Don’t let them kill you on some dirty roadway: survival, entitled violence, and the culture of modern American policing

Abstract

The police subculture serves as a means for police officers to cope with the perceived stresses associated with police work, including the belief that their lives are constantly threatened by dangerous ‘others’. As a result, the police subculture is peppered with racialized survivability discourse that reminds police of the possibility of their own mortality, mobilizes them through fear, and facilitates an entitlement to violence in the name of guardianship. Drawing from the author’s past experiences as a police officer, this paper offers insight into how, through this racialized police survivability discourse, police officers come to believe that their lives are more valuable than others, particularly when compared to Black lives. This has not only been demonstrated by the disproportionate killing of unarmed Black men but also by the emergence of the Blue Lives Matter ‘movement’ that arose in direct oppositional response to the subculture’s perceived threat of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Keywords:

• Police culture
• police survivability discourse
• entitled violence
• Black Lives Matter
• Blue Lives Matter

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dawn Rothe for her helpful suggestions during earlier drafts of this paper, and for challenging my views on policing when I was fresh out of the profession and new to graduate school. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their time, effort, and helpful critiques of this manuscript.

Notes

1. These figures are not to take away from cases in which police officers are tragically killed in the line of duty through violent, intentional means, but rather to acknowledge that these deaths are occurring much less frequently than the subculture socializes its members to believe.