Establishing 911: media infrastructures of affective anti-Black, pro-police dispositions

ABSTRACT

To facilitate deeper investigations into the U.S.’s centralized emergency number, 911, this article attends to the first decade of the service’s implementation in the mid-twentieth century. Ostensibly, 911 was created to hasten responses by public services for health and safety. Yet, federal backing for 911 first occurred in 1967 in a report admonishing the recent “race riots,” articulating predominantly Black communities as a threat to white society and articulating white individuals as essential extensions of the police. Notably, 911’s media infrastructure is replete with affective anti-Black discourses that produced an atmosphere of anti-Black, pro-police dispositions that uniquely capacitated white citizens to discipline the Black body. This history opens deeper inquiry into 911 and offers context for contemporary 911 controversies.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• anti-Blackness
• media infrastructure
• policing
• 911

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The original reports contain an antiquated term (“Negro/es”) that was/is still a derogatory term used against Black individuals and used to mark them as outside white U.S. culture. As an anti-racist scholar, I have chosen not to reproduce such words in the body of this manuscript given the affective and continued violence they inflict. I have only reproduced the term in this footnote, upon the insistence of an anonymous reviewer, for readers outside the U.S. who might not have contextual knowledge of the term.

2 The web address of this history is currently unavailable. The version cited here is archived through the Wayback Machine (URL in reference). The history was always published by A.P.C.O., but under a web address that became defunct. As of present, APCO is working to integrate the information into their history page. Once it is live, the information will be added to: https://www.apcointl.org/community/history/ (Architect, M. & Author. (2022, March 8). Website/Media content change [Personal communication]).