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

According to Grayville cops, the progression from subhuman to nonhuman, or from at least animate (if not animal) to wholly insensate, denotes a worrying trend that can be directly linked to the kind of policing being done in Grayville. Central in their perceptions of why the insults were proceeding in this direction, and why almost all staff had been subject to them in the course of undertaking police duties, was the particular mode of delivery of reactive policing. This delivery mode is known in the police department as ‘impartiality’.

Officers within the department defined impartiality as the quality or condition of being ‘unbiased’, ‘objective’, ‘nonaligned’ and ‘neutral’. An officer’s impartiality is considered to be the public’s insurance of the officer’s ability to reactively apply the law without bias, which in turn ties in to the department’s pledge that all people are treated equally (without bias, neutrally) before the law. Impartiality is most often defined by cops, however, as the absence of emotional expression, and emotional states of any kind are considered by Grayville cops to embody all the qualities and characteristics that run counter to impartiality—they are biased, subjective, aligned and partial or inclined in particular directions. Moreover, the advertisement or demonstration of a cop’s impartiality is achieved through the disguising of emotional expression, which is prevented by cops from appearing on the police body. Most of all, emotions are understood by cops to connect them with members of the policed community in such a way that a guarantee of equal treatment of all before the law is compromised. But, as police explained to me, if emotions are not expressed physically, their corruptive capacities can be limited. As one cop said, ‘a person doesn’t know how angry you are if you don’t show them’.

In Basic Psychology for Police Officers 1997 (Grayville Police Department, 1997), the training manual currently used at the Grayville police academy, the inability of an officer to control his or her feelings in any given policing situation is recognized as ‘costly’, and officers are advised that, ‘you cannot afford to let your personal feelings … interfere with the way you react’. The expression of feelings during the delivery of reactive policing practices—most often this refers to the physical form in which they might find expression—cannot be afforded because they have the capacity to corrupt an ideally impartial law enforcement response.