Police Beat: The Emotional Power of Music in Police Work By Simon ...

Because police associate emotions with ‘partiality’, the emotionless police body is understood by cops to be an ‘impartial’ or neutral one. Neutrality, though, is always culturally, specifically, defined and can be used to reinforce cultural norms, as well as the particular terms in which power is wielded. Police who are evidently unemotional are police who are in control, and in the police understanding, are ‘neutral’. Neutrality, then, is heavily underscored by notions of control, which means that police neutrality is not really neutral at all but is instead invested with the capacity of police to control not only the irrational in the officer but also the irrational in those who are policed. This is one way in which cops act as Foucauldian judges of normality; cops could, from a Foucauldian perspective, turn a normalizing gaze on themselves and, even in simply parading this body before members of the public, on others. Police officers themselves certainly subscribe to this idea: cops hang out in places which are known for trouble with the specific intention of bring about law abidance in and through the strategic use of the stern and compliance-inducing police gaze.

On the face of it, it would follow that such a vigorous nod in the direction of an apparently visual surveillance would mean that both the bodies of police and the bodies of citizens would be little more than frighteningly readable texts upon which police power could be inscribed. Police officers certainly engage in administering police gazes to themselves and to others, but the surveillance under which cops place their own bodies is not eye-seeing, as Foucauldian varieties of surveillance privilege, but is instead multisensual and wholly embodied. My exploration of this multisensual surveillance consequently privileges the activity that cops undertake in constituting and organizing their own physicosensual conduct, for the restriction of emotional expression is a highly organized process; recruits undergo rigorous training at the police academy to learn the techniques of emotional inexpressiveness to produce a body that is ostensibly unemotional. This practice involves police officers becoming highly self-aware of the movements and practices of their own bodies in relation to the social body of the policed community. For police officers, the act of becoming ostensibly unemotional involves embodying a kind of disconnectedness from the social body.