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

The problem in this overtly interactionist kind of account is that police officers are left to present a self to members of the public that is somehow separate from the embodiment of their conduct. Ehrlich-Martin speaks of the places and times in which police do not have to manage their emotions as much, that is, in the coffee room at the stationhouse, as a kind of formalized or at least institutionalized Goffmanesque backstage, which is typical of accounts informed by Hochschild’s work, those being heavily influenced by Goffman (1959), and significantly less informed by substantive and fine-grained detail of police lives over time. In these theory-driven accounts, ‘feelings’ or emotions have no bodily basis; feeling is not related to action but instead to impression: in Ehrlich-Martin’s account, the officer’s body is cast as a neon sign of his or her personal, inner emotional or, more commonly, unemotional state that can give others clues about the position of an other in an emergent sequence of social interaction. As Lyon and Barbalet (1994) note of Hochschild’s (1983) account and those that proceed with similar theoretical structures, more emphasis is placed on the culturally given cognitive structures ‘in terms of which social relations are supposedly given their meaning’ than on social and bodily relationships as located at the basis of emotional experiences (p. 58).

Without a conception of emotion as embodied and social or relational, it is difficult to move beyond a highly interactionist description of impression management to explain police experiences of emotion and its inexpression. As will be shown in the course of this book, the police separation from the community is not simply a matter of impression management but can be understood using a conception of emotion that is embodied and social–relational. It is entirely probable that police officers reflect on the emotional expressions they suppress or induce on the job, as Ehrlich-Martin’s account argues, and that they consider what impact these will have on policed citizens. Simply describing these as impression management strategies, as interactionist accounts do, fails to recognize that what cops are doing when they self-consciously hold their own bodies tightly in their own multisensually experienced gazes is disconnecting themselves from others, from community, in fundamentally important ways.