The Horrified Police: fear, fascism and the politics of reaction

• In Event: Cultural Criminology: New Research Trajectories

Abstract

In his discussion of fascism, Mark Neocleous inverts the familiar Machiavellian arrangement of a tyrant who rules through fear and asks us to consider the purveyors of fascism not only as terrifying but also as terrified. Following this suggestion, this paper considers, not only the horror engendered by police but also the police as horrified. As we know and as countless examples demonstrate, police must simply suggest they “feared for their lives” in order to excuse their knee-jerk reactions and devastating lethality. In his trial for the murder of Walter Scott, for instance, North Charleston Police Department officer Michael Slager testilied that he was in “total fear” of the unarmed man, and that he “fired until the threat was stopped...” Eyewitness testimony of course contradicted Slager’s explanation, proving he shot Scott multiple times in the back as he attempted to flee. If we take Slager’s claims of “total fear” seriously, we might then understand his execution of a fleeing unarmed man as the strangely predictable outcome of policing’s imagination of a monstrous enemy. Paraphrasing Marx, Franco Moretti once wrote that fear of the monster “is the fear of one who is afraid of having ‘produced his own gravediggers.’” Following this insight, the contemporary anxieties surrounding urban violence, riots and the so-called “War on Cops”, perhaps reflect a deep recognition that police and the social order itself has sown the seeds of its undoing. Accordingly, we are better able to apprehend the cold executions of Tamir Rice, Terence Crutcher, Stephon Clark and so many others as the casualties of a fabricated “war for civilization” waged across an equally imagined thin blue line, by legions of horrified police.

Author

• Travis Linnemann, Kansas State University