Police Power and the Right to Maim - "Less Lethal" as a Mode of Pacification

• In Event: A Critical Approach to Policing Dynamics

Abstract

Public discussions of police violence tend to fixate upon seemingly exceptional cases of lethal violence. While necessary, this focus on lethal violence performs the trick of normalizing “non-lethal” violence, particularly during rebellions and uprisings, hiding it in plain sight. To broaden the critique of police violence and the police power beyond lethality, this paper focuses on the use of “less-than-lethal” weaponry (LLW) in the context of uprisings in Los Angeles, dating to Watts 1965. Focusing on and including this overlooked, perhaps under-theorized form of violence problematizes the neat dichotomy between lethal and non-lethal. From the LA riots of 1992 where rubber bullets, or “kneeknockers,” were first adopted by LAPD, to the summer of 2020 following George Floyd’s murder where rubber bullets and other Kinetic Impact Projectiles struck 115 demonstrators and journalists in the head, visual imagery of the latter documents what Jasbir Puar has called the "right to maim," a specific mode of governance situated between biopolitics and necropolitics, constituting a mode of subjectivity through fear, intimidation and, most viscerally, corporeal disfigurement. As a political technology, LLWs expand the police power’s ability to pacify crowds while its accompanying discourse depoliticizes popular understandings of police violence.

Author

• Nicholas Timothy Walrath, Kansas State University