at a physical disadvantage.

The second, and worst, possible thing a cadet can do wrong during a frisk or search is miss a weapon. The academy instructors repeatedly warn cadets that missing a weapon during a frisk or search could be your biggest, and last, mistake. Cadets who miss weapons are severely reprimanded for putting themselves, but more importantly, other officers, at risk. At Clarkston

PD, when the cadets miss weapons during a simulated search, they were required to write

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obituaries for themselves and their partners. This arguably theatrical assignment requires the cadets to imagine the personal costs of the dangers civilians pose to them, their families, and their partners. At Terryville PD, during a traffic stop scenario, Collin finds a knife, but misses a gun, during a search. In the debrief, Sabrina lectures the class, “We’ve taught you control, we’ve taught you how to make an arrest, and you missed a gun.” After a dramatic pause, she hypothetically asks, “So which one of you is going to tell your partner’s family that you missed the gun and your partner’s dead?”

This reprimand also, at times, escalates to physical punishment. After the cadets at

Rollingwood PD learn how to conduct frisks and searches, the instructors orchestrate a drill to test their thoroughness. The instructors split the class into two groups – one plays the police officer, and the other plays the suspect. In another room, the instructors give the “suspects” weapons to hide in “unusual” places, like the waistband, sock, boot, under the armpit in their bra, or in their bra between their breasts. The cadets plant the plastic, bright yellow guns, knives, screwdrivers, razor blades, and needles on them, and then return to the gym. The instructors pair them up, and the cadet playing the officer frisks the cadet playing the suspect. After about ten minutes, the instructors tell the class to circle up in the center of the gym. One by one, the pairs of cadets report on how they think the frisk went. Most of the cadets who conducted the frisk say they think it went pretty well. The cadet who was frisked usually reports that it, in fact, did not go well: they neglected areas, they didn’t press firmly enough, and they missed weapons. One cadet finds a gun, but misses a knife. A few cadets miss guns. One cadet misses a razor blade, another a needle, another a screwdriver. The instructors arrange the found weapons in one pile

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and the missed weapons in another, both in the middle of the circle. Steadily, the two piles become roughly the same size.

After the exercise, still in the circle, the instructors hammer the cadets about the importance of frisks and searches, explaining that this is a life or death situation. It is

“inexcusable to miss guns and knives,” Josh shouts. Josh counts the weapons in each of the two piles. “Y’all missed over half of the weapons. Front leaning, NOW!” he shouts. The cadets all drop down into a plank position and hold it while Josh continues to chastise them for missing weapons, warning them that these kinds of mistakes will kill them. “Down!” he shouts, and the cadets lower themselves to the ground, hovering in a push up position. “Look at the weapons!” he shouts – they are still in piles, in the middle of the circle – “Keep your eyes on the weapons!” he repeats. The cadets continue to do push ups, with their heads strained up, staring at the piles of bright yellow, plastic weapons as they do so. The instructors take the cadets outside, where they continue to do push ups, air squats, and sit ups until they collapse into the grass.

Gendered Disciplining

Often, the disciplining reliant on verbal humiliation at the academy is rooted in sexism, where women cadets, or the abstract threat of femininity, are used as a foil against which men’s performances are evaluated. Other scholars have pointed to the ways in which “cop culture” relies on performances of masculinity that often degrade femininity (Fielding 1994; Prokos and

Padavic 2002). During my field work, men instructors berated men cadets when women outperformed them, using feelings of emasculation to motivate men to perform strength and violence better. Even when women cadets are not used as literal comparisons, instructors lob gendered insults at men who display any feelings of physical vulnerability or fear.

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I experience this myself during the first work out session at Hudson PD, which is called the “break out work out.” Within the first three days there, cadets and the instructors frequently brought up the break out work out, hyping it up as an important first step in the academy.

Instructors told the class about cadets vomiting, fainting, and needing oxygen during the work out, and warned us to “get ready for” it. On the first afternoon, I mention to Andrew, the cadet I sit next to in the classroom, that I am nervous about the break out work out. Andrew, a white,

Army veteran in his 30’s, replies that he is excited for it and that he “loves that kind of shit.”

“Can you do a push up?” he asks me, smirking. Andrew and I have developed a playful, humorous relationship in the first few days of the academy, but despite our established dynamic, his question – and his tone – irritate and insult me. He is mocking me, and I know it is because I am a woman. I barely turn my head in his direction and glare at him out of the corner of my eye.

“Yes,” I respond, maintaining my glance, “I can do several.” At lunch on the second day, a cadet in the most senior class at the academy tells me and another cadet to just “get through it,” and that “only one cadet from” her class “puked.” On the third afternoon, our instructor tells us to go to the locker room, change out, and meet in the defensive tactics gym.

For the next two hours, in 100-degree heat, we run laps, and do push ups, bear crawls, sit ups, mountain climbers, and squats, all as punishment for discretions – either not following directions or not doing something in unison - that the instructors have kept track of over the last three days. Several cadets vomit, others collapse, and one needs to receive oxygen. Importantly, during the entire two hours, we have an audience. All of the training staff, including sergeants and lieutenants, and several cadets from more senior classes are there to watch. Officers who work patrol, and therefore have no other reason to be at the academy, are there to witness us suffer.

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Each time we run a lap outside and come back into the gym, we pass through a column of officers, instructors, and sergeants yelling at us to move faster. Out of an awkward, gendered habit, I smile at the instructors as I run past them. Although I think I am being polite, I do not realize what my smile communicates until the sergeant, a white military veteran in his 40’s, forcefully shouts at me, “GRAD STUDENT, YOU AREN’T WORKING HARD ENOUGH IF

YOU’RE SMILING!”

About an hour and a half into the work out, I am winded, but getting through it comfortably. Others, including many men, are not. The sergeant uses me as a point of comparison to embarrass the class, yelling: “DO NOT LET THE GRAD STUDENT, WHO DOESN’T EVEN

HAVE TO BE HERE, SHOW YOU UP!” When I return to the academy the next week, several cadets tell me that the sergeant was “talking shit” about me on Monday when I was gone. They tell me he said I was “giggling” throughout the work out. Although of course the sergeant’s reaction and comments highlight my being an outsider to the institution (i.e., calling me “grad student”), they are also very much dependent on my being a woman. My out-performing men, in a masculine institution, in a task that men ought to be good at, was used to embarrass the cadets into performing better.

This use of women as foils also comes up at Clarkston PD during a day of firearms training. I spend the day at their indoor firing range, where the cadets complete their qualifying exams for shooting. Kurt, a white firearms instructor in his 50’s, leads the cadets through the exams. There are too many cadets in the class to all complete the exam at once, so groups of about a dozen cadets come into the range, complete the exam, and then leave, making way for the next group. After the first group shoots, two of the instructors come into the command booth,

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where I am sitting, and one of them says the two women cadets, who are standing next to each other on the far right end of the line, are “lighting it up.” They say they made fun of the men cadets who were not shooting as well, apparently telling the men cadets, “Maybe they can shoot for you and you can drive for them.” The room full of firearms instructors – all men – breaks into laughter. Again, here, women cadets who are outperforming men in shooting, a task that men ought to be good at, are used to embarrass men.

