Inescapable scripts: role-playing feminist (re)visions and rehearsing racialized state violence in police training scenarios

Abstract

This article examines how police vision is trained, tested, and scripted at the site of a local police academy in San Diego, California. I use the term scripting to illustrate how police recruits are directed to see, act, and respond to racialized, gendered others in scenario-based simulations during the final week of the police academy. Through participant-observation and methods in performance ethnography, I argue that turning to police training as an object of analysis offers ethnographic insights into the performance of tacit, ordinary methods of police violence. As a feminist intervention into the “scripting” of police vision, I describe my attempts to read against the grain of these scenario scripts by volunteering as a role-play actor in the police academy, taking on different embodied roles in order to examine how police recruits read the choreography of my racialized body. I suggest an investigation into the performativity of policing can move debates centered on racialized police violence beyond ideological frameworks that rely on the same visualizing technologies and logics of objectivity deployed by the institution of policing.

Keywords:

• policing
• police training
• scenario—based training
• scenarios
• performativity
• performance ethnography
• racial violence, scripting

Acknowledgements

This work would not exist without the enduring support of Elana Zilberg, Patrick Anderson, and Ricardo Dominguez: my understanding of what it means to risk embodied copresence with others has been shaped by each of you. Deepest gratitude to Kim Bobier, Marisa Williamson, the editorial collective of W&P, and my anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback and engagement with this piece. Special thanks to Yelena Gluzman, Tara Pixley, and Michael Berman for reading different versions of this unruly text along the way, and to Mark for everything in between.

Notes

1 I foreground the names of those police officers responsible for the acts of murder and brutality that have destroyed and stolen the lives of Eric Garner, Alfred Olango, and Rodney King.

2 See Balto (2019), Felker-Kantor (2018), Schrader (2019) and Vitale (2018)

3 See also Brown (1988), Manning (1977, 1982, 1988), Martin (2019), Muir (1977), Skolnick (1966), Manning and Van Maanen (1978), and Westley (1970).

4 In Policing Contingencies (2003), Peter K. Manning explains, “the metaphor of drama is not only about individual consciousness; it is about the structure of relations … The social world is not simply seen, heard, or smelled, but it is interpreted” (5). Despite Manning’s acknowledgement of interpretation here, making sense of police work as “drama” foregrounds a familiar narrative that individual, “good” officers may be innocently caught within larger “theaters” of violence beyond their control while also reinscribing divisions between a totalizing “police culture” and the world beyond, including the position of the ethnographer who imagines himself as outside of the interactions he observes.

5 Founded in 1959, POST is composed of law enforcement professionals, city and county administrators, and members of the public appointed by the Governor of California. For more on the historical development and early organizational management of POSTs, see Christian and Edwards (1985).

6 The use of role-play methods in the police academy serves as an apparatus for police training that informs how sociality (Alves and Costa Vargas 2017; Karpiak 2013), negotiating role-taking (Lundman 1980; Van Maanen 1973; Moskos 2008), and symbolic performances of authority, objectivity, and legitimacy (Barker 1999; Manning 2001) are performed in the patrol field.

7 While attempts to corroborate this information have come up against a predictable blue wall of silence, it has been echoed in conversations with other police and training officers, suggesting that this practice is provisionally enacted despite the absence of an official acknowledgement.

8 These 14 scenarios include: Ethics, Domestic Violence/Victim Assistance, Force Option – Baton, Force Option – Control Hold, Deadly Force, Pedestrian Approach, Nighttime Vehicle Pullover, Suspicious Person, Building Search, Critical Incident, Ambush, Preliminary Investigation/Felonious Assault, Death Investigation, and Mentally Disordered Person. As of this writing, California’s POST has proposed to remove the carotid restraint, also known as a “choke hold,” from mandated police training.

9 While Phelan’s canonical, “syllabus-haunting staple” (Switzky 2018) remains an incisive contribution to the field of Performance Studies, her thesis must be carefully considered in the longue durée of anti-Black mortality and resistance. See recent works by Women & Performance contributors Henry Washington, Jr. (2021), Jesse A. Goldberg (2021), and Joshua Chambers-Letson (2016).

10 This act’s title is sampled from Lauryn Hill’s 2002 song “I Find It Hard to Say (Rebel),” from her live album MTV Unplugged No. 2.0, and which was inspired by the murder of unarmed Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo by four New York City Police Department plainclothes officers on February 4, 1999.

11 Here and elsewhere, I resist translation both as an enactment of Tina Campt’s (2019) call towards a politics of refusal, and to rhetorically perform the uncertainty of meaning and intention that recruits navigate during Scenario Test Week.

12 This act’s title is sampled from Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 song “Alright,” off of his album To Pimp a Butterfly. I invoke Lamar’s writing here for its allusions to police violence, and because of its exalted status as a “protest song” following the spate of killings committed by police officers in 2020.

13 This small moment demonstrates how post-performance acts of care exceed the seemingly-bounded limits of the training scenario, and stand in stark contrast to the televisual images of routine and spectacular enactments of police violence that animate the institution of American policing. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, citizen-recorded video of Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck capture the disciplinary force of legitimated state violence in Chauvin’s posture: with hands in his pockets, Chauvin appears untouchable as he casually ends George Floyd’s life. Surrounded by fellow officers who stand in resigned witness to Floyd’s murder, this scene becomes a familiar citation in the long history of extralegal police killings in the United States.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christina Aushana

Christina Aushana is a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. Her writing on the intersections of police training and the visual culture of policing has been recently published in the journal Surveillance & Society. Aushana is co-founder of the research collaboratory Feminist Theory Theater, a group dedicated to staging feminist theory as an intervention in situated meaning-making in the academy and beyond.