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They try it because they have recognized emotion as a powerful connector of persons to other persons; specifically of concern to cops is the fact that emotion is a powerful connector of police to policed citizens. Such a connector would impact radically upon dearly held police principles of impartiality and neutrality, which together constitute the notion and the embodied practice of police professionalism, and so cops seek to produce a body that is ostensibly unemotional.
This too is heavily traversed terrain, and it has been especially traversed by sociologists and by emotional labour theorists. The resultant overwhelmingly interactionist accounts threaten to give the sense that cops are actually artful managers of their emotional bodies and that they successfully place their own bodies in sequences of social interaction as billboards of controlled expression. Placing emotion centrally in the construction of the social body stands in contrast to those studies of sociological origin that have traditionally been applied to police work contexts and which remain primary in studies of police. In these studies, in which I include those produced by Hochschild (1998) and Fineman (2003), great emphasis is placed on the culturally given cognitive structures that apparently contextualize social relations and their meaning, but the accounts are, resultantly, bodiless.
Favouring a conception of emotion that is embodied, relational and social, this book looks closely at the ways in which a disconnection from the social body is achieved when police engage in particular techniques for the policing of emotion on their own bodies. This is precisely what the emotional labour theorists proposed that people do in social situations, and cops, by my reckoning, certainly attempt to do just this. But what the emotional labour theoreticians did not realize in their approach was just how unusual such a practice is: Drawing a thin blue line between ‘inner’ emotion and its outer expression to evoke particular and planned responses in a sequence of social interaction, and carefully policing the police body to ensure that it does not ‘exhibit’ any indicators of social connectivity, is a lot of labour. Looking at this kind of labour might not be fruitful for looking at emotional interaction as it occurs in a more habitual manner, though. My approach points precisely to the minute details of police attempts to produce ostensibly unemotional and highly reflected upon bodies—minute details we routinely ignore as we engage in unreflected upon social life—in the name of police neutrality and professionalism that are, I believe, best understood as material memories.