At times, this kind of gendered disciplining does not require an actual woman, just the specter of femininity. CJ Pascoe (2011) examines this gendered dynamic in a high school, where boys constantly try to dodge and then displace the label of “fag” onto other boys. Being labeled a fag, Pascoe explains, can result from a range of behaviors, including expressing emotion or warmth or demonstrating a lack of physical strength. In the police academy setting, men cadets risk being disciplined when they display any sign of physical weakness or fear, in ways that women are not.

This comes up at Terryville PD on “TASER day,” when each cadet is required to be shot in the back with a TASER gun. Anthony, the largest cadet in the class – who is 6’3” and weighs around 250 pounds – is up next. He apprehensively walks to the center of the room, nervously looking back to the line of cadets along the wall, where he just came from. He won’t stand in the spot the instructor has designated; he walks around it for over a minute. “Come on, Ant!” the class yells, cheering him on, “you got this!” He continues to look back at the line of cadets along the wall, his hands forcefully shaking. He raises his fist up to cover his mouth as he starts to gag.

“Are you going to throw up?” one of the instructors asks flatly, carelessly kicking a trash can closer to him. “I think so,” he says, his large body subtly convulsing. His classmates encourage

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him to take some deep breaths, and he finally stands in the correct spot, with two cadets grasping each of his arms. Still, while he stands there, he continues to glance behind him, where the instructor holding the TASER stands. “Stop looking behind you,” Davis shouts at him, but he does not stop glancing back. “Anthony, STOP LOOKING BEHIND YOU!” Davis yells again, his finger pointing towards the back wall, where Anthony should be facing. He continues to nervously look backwards. Davis’s tone changes, now encased with anger, and as he points at the door, he shouts “Anthony, do you want to quit? You can fucking quit right now if you want to.”

“No sir,” Anthony says, still shaking. “Then fucking face the wall, and get this done. You’re making us look bad,” the instructor says. “I don’t usually get mad,” he says to another officer,

“but damn.” In the afternoon, we go back to the classroom and watch videos of every cadet in the class being TASER-ed, and when we get to Anthony, the instructors berate him again, “well we don’t have 30 minutes to re-watch you shitting your pants,” and everyone laughs.

Months later, at Terryville PD’s graduation, the instructors again make fun of Anthony for his trepidation on TASER day. A few hours before the ceremony, Davis gives each cadet two

TASER cartridges (the equivalent of ammo for a TASER gun), and tells the cadets to test their

TASER gun, and then load a cartridge. The cadets all point their TASER guns at the ceiling and pull the trigger. A loud, deafening *buzz* fills the room. Davis turns to Anthony, he smiles, and sarcastically asks, “You gonna be okay?” Dylan slaps Anthony on the back and, making fun of him, asks, “Hey man, do you need peer support?” The room erupts into laughter. Anthony’s display of fear, which is incompatible with the masculinized performances required in policing, is disciplined repeatedly, for months after the incident. Despite, or perhaps even because of, his

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large size and muscular build, Anthony’s brief lapse in a performance of fearlessness and strength in the face of extreme pain, is considered unacceptable.

Pushed Out of Policing

While I was conducting field work, I saw several cadets leave the academy, either because they quit or because they were fired. A few were fired for failing academic or physical fitness exams, but several either quit or were fired because of their inability or unwillingness to engage in violence. In both cases – being fired or quitting – the cadets who left the academy were under careful and public scrutiny by the instructors during their tactics training. When cadets showed any sign that they may either be unwilling or unable to use violence, instructors zeroed in on them, adding a level of pressure and heightened visibility to these cadets’ performances of violence. For some cadets, this public humiliation and pressure was enough to push them out, even when they were competent in other policing skills. For others, the institution removed them.

At Rollingwood PD, there were two poor-performing cadets that the instructors were absolutely fixated on. They ridiculed Will, an Asian man in his 20’s, for running awkwardly, speaking in a stiff tone, and living with his parents. They mocked Adam, a white man in his 20’s, for his lanky figure, for using an expansive vocabulary, and for his slow, methodical manner of speech. More than anything else, though, the instructors derided both Will and Adam for being unable to fight. Both Will and Adam were fired shortly before they were scheduled to graduate. I focus on Adam here because he agreed to do an interview with me after he was fired.

Adam is white, blonde, about 6 feet tall, and notably thin. He has a deep voice and southern drawl, and speaks slowly, his mouth hanging open for a moment after he finishes each sentence. A few months after he was fired, I interview Adam in a Starbucks in south

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Rollingwood. As is the case with almost every officer I met (they are a punctual bunch), Adam arrives early, and we sit at a high-top table in the middle of the coffee shop. He wears work boots, a collared shirt, and often finishes off his sentences with “ma’am.”

About 15 minutes into the interview, Adam tells me that he thinks he chose the “wrong” department for his “first academy.” I ask what he means, and he responds:

So obviously I've got no military experience, I didn't go into this with a fighter's

mindset. And I don't know how to keep my head down. So, my tendency to use

large words to talk about small things I think drew a target on my back. And, I

just couldn't punch hard enough to make them shut up about it. So, the general

environment here is more focused on your ability to punch the problem. And I

didn't expect it because I hadn't talked to anyone, so I didn't go in with that same

mindset. I went in with the image of the police officer that I had from my

experience. Like I said, I don't have occasion to deal with the "warrior" cop.

Adam says he garnered extra attention from his instructors because he lacked tactical skill and a warrior’s mentality. Adam was indeed under a microscope by his instructors. During one day of the scenario training, for example, an evaluator comes into the conference room to report that

Adam failed a scenario. The instructor in charge of tracking the cadet’s performance on an Excel sheet exclaims, “Oh yay!” and taps his fingertips together, giddy with excitement. Later on, when Adam is about to go through a scenario that requires him to run after and arrest a suspect, an instructor asks the others in the conference room, “Does anyone wanna see Adam chase someone? Just sayin’, it’s fair game.” A few instructors jump on it, and head out to go watch

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him. Adam often attracted a crowd of officers to watch his performance on tactics exams and scenarios, who were eager to mock him both publicly and privately.

During his tactical training week, instructors constantly berate Adam, both to his face and not, for what they see as his inability to fight. On the last day of their first tactics week, the instructors pair up the cadets and require them to fight one another in a mud pit. This ritual comes up when I ask Adam about his experience during tactical training:

I had a hell of a lot of fun with both of them. But then, you come around to your

final implementation for each one, and then the last day of week 1 was fighting in

the mud pit. And, you know, you do it until you're done. And my opponent was

James, especially chosen for me. And he was told that he was to go 100%, and if

he didn't, that we would be there all day. So he did, which I thank him for because

I would rather have gone through it all at once than spend all day. But, his 100%

and my 100% are world's apart. Because, you know, he was in training to do

Navy Seals, and that's not me. So, sparing every detail, at the end of it, he

apologized to me because we were at it for awhile, and I had spaghetti arms by

the time we were done.

