‘FREEZE?’ An analysis of police officers accounts of self-enclosing experiences

ABSTRACT

When confronted with violent incidents, police officers are expected to act in the situation at hand. This article examines the critical moment of not acting, that is, of ‘freezing’. Policing studies as well criminological and sociological studies of violence have, to date, paid little attention to ‘freezing’ as a vulnerable, unwanted and stigmatised experience. The aim of this article is first to explore what the term ‘freezing’ refers to what kind of behaviours, what they have in common and why officers lump these descriptions together. Second, to study the experience of ‘freezing’ from a phenomenological and embodied viewpoint to understand the ways in which officers try to deal with it. Building on neurological insights and theories on emotional–corporeal transformations, this article shows that ‘freezing’ is more accurately understood as a self-enclosing transformation in which officers lose the ability to purposefully act. Officers are thrown out of a bodily latent taken-for-granted intertwinement with the world which hampers their ability to project activity and interrupts the ongoing flow of (inter)acting. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2021, and 67 semi-structured interviews with Dutch police officers, the analysis further reveals that ‘freezing’ is not just characterised by bodily cessation but also directionless behaviours, and occurs when officers encounter unexpected circumstances. Finally, this article demonstrates that exiting a ‘freezing’ experience requires collective team effort and that it causes conflicting feelings because it attacks officers’ sense of good policing.

KEYWORDS:

• Violence
• policing
• freeze–fight–flight
• emotional–corporeal transformations

Acknowledgements

First I wish to thank all the police officers who shared their intense experiences with violence. Second, I thank Don Weenink of the University of Amsterdam, Giselinde Kuipers of KU Leuven and Jeremy Rijnders for their thorough readings of previous drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council, Consolidator Grant number 683133, awarded to Don Weenink.

Notes on contributors

Laura D. Keesman

Laura D. Keesman is a cultural sociologist part of the Group Violence Research project at the University of Amsterdam and Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR). She is affiliated with the Amsterdam Center for Conflict Studies (ACCS). Her research interests are violence, policing and occupational practices. She currently focuses on how Dutch police officers cope with violent interactions.