Bodies of Force: The Social Organization of Force, Suffering, and Honor in Policing.

摘要

This dissertation is an ethnographic description of how police recruits learn to use force. I became a police recruit at two academies in order examine the process whereby police recruits learn to deploy calibrated physical force as a body technique (Mauss 1979) central to policing. Body techniques are traditional, technical and efficacious ways of using the body that are embedded in contexts of social value and symbolic significance.;Theoretically approaching police force as a calibrated bodily technique allows us to bring together the subjective life of the recruit's body with its objective social situation. Body techniques are subjective in the sense that they are forms of knowledge and understanding. But these same techniques are also objective in that they are social facts characterized by a social distribution and origin and they are encountered as external constraints, meaning that recruits feel compelled to use their bodies in certain ways.;I also don't treat the forceful skills as only technical. Recruits do invest themselves in forceful practices as preparation for often-inflated perceived dangers. But I show that more importantly, recruits embrace police force because, in the daily experience of the academy, having a forceful body confers recognition and respect from the academy staff and from peers. To be overweight, poor with a firearm, bad at driving, unable to keep up on a run, or seemingly incapable of tolerating pain, is to be relegated to a stigmatized status by staff and peers.;In attempting to balance the need to make pacified recruits forceful and at the same time temper the use-of-force, I show how recruits sensibilities toward the use of force are honed, affect economies cultivated, and calibrated force is routinzed as a skillful response to social encounters.;The introduction, chapter one, defines the problem of learning to be forceful. It shows how being forceful is a central concern of the academy and central to the very definition of competence. Chapter two reviews the literature on police academies, police socialization, and police culture to reveal large gaps in the literature.;Chapter three outlines the methods and procedures I used to conduct this study. It also describes the recruit classes and the training staff of the two academies I studied. In chapters four and five I examine how academy staff try to teach recruits use their bodies forcefully. In chapter four I begin by examining how recruits learn their hand to "search and seize." Recruits use their hands more than any other part of their body, other than their mouths, to be forceful. Because forceful use of the hands is routine, it is an ideal place to begin examining how recruits learn to use their bodies to exert situational dominance over another using their body. Academy staff refer to this colloquially as "control." In chapter five I describe in detail how police recruits learn to use deadly force with their firearms. Unlike skilled use of hands firearms are rarely used by police but intense value is placed on mastering shootings skills. I examine how a particular technique of shooting, "double tapping" is learned as a bodily technique.;In chapter six I focus on daily negative rites like physical training that imbue recruits with a valued social body. This body is cultivated within a symbolic economy based on recognition and respect on the one hand and shame and insult on the other. The suffering of physical training also serves as a daily ordeal for recruits to overcome and that helps mark the police world as a separate sacred and heroic world that stands above the profane world recruits came from. In chapter seven I focus on an episodic negative rite, "Chemical Agents Day." During this rite recruits are expected to overcome the intense pain of exposure to chemical agents, with poise, in order to demonstrate their character. But in addition to be a test of moral self worthy by way of bodily self-control, the rite functions as a way of building a deep visceral bonding of the recruits to one another through a shared sense of pain and humiliation. Recruits also are bonded to their trainers as they overcome their suffering with the help of the very trainers who exposed them to physical pain and vulnerability.;In the final empirical chapter, chapter eight, I provide one in depth interview with a recruit. This interview is important because it provides a sense of how a fairly typical recruit experienced the discipline, shame, as well as pride in bodily and emotional self-mastery. In particular we get to hear how a recruit thought and felt about the stressful and uncertain environment created by the academy staff in order toughen up recruits. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).