Throughout the academy, the instructors frequently set up Adam to fail, particularly with regards to fighting and tactics. In this example, they purposely paired him with James, one of the top cadets in his class, who weighs around 70 pounds more than him, to fight.

The instructors repeatedly talked to me about wanting to fire Adam. They were waiting until they had enough evidence to finally do it, they explained. Eventually, they did, and just a few days before graduation, they pulled him into the administrative offices and gave him the

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option to either resign or be fired. According to Adam, and his instructors, he did fine academically and was able to pass his physical fitness tests, but was unable to fight or make quick decisions. He resigned, left the academy, and, despite his experience, tells me he still intends to apply to other departments.

Sometimes, this institutional disciplining, including the heightened pressure, visibility of performances, and intensity of the anticipated consequences of mistakes, pushes otherwise- qualified cadets out of the academy. This was true for Elisa, one of Adam’s classmates, who quit just four months into the academy, directly after tactics training. Elisa is white, blonde, around five feet tall, and athletic. She has a black belt in karate and has participated in competitive cheerleading and CrossFit. I find out about Elisa’s experience at the academy from her classmates, who speak highly of her, and express disappointment that she quit. Jacob, the class president at Rollingwood PD, tells me, “There was a very capable girl in my academy class who

I’m still good friends with, her name’s Elisa …. She could move more weight than a lot of the guys, but she was also about five foot two …. She ended up resigning.” Patrick, another classmate, tells me, “Elisa …. we were good friends, too. After the first tactics week, she was like, ‘I just don’t think being aggressive and putting hands on people is for me.’ She was back and forth for a while, and then she finally just said, ‘I’m done.’” I interview Elisa a few months after she quit the academy, and she explains that after the first week of tactical training, she began to have doubts about continuing to pursue the career.

As she describes it, Elisa froze during a use-of-force scenario at the academy and

“couldn’t make the move” to go hands-on with a suspect. She explains what happened:

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I was with my partner, he was a male, also not very big. And we were at a bar,

and the bar owner had asked this guy to leave …. Of course he was the biggest

dude in the room …. so we walk in, they start harassing us, and eventually they

start throwing drinks at us, like cups, which is immediately like, we could have

just cuffed them then because they were throwing stuff at us …. and I just-, I

couldn't make the move. And eventually, my partner tried tasing him, I tried

batoning him – it's like all imaginary – but my partner pulled his gun, like, in a

bar. It just downward spiraled, but in the whole thing, I didn't do anything. And

even when he [her partner] pulled his gun, I was like, Holy shit, why'd you pull

your gun? Why'd you pull your gun? But I hadn't done anything, so he was just

like, I'm gonna pull my gun …. And it took me forever to go in and handcuff him.

It was just that I couldn't make the move…I had so many opportunities to go

hands on, and I couldn't do it. And it was stifling fear of like, I know this is fake,

why am I not doing anything? What is wrong with me? Why can't I do it?

Despite having a background in karate, Elisa explains that when the tactics training began at the academy, she could not will herself to initiate a physical contact. I ask her what specifically she felt afraid of, and she responds:

It was just like a fear of making the wrong move, for one. You're being watched

by the whole instructor board, especially me, because everyone wanted to know:

is she gonna fuck up? And like the fear of getting it wrong was probably the

biggest thing for me, and I think that just added to the flame of like stifling me.

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Elisa points directly to the heightened visibility of her performance and a fear of making the wrong decision in front of her instructors.

This fear, she explains, initiated a spiral in her mental health, which ultimately led her to quit. During her defensive tactics and scenario-based training, Elisa explains:

I would go home and simmer on scenarios that would just fill my head …. like,

the week of DT, we go through all these defensive tactics, but then I would go

home and be like, okay how am I gonna use this? Where would I be stuck in that

position? And you create these things, and it's like a rabbit hole, and I would keep

myself up, like, okay how would this happen? And what would happen to me?

And what would I do? So it was kind of a train wreck for me. I just couldn't turn it

off …. I was literally making myself sick. Like, it was eating me alive.

After a few weeks of feeling tormented, trying to decide if she should continue the academy or leave, Elisa quit. This decision was tough to make, Elisa tells me: “I was super proud to be in the academy, and to walk away was really hard.” She does not regret her decision, she explains, and is glad that she is not out on the streets working patrol with her classmates.

Elisa explains that she performed well throughout the rest of the academy, but she could not get through the tactics training. Everyone she spoke to about it, she says, “tried to get me to stay, begged me to stay.” She explains, “I had all the other boxes checked. I was fit, I was good in the academics, I wasn't socially awkward …. I could speak Spanish. Everything else was good for me.” Despite having years of experience competing in sports and practicing martial arts, Elisa was unable or unwilling to use violence in the ways that the department required of her.

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During our conversation, Elisa describes feeling a fear of being overpowered by someone bigger than her, but ultimately, explains that she quit the academy because she was unable to initiate a physical interaction. After some back and forth on this, I try to clarify with Elisa:

Samantha: So some cadets I think had trouble towards the end of it [the academy]

with how to apply the law, or making an on-the-spot decision and stuff like that,

so it sounds like – I'm just trying to make sure I get it – it sounds like for you, it

was this physical conflict that you weren't sure about. Is that what it was about?

Elisa: Yeah, mostly the physical, like, being able, (1) to go hands-on first, like to

make the first contact. And then, (2) make the right decision when I go hands-on.

Like, I think – I never did this – but like overreacting, kinda like my partner

pulling a gun, and knowing like, there's serious consequences if I do that. And

that would send my brain into overdrive. So just thinking about like, okay you

gotta apply policy, and you have to apply the law, and knowing all these things,

and be able to react, I just like-, it was overwhelming for me. But, the biggest

thing being the physical barrier of not being able to step into that first contact, or

just like physical-, like going hands on.

Elisa was unwilling, and as a result unable, to initiate physical control over another person, and as a result, was subject to heightened scrutiny and visibility. Her experience differs from Adam, though, in that her instructors asked her to stay, and despite this, she decided to leave. In contrast to Adam, her instructors believed she had the ability to engage in violence, and that through more practice, she would improve. However, despite these urgings, Elisa’s fear of making the wrong decision and her apprehension to engage in violence led to her quitting.

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While at the academy, the cadets are subject to humiliation, punishment, and disciplining, all of which encourage them to perform violence in willing and competent ways. When cadets demonstrate an unwillingness to stand their ground in a fight – on fight day, for example – their instructors lob insults, shout, and engage in physical displays of anger. When cadets do not perform the tactics skills they learn in their training competently, especially when they do not use enough force or fail to find a weapon during a search, the instructors yell, require the cadets to repeat the exercise, or physically punish them. Those cadets who repeatedly show an inability to use violence are subject to increased levels of visibility and scrutiny, which often results in the removal of these cadets from the institution.

