Being in Control: Policing Bodies, Emotions and Violence

Research output: Book / ReportBookAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

We expect the police to ‘be in control’. At the same time, control is essential to officers’ daily routines, for executing their job of maintaining public order, and ensuring safety for others and themselves. But what does it mean to ‘have’ or to ‘be’ in control? How do officers maintain it? In what ways do they attempt to gain control, and how do they make sure not to lose it; over situations, civilians or suspects, and over themselves?
While control is at the heart of many policing studies and analysed from fields of criminology, sociology, law, political science, social- and public policy and other behavioural sciences, control itself is rarely questioned.
In this book, I examine what control means in the context of police work. Based on a long-term ethnography of the Dutch police, I answer how control works from three analytical lenses: 1) violence and antagonism, 2) bodies and emotions, and 3) trajectories and anticipations. I develop a phenomenological-interactionist approach to analyse officers’ micro-level behaviours in antagonistic interactions, their embodied and emotional experiences, and meaning-making of control and violence.
I show that control is not a matter of ‘to have or to have not’. Rather, police officers enact control; they put it into being. I propose a non-essentialist understanding of control to elucidate in what ways it is enacted. More specifically, I illustrate that police officers enact realities of control on bodily, emotional, discursive and visual levels by constructing particular futures, using certain discourses and applying forms of emotion/body regulation. The feeling of ‘being in control’ is thus also enacted. In short, this book specifies the ways in which police officers ‘do control’.
Original languageEnglish
PublisherUniversiteit van Amsterdam
Number of pages294
ISBN (Print)9789464197112
Publication statusPublished - 31 Mar 2023

Keywords

  • Policing
  • Violence
  • Embodiment
  • Culture
  • Use-of-force
  • Ethnomethodology
  • Video elicitation
  • Police-citizen interactions

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