White Man’s Best Friend? Police Dogs and the Visual Production of the “Color Line”

• In Event: Doing Visual Criminology: New Empirical and Theoretical Directions

Abstract

This paper thinks through the racialized visual economies of the German shepherd “police dog” in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s, when police turned to trained dogs in their war against Black criminality and insurgency. Drawing from the visual archive – photographs from magazines, newspapers, and other documents during the period – I offer some reflections on the ways the police dog came to represent the violence of the “color line”. To do this, the paper juxtaposes two set of images: The first and already infamous images of police dogs attacking Black civil rights protestors in Birmingham 1963. The second set of images, rarely discussed, depict white women and children, usually the family members of police K-9 handlers, sitting with the large dogs in their homes or in their suburban yards, a politics I will call the “white domesticity of police power”. The goal of the paper is to not fetishize the image, but to think through how these images might tell us something important about the predatory violence of racial capitalism and the police’s role in this terror.

Author

• Tyler Wall, Eastern Kentucky University