TACTICS AS SEXUAL DOMINATION

There is a sexual undercurrent to the tactics training at these police academies, which, although barely acknowledged by the participants, is a defining feature of the training. Feminist scholars have theorized about the relationship between violence and sexual pleasure within a patriarchal system of gender. Catharine MacKinnon (1987) famously argued that heterosexual sex is defined by male dominance and force, and that this dominance and force is what constitutes the erotic. The domination of women’s bodies, these scholars argue, is always sexual.

The training that cadets receive, as outlined in the previous two sections, teaches embodied strategies of dominating other people. This training, I argue, is rooted in the sexualizing and domination of women’s bodies.

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Dominating Women’s Bodies

This domination of women’s bodies is perhaps most vividly illustrated when the cadets learn how to conduct frisks and searches. The institution, and the instructors, acknowledge the sexual, and potentially sexually violent, nature of this kind of touch in two primary ways: (1) departments have different policies dictating same vs. opposite sex searches; (2) instructors warn men cadets that inevitably, they will be accused of sexual harassment or assault from a woman while on duty. In these lessons, instructors emphasize the need for men to control women’s bodies in order to protect their own vulnerabilities. In contrast, the safety or comfort of women, including women cadets, is not considered a priority.

At Rollingwood PD, the cadets spend a considerable amount of time learning to conduct same, and then opposite-sex, searches. The cadets are told that men officers are allowed to frisk, but not search, women. Conducting a frisk is considered appropriate if an officer believes someone may be armed, and involves the officer touching someone, over their clothing, to look for weapons. A full search – which involves turning out pockets, taking off shoes, and can include shaking out clothing – cannot be conducted until after an arrest has been made. At each department, regardless of whether or not men officers are allowed to search women, there are rules dictating the way in which the officer touches/inspects “sensitive areas,” which include the groin, butt, and breasts. This also applies to women officers searching men’s “sensitive areas,” though instructors do not spend nearly as much time discussing this scenario.

At Rollingwood PD, the cadets spend a full day learning how to conduct same and opposite-sex frisks and searches. The day before, Rob tells me that watching the cadets learn to search is very “awkward.” “Why? Because they have to touch each other?” I ask. “Yeah,” he

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responds, “it’s like, come on guys, we all know what boobs feel like. Even hard boobs aren’t as hard as a gun. Like, come on.” Before the cadets practice on one another, Tyler, demonstrates how to conduct a frisk and a search. Tyler begins by demonstrating on himself, and as he does so, notes the inherent invasiveness to this kind of touch: “You’re gonna have to touch each other.

There are dirty dudes out on the streets, and you’re gonna have to touch them too.”

Demonstrating how they need to touch someone around their groin, Tyler presses his hand against his pants, into the crease where his groin and leg meet. “You need to go all the way to where the body ends,” he says “because there are weapons there.” “It’s uncomfortable,” he acknowledges, but you need to do it. Tyler warns that inevitably, when you frisk people, they will say something about you touching the groin area of their body. Pointing to the sexualized nature of this kind of touch, Tyler imitates a man who is being frisked by a man officer: “You’ll get a lot of ‘suck my dick faggot,’ and ‘oh you like that, don’t you faggot?’ and you just have to keep doing the frisk and not let it distract you. You can’t do anything about it.”

Next, Tyler calls up a man cadet to fully demonstrate same-sex searches between men.

The cadet is white, relatively short, and has broad shoulders and an athletic build. The cadet stares straight ahead, chin high, while Tyler touches his back, waistline, chest, and legs. Tyler clarifies that when men frisk women, they should use the back of their hand on their breasts, and then use their extended thumb to press between their breasts, and curve around, so the back of their hand presses underneath each breast, and up into their armpit. Tyler comments, “We all know what breasts feel like,” so although it might be hard to immediately tell if something hard is actually underwire in a bra, you should be able to determine if it is a gun or knife. When you are out on the street, he adds, there “are nasty-ass transient women who don’t wear bras, and

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their breasts are,” he motions with his hands that their breasts are at their hips or over their stomach. “For those women, you have to get under them, even though it’s nasty,” he adds, “there are beer cans, sandwiches, and sometimes guns, under those things.” The class laughs.

After finishing his search of the man cadet, Tyler calls on a woman cadet to come to the front of the class. The cadet is white, tall, slender, and has light hair and eyes. Tyler, now demonstrating on the woman cadet to show the men in the class how to frisk women, reiterates that for an opposite sex frisk, the sensitive areas on a female are the groin, butt, and chest. He starts the frisk the same way, reminding the men in the class that touching the waistband, stomach area, and back on a woman are all the same as when frisking a man. When he gets to the cadet’s chest, he again explains that men need to use the back of their hand, and he demonstrates, pressing down and swiping the back of his hand across the top of her breasts. As Tyler gets to her chest, her breathing gets heavier, her sternum moving up and down dramatically. Though her mouth is naturally arranged in a subtle frown, the corners of her mouth droop more noticeably, and she stares at the ground.

Talking us through it, Tyler slides his thumb along her sternum, and then moves the back of his hand underneath her breasts, in a half circle, and up the side of her armpit. As he does this,

Tyler insists, “it’s the thumb side guys, not the other one, like you’re a fucking weirdo,” highlighting the specific way in which they are expected to touch women. He shows that if they use the other side of their hand, they will end up cupping each individual breast with their palms, which is more invasive, and leaves them more vulnerable to accusations of misconduct. He demonstrates the “wrong way” as he says this, cupping the cadet’s breasts in his hand, and her shoulders shiver. Tyler again insists that the cadets get comfortable with this: “Oh no, it’s a girl,

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she has boobs. No, you can’t do that.” No one demonstrates how women can search women – there are no women instructors to do this – but Tyler describes it, explaining that women officers searching women can pat down breasts just as any other body part, using the palm of their hand instead of the back.

For the next hour, the two women cadets in the group, both of whom are thin and white, are passed around the class so that every man cadet can practice searching them. The women cadets, with an airtight professionalism, move from one group to the next, repeatedly being searched by over a dozen men in their class. No one acknowledges the discomfort that this may have caused the women cadets, and it’s treated as an absolute necessity so that the men cadets can learn how to protect themselves from potential vulnerabilities that women on the streets may pose. They need to learn how to frisk women’s bodies here, this logic follows, so that when they are on the streets, they do not miss weapons that may be a risk to their safety.

After they finish searching one another, the instructors ask the cadets if they have any questions. Largely, the cadets’ questions focus on the specifics around how men can or should frisk women. One man in the class asks for clarification on how to search a woman who is wearing a skirt or dress. Another man asks whether or not he would be allowed to pull a woman’s sports bra away from her body and shake it to let weapons drop out. In answering these questions, the instructors repeatedly remind the cadets that everything will be on camera, so as long as you frisk within policy, no one will be able to accuse you of harassment or assault. In this case, they explain, the body cameras are your best friend. The concern here is that women civilians will create false stories or misinterpret men officer’s touch as sexually invasive, not that men officers may actually inappropriately touch women’s bodies while on duty.

