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

Police officers are accordingly required to present their bodies as emotionally inexpressive objects in spite of how they may feel ‘inside’. It is noted in the training text that police officers are often exposed to situations that are ‘personally upsetting’ or that they may have ‘an emotional bias for or against people or situations’, but police officers are advised to vigilantly ‘guard against exhibiting’ these feelings ‘with’ their bodies. Bodies and emotions (as well as the internal and external regions of the body) are thusly separated during the course of police work in particular and specific ways. Cops are also (and equally) taught to separate ‘mind’ or ‘thought’ from ‘emotion’ or ‘feeling’; emotion, in the course of policing training, is negatively presented as ‘irrational’ and opposed to thought, while thought is related to dealing with facts and evidence: a cop should ‘think’ about the facts of a case and should ‘avoid’ allowing his or her personal feelings to ‘muddy’ the inherent facts of any given policing situation. Control and the lack thereof, especially physical control and uncontrol, are also attributed to unemotional and emotional conditions of the officer, respectively.

The impartial delivery mode of reactive police services to the community, in most officers’ opinions, has contributed greatly to the public conception of cops as not only generally uncaring, anti-service pro-force people but also as detached and unfeeling people or, rather, non-people: said one officer, ‘because we have to be impartial, that makes us seem less human, I suppose, because we can’t respond to situations like normal people do’. Many officers agreed that the emotionally inexpressive ways in which they had been trained to respond to any given event or person made them look ‘as though we haven’t any feelings’. The insults that are hurled at cops with no evident feelings are insults about an ostensible lack of human quality; in what police take to be the public mind, a connection seems to have been forged between a lack of ostensible feeling and subhumanness or nonhumanness. Grayville police officers know that behaving impartially or without expressing feelings will attract a label of nonhumanness; Grayville cops get called robots ‘all the time’.⁴

Evidently, unemotional behavior is the basis of police professionalism and authority. For a police officer to appear unemotional, he or she must be well in control—in physical control—of his or her emotions, in order that the emotions are not expressed on the police body.