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This anxiety around men officers being accused of harassing or assaulting women while on patrol also came up when cadets were put through scenarios during their training. In one scenario at Rollingwood PD, the cadets are required to make a traffic stop, run the driver and passenger’s name through dispatch to check for warrants, and, upon finding out that the driver has a warrant, arrest and search her. The cadets are supposed to find the gun she has in her shorts and the small bag of drugs hidden in the side of her sports bra. One cadet – the class president, a

South Asian man in his 20’s – lifts the woman officer’s shirt completely up to to her neck, exposing her bra to his partner on the scenario and the pair of officers evaluating the scenario.

When the instructors ask why he did this, he explained that he wanted to make sure his entire search was captured on his body camera in order to avoid any complaints. Several other cadets have trouble finding the bag of drugs hidden in this officer’s sports bra. The officer tells the instructors that the cadets are missing the drugs, so, in an attempt to check if the bag is easy to find, one of the men instructors repeatedly frisks the woman officer, gliding the back of his hand against her breasts, sliding his thumb between them, and pressing the back of his hand underneath each breast and around her armpit. They decide to add more crack rocks to the bag so that cadets have an easier time feeling them. When discussing the problem, and while being frisked by her colleague, the woman officer’s tone is even and matter-of-fact. Her shoulders are relaxed, her breathing smooth, and her face calm – this is business as usual, her body tells me.

Sexualizing Women’s Bodies

Throughout the tactics training, men cadets are taught to touch women in ways that are dominating, but “professional.” This is part of the job, they are taught, and both the men and women cadets participate in the training without openly acknowledging the sexual and

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dominating nature of these exercises with regards to one another. As outlined above, men officers are taught to be wary of women civilians while on patrol, who may hide weapons in their bras or falsely accuse them of sexual assault, but there is a distinction made between the dangerous women out on the streets, and the professional women here at the academy. During this training, there is an institutional attempt to desexualize women cadets’ bodies, while simultaneously dominating them. The dynamic is similar to discourses of colorblind racism, where the logic dictates that acknowledging race is what makes something racist. In this context, it is as if by not acknowledging the domination, this means the touch is not dominating. There is a persistent clumsiness to the way in which the institution positions women’s bodies in this space, where the only two options seem to be either de-gendering and masculinizing women (i.e., pretending they are not women) or sexualizing, objectifying, and dominating them.

The cracks in this façade – of the attempt to pretend women’s bodies are desexualized in this space – appear in several ways at the academy. Men officers talk about women officers in objectifying and violently sexual ways, women cadets’ bodies are shielded from men, and the department puts women officers’ bodies on display. At Clarkston PD, the firearms instructors there – all men – openly talk about their sexual pursuits of women officers. I spent the day at

Clarkston PD watching the cadets complete their qualifying firearms exams, and during down time, the instructors and I sit in the back office together. The office has just enough space for three cluttered cubicles and a long, communal table, where the officers drink coffee in the morning and eat lunch together in the afternoon. Firearms-related posters, stickers, and awards cover the walls, filing cabinets, and desks. The only poster in the office that is not directly related to firearms shows several women in military uniforms, with the title “Marine Women” along the

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top. There are no women officers in this unit, so the presence of this poster seems more about sexualizing and objectifying, rather than supporting, women in the military.

During lunch, the officers tell me about different pranks they have played on each other at work. Wes, a white officer in his 50’s, tells me about a joke he played on Royce, another white officer in his 50’s. Wes tells me that an older Asian woman officer came into the firing range once, and, pointing at her, he asked Royce, “You fucked her, didn’t you?” Royce denies it, Wes tells me, and as a joke, later in the day, Wes takes Royce’s phone and texts the woman officer:

“I’m coming over later, we’re fucking.” “Then she responds!” Wes shouts, slapping the table and laughing, “something like ‘What time?’ So then I was like, oh damn they really did fuck!” Wes describes the woman as older and suggests that she is physically unattractive. After describing her in this way, he laughs and, making a blatant connection between violence and sexualizing women, adds, “I mean a kill’s a kill.” At the time, I was surprised that these officers – all men somewhere between 10-25 years older than me – spoke so explicitly around me. Months later, while analyzing my data, I considered this dynamic to be an even greater indication of the institutional acceptance and encouragement of this kind of sexual domination. Perhaps these officers were sending me a message about what my place was in their institution, and what it meant for my body to be there.

Sometimes, these messages about violence and the objectification of women’s bodies were more specifically directed towards me. At Rollingwood PD, for example, during one of the tactics-intensive weeks of training, the instructors mention to me that John, a white cadet in his

20’s, “won’t stop staring” at me. The instructors call John “Gerber” because they say he looks like the Gerber baby, and they incessantly make fun of how he looks and his low performance in

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tactics. John is thin, has a large, round head, and his mannerisms are mechanical: he scrunches up his mouth and darts his eyes sharply when watches the instructors demonstrate a new skill.

David leans over to me and asks, “did you notice he [John] won’t stop fucking staring at you?” I had not, actually, until he mentions it, and then I definitely do notice. The instructors seem both annoyed and amused by it.

The instructors pair up the cadets to practice frisking one another. Once the pairs of cadets are arranged into two lines, the instructors rearrange a few of them, so that John is positioned directly in front where I am sitting in the gym. They tell John to switch with his partner so that he is even closer to me, facing me directly. They have never rearranged cadets like this before, so I know they are doing it specifically to put John in front of me. I ask David,

“did you just put John right in front of me on purpose?” He laughs, and in a melodic tone says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and walks away. At the time, I found the display to be both annoying and funny. I joke to Rob, “Well when I have a stalker case, I’m gonna have you guys testify.” Rob laughs and says, “Are you kidding? We’ll take care of it ourselves,” and then alludes to the collection of guns he owns. The only reasonable interpretation of Rob’s comment is that he is suggesting he would either threaten or kill John, or another man, who stalked me. In this instance, these officers – all men – are sexualizing me, putting me in a position to feel uncomfortable and possibly unsafe, and then offering to protect and save me from the situation they created. They first put my body on display for a man cadet, and then propose violence to protect my body from men.

During tactics training, the academy instructors treat the visual exposure of men and women’s bodies differently, highlighting the way in which the space sexualizes women’s bodies

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and conceptualizes them as out of place. This dynamic is particularly salient at Terryville PD on

TASER day, when an instructor shoots each cadet with a TASER gun. Officially, instructors tell me that this exercise is meant to expose the cadets to the physical experience of being shot with a

TASER gun so that they better understand this level of force. Informally, however, TASER and pepper spray day are also highly-visible, symbolic rituals testing devotion to the job and appropriate performances of masculinity.

Before the exercise begins, the instructors place all of the cadet’s names on individual pieces of paper and throw them in a hat. We all enter the gym and the administrative assistant pulls a name out of the hat, one by one, to determine the order the cadets will go in. Davis stands in the middle of the room, on a blue mat, with a TASER gun on his belt and an open box of new cartridges on the ground next to him. The cadets all line up against the far wall, waiting for their turn. When their name is called, each cadet joins Davis on the blue mat, about five feet away, their back turned to him. Two classmates stand on either side of the cadet, grasping their shoulder and arm, ready to slowly lower them to the ground when they get shot in the back. The room falls silent, the instructor aims the TASER gun at the cadet, and we all watch as the two red laser dots hover on the back of the cadet’s uniform, one near the shoulder blade and the other around the lower back. When the instructor pulls the trigger, a jolting buzz echoes in the gym while two roughly two-inch metal probes attached to conductive wires fly out of the TASER gun, hit the cadet’s back, and hook into their skin. The cadets’ reactions to the electric current varies, but in general, their bodies stiffen, their heads convulse backward, and they yell. For smaller cadets, I can hear the electric current shaking in their voices. The TASER gun continues to emit a current for five extraordinarily long seconds. Afterwards, the cadet’s two classmates

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carefully, but forcefully, yank the probes out of their back, pull their shirt up, swab the probe entry points with alcohol wipes and put band aids over the small wounds.

When I enter the gym, I notice that the instructors have set up a blue mat as a temporary wall in the corner of the room. After several men cadets go through the exercise, and no one makes use of the walled-off area, I ask Davis why they have set up the mats this way. He casually replies, “Oh, just so that the females aren’t exposed when they take the probes out.”

Indeed, each woman cadet is paired up with at least one other woman, and after the probes are pulled out of their backs, the two women go behind the blue mats to apply the basic first aid. No one has asked the women cadets if they want this extra measure of modesty, and no one asks the men cadets if they would like to go behind the wall to have their first aid applied. This practice highlights that women’s bodies cannot be seen by men in a way that is not sexualized. Although perhaps the women cadets appreciated the ability to not expose their bodies publicly, the fact that only women were expected to shield their bodies demonstrates the way in which the violence enacted against women during this exercise is necessarily eroticized.

However, at the same time that women’s bodies are hidden from view, they are also put on display. This display of women comes up at Rollingwood PD, where they created a photo calendar of women officers in an attempt to attract more women recruits. The calendar, titled

“Warrior Women,” features photos of women officers at the department, in various policing settings. The first featured photo, situated above the month of January, shows three women officers in an indoor shooting range. One woman is laying on the ground, left eye centered on the scope, shooting a rifle. A second woman is positioned on one knee, both arms raised in front of her, shooting a pistol. A third women is standing, legs planted underneath her, shooting a

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shotgun. Underneath the photo, a quotation reads, “I train body, mind, and heart to best serve the community and my department family. Body, so that I may stay in the fight. Mind, so I find the best solutions. Heart, so that no matter what, I act with integrity and bravery.” Other photos in the calendar show women officers – all in uniform – on horseback, boxing, running, riding motorcycles, posing with their children, and wrestling. The overarching ethos of the calendar is: whatever they [men] can do, we can do too, and maybe even better.

Of course, the sexual undercurrent of a photo calendar featuring only women is difficult to ignore. Sports Illustrated Swimsuit calendars, featuring women supermodels, athletes, and celebrities in bikinis, and many professional sports teams’ cheerleader calendars have, for decades, maintained an enduring position in American culture. The women featured in the

“Warrior Women” calendar are wearing police uniforms, not bikinis, and are photographed while completing tasks associated with policing, like shooting, fighting, running, and investigating.

However, the existence of the calendar – and there is no men’s equivalent at the department – highlights a tension in women’s position at the department.

Women can, and do, excel in the tactics training at police academies. However, the institution does not quite know what to do with women’s bodies at the academy, and the result is a simultaneous effort to both de-gender and objectify them. Cadets are taught that women’s bodies may pose a grave threat to men officers, both from hiding weapons between breasts or in bras, or by accusing officers of sexual misconduct. At the academy, women bodies are touched invasively to prepare for this threat. This touch is considered to be professional and necessary. At the same time, though, women cadets and officers are sexually objectified – both by being

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hidden and put on display – by men officers and the institution. The domination of women is always sexualized, and the academy tactics training is rooted in this sexual domination.

CONCLUSION

When video footage of the police making arrests surfaces on the internet, they are often criticized for the ways that they talk to, and interact with, civilians. Those critical of the videos usually comment that the officer’s voice and commands were overly aggressive, that they touched the civilian’s body in a forceful and/or violating way, and that they needlessly escalated the level of violence. Especially in cases where a police officer shoots someone who is unarmed, public outcry centers around the officer’s mistaken assumption that this person – who is more often than not, a man of color – had a weapon.

In this chapter, I show how these kinds of violent interactions are made. In the academy, cadets are taught to talk to and interact with civilians in exactly the ways that are shown in this kind of video footage. Instructors urge cadets to use a loud, deep voice to issue commands, to get physical at the first sign of noncompliance, to forcefully position other people’s bodies to communicate dominance, to fight in ways that hurt other people, and to shoot as soon as they perceive a threat. Through repetition and disciplining, the cadets learn to embody the role of the police officer through violence and domination. The police officers that are shown in most of these publicized videos (there are, of course, cases that even officers agree are inexcusable) are simply acting like police officers.

Cadets are taught that they will have to make life or death decisions, and that in those situations, they should choose their own lives, even if it means someone else dies. Of course, instructors do not encourage cadets to shoot unarmed civilians, but they do train the cadets to

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assume that everyone is armed, and to shoot as soon as a threat is present. Given this training, it is not hard to understand why police officers repeatedly end up shooting unarmed civilians who run away, turn around suddenly, or reach into their pockets to grab a phone or wallet. Quite simply, they are trained to react in this way. At the academy, cadets are punished for not fighting or not using lethal force, sometimes amounting to removal from the institution. The cadets who graduate, then, are willing to use force, taught how to fight, and conditioned to shoot.

There are several important implications to be drawn from these findings. First, the fact that officers are trained to act in these ways provides insight into why, in the majority of police- caused homicides, the officer is not indicted. These ways of interacting with civilians are well within the parameters of the institution’s norms, and are, in fact, designed to be this way.

Officers are expected to demand compliance, regard any hint of non-compliance or resistance to be a precursor for a deadly threat, and to air on the side of caution, i.e., violence. Although the judicial system, not the police, dictate whether or not officers are indicted, these decisions are made based on the ways that officers are expected, and allowed, to behave. Officers are not indicted in most of these cases because they behaved in the ways they are supposed to, according to their institution, and the way that the laws have allowed, and encouraged them, to.

Second, this research sheds light onto patterns of gendered police violence. Although public discussion about police violence tends to focus on the use of deadly force against Black men, the police also engage in gendered, often sexual, violence. Scholars and activists, particularly Black feminists (Brunson and Miller 2006; Crenshaw et al. 2015; Kraska and

Kappeler 1995; Malone Gonzalez 2019; Ritchie and Davis 2017), have shown that the police engage in sexual harassment and assault of women, especially women of color. My findings

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demonstrate how the tactics training that police officers receive is rooted in a system of sexual domination of women’s bodies. Cadets are taught to touch women’s bodies invasively without acknowledging women’s vulnerabilities. Instead, they are taught that men are vulnerable to women’s sexualized bodies and of women’s accusations of sexual misconduct.

Lastly, my findings call into question whether or not women can be the solution to the problem of police violence. In contemporary discussions about police violence, hiring more women officers has been one major policy suggestion to decrease the use of violence. As I show in this chapter, although women cadets certainly experience gendered dilemmas in the academy around violence, they can, and do excel in these spaces. Women face added barriers to performing well in the academy, but they, just like their male classmates, are taught to use violence to control and harm others.

Being a police officer does, of course, come with certain risks of harm. While on patrol, officers are sometimes punched, kicked, tackled, and killed. I am not arguing that police officers should entirely ignore these risks, or that they should not learn how to physically defend themselves in situations that require it. However, I am arguing that the way in which cadets are taught to use violence assumes a troubling control over people’s bodies. They are taught not just to defend themselves, but how to control, incapacitate, and harm other people in the name of the greater good of society. In the academy, officers often tell cadets that in a high-stress situation, they will not “rise to the occasion,” but rather, “fall back to their training.” Cadets’ physical bodies are conditioned, through repeated drills and institutional disciplining, to react in specific ways. The outcome of this kind of training are clear: the police are quick to escalate violence, and civilians are dying as a result.

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Chapter 5: Conclusion

There are many memories from my field work at police academies that have stuck with me, both in my mind and body. Some of these memories make me feel devastated, others hopeful, but most of them spark a deep, persistent feeling of conflict. Often, when I think about my time in the field, with so many cadets and officers who I came to know well, I wonder: what does society want from police officers? It is true that emergency responders are needed; that some people do drive cars recklessly, steal from, rape, and murder others; that officers, on a daily basis, are required to respond to tragic, graphic, and sometimes dangerous calls; and that in reality, I want to be able to call someone who is willing and able to help me in an emergency, which, admittedly, may involve the use of violence. It is also true that police officers harass, assault, rape, and kill people while on duty, and that these patterns are gendered and racialized.

When I consider my own feelings of conflict, I think about one particular memory from my field work. I spent every day for two weeks at Rollingwood PD’s academy, watching their final scenario-based training exercises. Most of the time, I rode around on a golf cart with one or two officers, making stops at the scenarios happening all over the academy’s campus. I also spent time in the “war room,” a conference room in the middle of the building, where officers tracked the progression of each scenario and cadets’ performances. On the eighth day, while I sit in the war room, a young, stylish, white man walks in with a bunch of camera equipment. He has dark brown curly hair and wears round, turtle shell glasses, khaki shorts, and a floral-print, dark button-up shirt. I would not have needed to spend a year at police academies to immediately recognize that he was not a cop. He walks in the room with Steve, one of the sergeants at the academy, and I gather from their conversation with the other instructors in the room, in which

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they reference the Chief of Police, that he is not a reporter; he is there to film the scenario training as part of a marketing video for the department.

I hear the videographer say, “Yeah, he’s [referencing the Chief] looking for more of a guardian than a warrior vibe.” Steve asks Keith, a white instructor in his 50’s, and Paul, a white corporal in his 40’s, which scenarios are currently running, and which ones might be good for the videographer to record. The intensity of the scenarios has increased as days have passed, so now, on day eight, almost all of today’s scenarios involve deadly force. Keith and Paul describe the scenarios currently running, and the videographer replies, “Yeah I don’t think that’s what they’re

[command staff] wanting.” Steve explains that the Chief and Commanders are looking for more of a “community policing vibe.” Keith turns from looking at the whiteboard, where the scenarios are listed, back towards the table, and in a prickly tone says, “Yeah, well, nothing we’re doing today is going to be what you’re looking for.” Steve and Paul end up deciding to set up a scenario that is not actually running today for the videographer to record. Looking at each another, they suggest different scenarios: maybe a park disturbance? Maybe a littering call?

Something civil-related, they say. In the meantime, the cadets are actually running scenarios where they get ambushed by a man with an AK-47 and later go through a round-robin of back- to-back lethal use-of-force scenarios.

The videographer leaves the room with Steve and Paul. Brett, a white officer in his 40’s, sits on the other end of the table, next to Keith. Facing Keith, he says “You know what? People don’t want violent cops until violence is brought to them. Then they want violent cops. But if we have to pretend we aren’t violent to make people happy, then so be it. And we will still be there to protect them when they need us.” I was struck by Brett’s comment, because of the intensity of

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his claim, but also because it captured the conflict I had been feeling about policing. Throughout my year in the field, I saw that violence fills the arteries, the capillaries even, of this institution. I felt troubled by the way in which violence shaped the hiring process and the training that cadets received at the academy. And yet, Brett was right: if I called the police because I felt I was in physical danger, the reason I would call is because I would need them to use violence in a way that I could not, would not, or did not, want to.

VIOLENCE IN HIRING AND TRAINING

Brett’s comment also illustrates the argument that I make in this dissertation through my examination of hiring and training: that violence is an essential, constitutive, and structural requirement of pursuing police work. During my time in the field, it felt like violence pervaded every inch of the space, and in this dissertation, I have shown how that violence shapes the organizational discourses, ideologies, and practices at the academy.

When I talk about my research about police violence with others, I often get the question: isn’t it really about selection? This question suggests that police violence happens because police departments are hiring already-violent people. The United States is heavily invested in individualistic understandings of both successes and failures. Billionaires are thought to have achieved their level of wealth by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, and folks in prison are thought to have landed in their position because of poor decision making and selfishness. It is not surprising, then, that in this country, an attractive answer to the question of why the police engage in racist violence is that there are racist, violent people who then become officers.

While, of course, racist officers exist (racist people exist in every institution), in this dissertation, I instead focus on how the procedures, discourses, and practices that dictate the

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hiring process result in racist organizational patterns of violence. This study shows that the way in which police departments conceptualize the ideal candidate, and the procedures and practices organized around this discourse, contribute to patterns of racist violence. Although historically, police departments often recruited directly from racist, violent organizations (Hadden 2003) and explicitly excluded women from patrol positions (Martin 1982), they have now instituted diversity initiatives to attract more women and men of color officers. The story is not that police departments are systematically advantaging racist, violent white men, and excluding women and men of color, in the hiring process. Instead, the way in which departments conceptualize the

“good officer,” and thus the successful candidate, works to sustain this white, male organization, even without white men. Police departments hire candidates, regardless of gender and race, who share a worldview that is rooted in binary beliefs about individualism, morality, and violence, which, I argue, positions the institution to engage in racist violence.

In public conversations, it is often suggested that building trust between communities of color and the police will reduce rates of police violence. If communities of color trusted the police, this logic goes, then they would be more compliant and deferential in their interactions with the police, and the police would not feel the need to use force. This way of framing the issue places responsibility on communities of color, not the police, by focusing on distrust, rather than misconduct. This narrative also sets up a false binary, leaving no space for police officers who are also members of communities of color. This dissertation is critical of this narrative, examining instead how the police are taught to think about their relationship with the public. I show that cadets are taught to be warriors, and that their enemy, the bad guys, are Black men.

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Importantly, the warrior and guardian construct is gendered and racialized in ways that complicate women and men of color officers’ position within the institution.

Violence takes form in many ways – ideological, institutional, verbal – but in the case of police violence, it is, among other things, embodied. A police officer uses their body to control, dominate, hurt, or kill another person’s body. This study takes seriously the role of the body, and shows that the academy conditions cadets’ bodies, through repetition and institutional disciplining, to engage in violence. The academy tactics training teaches cadets to use their voices and bodies to communicate authority, control someone’s freedom and movement, and to incapacitate or hurt them. The cadets practice these skills over and over again, while their instructors shame and berate them, often in sexist ways, until they master them. As I show in this dissertation, the tactics training is rooted in a system of sexual domination, where men’s comfort and safety are prioritized and women’s bodies are sexualized and objectified.

HOW CAN WE REDUCE POLICE VIOLENCE?

In this dissertation, I spend a lot of time discussing reform efforts that I think do not, and will not, reduce police violence. Specifically, I argue that demographic diversity initiatives and de-escalation training, both of which have been touted as possible solutions to police violence, will not reduce this pattern. What, then, should we do about sexist and racist police violence?

Although there are moments when I am tempted to throw my hands up and say “I just don’t know,” there are a two efforts that would be worthwhile.

Reduce Civilian Gun Ownership

As I discuss in the third chapter of this dissertation, new officers are taught that they are in grave danger while on the job. Cadets are repeatedly shown graphic videos of police officers

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getting killed. Instructors issue warnings about bad guys who have weapons and are not afraid to use them against – and indeed, sometimes specifically targeting – police officers. In their tactics and scenario-based training, instructors punish cadets for missing weapons during a search, reminding them that it’s not just their life on the line, but also their partner’s. This responsibility, to protect yourself, your partner, and to go home to your family at the end of the night, becomes all-encompassing. One tiny, momentary slip in this intensity – of watching someone’s hands, of searching them completely, of approaching their vehicle tactically – they are taught, will lead to your and your partner’s violent murder. Admittedly, if I had to live in that kind of headspace for

40 hours per week, I, too, would become paranoid, reactionary, and quick to assume the worst.

The number one fear that officers expressed, both in conversations and during training, is dealing with someone who has a gun. The cadets are trained on how to deal with other kinds of weapons, like knives or razorblades, as well, but by far, guns are considered to be the most serious threat. During scenario-based training, when a cadet found a gun on an officer/actor, they were taught to shout “GUN!” at the top of their lungs, so that their partner would hear it, and immediately handcuff the person, take the gun, drop the magazine, and search the person for any other weapons or drugs. As soon as a cadet shouted “GUN,” anxiety became palpable and contagious. Their movements quickened, their eyes widened, their voice elevated and strained.

They were, understandably, afraid.

The assumption that anyone could be armed at any time has real consequences. At the academy, I watched almost every single cadet shoot their unarmed partner, who pulled a miscellaneous item out of their pocket quickly, because they thought the item was a weapon.

Instructors told me about their time in the academy, when they ran through a scenario where,

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after going through several lethal force situations, they had to conduct a routine traffic stop. They explain that the person sitting in the driver’s seat whipped her arm out of the window with her driver’s license in hand. Every officer who told me about this scenario said that they thought she was pulling out a gun, so they shot her. This relationship between civilian gun ownership and police violence appears in national trends: the police shoot people at higher rates in U.S. states with higher gun ownership (Hemenway et al. 2018).

The academy training draws on this fear and teaches cadets that it’s better to assume the worst – that someone is armed – and overreact, than to assume they are not armed and be killed.

This dynamic, I argue, would be dramatically different if the American public was not armed.

One way to work on reducing police violence, then, is to push reform efforts that decrease rates of gun ownership in this country. If civilians did not have access to guns, police officers would perhaps not act based on the assumption that every person they meet while on duty could be armed.

Civilian Oversight of Hiring and Training

Although they take different forms around the country, civilian oversight groups are meant to hold police departments accountable to the public. Primarily, these groups conduct independent investigations of misconduct, contribute community input to investigations and procedures, and/or push for reform efforts. Early civilian oversight groups developed alongside the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950’s, but ultimately failed due to a lack of resources and fierce opposition from police unions (Walker 2000). In the 1970’s and 1980’s, civilian oversight groups again emerged, this time with the authority to conduct independent investigations of civilian complaints (Walker 2000). Starting in the 1990’s, civilian oversight groups started

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popping up all over the country, and with them, came a focus on an auditor/monitor model (Bobb

2003). Instead of concentrating on individual complaints, these new groups examined patterns of misconduct. According to the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement, by 2016, there were 144 civilian oversight groups in the United States (De Angelis, Rosenthal, and Buchner 2016).

The primary focus of these groups is to investigate, address, and make recommendations in response to civilian complaints against police officers. This is a vitally important task, but, I would argue, is mostly a reactionary response to police misconduct. Unfortunately, many civilian oversight groups lack financial resources, have very few personnel, and experience resistance from police departments and unions. However, where they do have the resources and power – and to be clear, I also take the position that they should have significantly more resources and power – I am suggesting that these groups take on a more active role in shaping the hiring and training practices at departments. Civilian oversight groups are currently functioning like an emergency room: they provide a much-needed service, but at a point of crisis. Instead, a focus on preventative care, on helping to determine how cadets are hired and how they are taught to think and behave, could have a more critical role in patterns of police violence.

If civilian oversight groups chose to focus their energies on pushing for a role in determining what police hiring and training looks like, they will undoubtedly be on the receiving end of intense opposition and hostility from police departments and unions. This would be nothing new for these groups, who have repeatedly fought this battle and steadily, over decades, secured more power. Although not an easy fight, civilians should absolutely have more input on who gets to have police authorities, and what those authorities should look like.

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CONCLUSION

When I spoke with officers in the field, they would often ask me, with a disheartened, genuine tone, to please tell their story “right.” Standing in the parking lot outside of Terryville

PD’s academy one afternoon, one officer pleaded with me to “do us right,” in my writing, adding, “A lot of people don’t do us right, so do us right. Do us some justice. We’re people, we bleed red just like everyone else.” Many, though certainly not all, of the officers I met told me that they felt misunderstood by the public, misrepresented by the media, and generally resentful, anxious, and guarded about their jobs. It has never been my goal in this dissertation to suggest that all police officers are evil and go into police work so that they can commit acts of racist and/or sexist violence. I do not believe that, and I do not think that the data I have presented in this dissertation would support that claim. I am, however, arguing that this institution’s hiring and training practices are rooted in systems of patriarchy and white supremacy. It is possible, I think, to recognize both realities. I am not in a position to doubt that most police officers want to help people; that their jobs are difficult; and that they face dangers that I will never experience in my profession. While I acknowledge the challenges of these officers’ experiences, I argue that it is vital to also maintain a critical eye of the institution and the ways that this organization’s hiring and training practices result in persistent patterns of racist violence. This, I think, is the only way forward.

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