Inescapable scripts: role-playing feminist (re)visions and rehearsing racialized state violence in police training scenarios | Christina Aushana (30.3)

“The interrogation of the limits and violence of vision is part of the politics of learning to revision.”

— Donna Haraway (1989, 384)

“Did you use deadly force because you feared for your life?”

The question floats above me, directed to another. It is infused with the tonal inflection of an encouraging teacher leading a pupil to the expected – “correct” – answer. Suede, scuffed UGG boots tap impatiently inches from my face, anticipating the student’s reply. As the student answers, his center of mass pivots, spreading my shoulder blades apart further in some perverse, overzealous massage parlor move that transfers our collective weight into my pancaked breasts beneath us.

“Yes, ma’am!” the student barks, but it is the small silence preceding this affirmation that marks his uncertainty.

The knee in my back, however, is as certain as Daniel Pantaleo’s carotid chokehold, as true as Richard Gonsalves’ aim, as “legitimate” as the baton strikes discursively justified by the “professional vision” of expert witnesses whose testimony aided the acquittal of four white officers and set Los Angeles on fire (Goodwin 1994), as routine as the failure of grand juries to indict police officers across these (and too-many-more) cases of police violence in the United States, and as absolute as the perilous claims to objectivity undergirding modern regimes of surveillance.¹

Certainty, legitimacy, and absolute objectivity are ideological pillars supporting the routine optics of police vision, and epistemic categories of state violence. They are epistemic categories leveraged in public debates and policy discussions about the state’s mandate to uphold truth and transparency as policing’s platonic ideals while obscuring the racialized practices of surveillance marked by “objective” screening technologies like body-worn cameras and facial recognition software (Benjamin 2016, 2019; Browne 2015; Brucato 2015; Gates 2011). Anthropologists of policy and law, likewise, have illustrated how bureaucratic regimes promoting the transparency of the state occlude as much as they reveal (Mathur 2015; Newell 2018). In order to ground the larger historical vision of police violence identified by Dennis Childs (2015), Marisol LeBrón (2019), Andrea Ritchie (2017), Micol Seigel (2018), and others², and to situate the logics supporting recent proposed policy measures and campaigns for police reform, I insist we take seriously Donna Haraway’s (1988) claim: “The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular”(590).

It is here – pinned and prone on the floor of a police academy classroom underneath a broad-shouldered, nearly-300-pound police recruit – that a larger vision of policing is trained, performed, and scripted. I use the term “scripting” to illustrate how police recruits are directed to see, act, and respond to racialized others in scenario-based simulations during the final week of instruction known as “Scenario Test Week” hosted by a regional police academy in San Diego. As a police researcher and performance ethnographer, I describe my experiences volunteering as a role-play actor opposite police recruits in these scenarios, examining how enactments of policing’s ideals of transparency and visibility meet my racialized, gendered body in the act of performance. With every simulated “stop-and-frisk” search, recruits’ hands sliding between my thighs and along my ankles probing for wayward weapons, and with every simulated deadly use-of-force that sends me crashing to the ground, I encounter my own visibility and legibility as a particular kind of body – multiracial Iraqi-Assyrian and Colombiana, fat, femme, brown – through the highly circumscribed ways of seeing practiced by police recruits and reinforced by training officers (TOs) in the police academy. This article turns to this site of police training to theorize how – through performative acts of citation – performed acts of racialized police violence become not only ordinary in the police academy, but citable in the every-day field of patrol work.

Insisting on a performative and performance-centered analysis of police training is, importantly, not a means to activate familiar dramaturgical metaphors of policing’s “front” and “back stages,” developed most notably in “classic” sociological studies of policing and carried forward by contemporary examinations of police cultures in a growing field known as Police Studies.³ No doubt those for whom Erving Goffman’s (1956) account of theatricality continues to provide robust theoretical scaffolding for delineating boundaries between sites where ritualized presentations of policing are internally organized (“back stage”) and publicly communicated (“front stage”) will likely read this work as firmly engaged in policing’s “back stage.”⁴ While the ethnographic work carried out here does build on precedent and ongoing discussions by anthropologists of policing (AOPs), criminologists, and sociologists of race and policing that mobilize metaphorical visions – blue lines, walls of silence, shields – in service of holding policing accountable to its structural violence, I propose experimenting with different conceptual language to shift ways of theorizing how acts of racial police violence travel relationally across bodies and boundaries in the training worlds of policing: performativity. Departing from centering theater as metaphor is an opportunity to examine how the lived, embodied theatrical arrangements of explicit training situations – staged encounters between recruits and role-players, scripts, and divisions between observing evaluators and observant recruits – performatively structure police vision in the mise-en-scène of Scenario Test Week. To make this theoretical and rhetorical move toward performativity, I insist on moving through and being moved by acts of embodied performance.

In what follows, I offer two acts from the theater of Scenario Test Week. Each act contains multiple enactments of training scripts provided to all state police academies by California’s Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST). Head-quartered in Sacramento, this certification body is responsible for regulating and enforcing state-mandated policies for all law enforcement agencies and training sites in California, including outlining the testing requirements for scenario-based training.⁵ Across these scenes, I bring ethnography and performance methods to bear upon the academy’s training texts in co-presence with recruits and training officers precisely because performance praxis is embedded in police worlds on multiple fronts.⁶ Centering training scripts as ethnographic objects is an opportunity to examine how texts are open to interpretation, improvization, and revision in real time. As a feminist intervention into the performativity of police training, I describe my attempts to read “against the grain” of these overly-determined, inflexible training scripts through the risks and strategies made available by embodied performance, keenly aware that my racialized and gendered body becomes textual material to be read, interpreted, and recast by police vision and its primary mandate to enforce the primacies of officer safety and control over policed subjects. This embodied (un)doing of training scripts is an attempt at a feminist revisioning of the not-so-“hidden curriculum” (White 2006) that shapes the racial imagination of a hegemonically-rendered heteromasculine police vision in interaction.

This article then is an invitation to stand, fall, and lie prone in these rooms with me as I meet this vision with my flesh, and stand with the ethical imperative of Dwight Conquergood’s call for doing performance ethnography research that “resists the closure and totalizing domination of a single viewpoint” (1986, 47). In the world of police training, however, the mandate of performance ethnography to commit to the openness of texts is challenging to uphold when the entire endeavor of Scenario Test Week is the collective rehearsal of a narrow repertoire of police vision. In this article, I ask the reading audience to co-witness how the ethnographic field as a series of interruptions “speaks back” to the This article then is an invitation to stand, fall, and lie prone in these rooms with me as I meet this vision with my flesh, and stand with the ethical imperative of Dwight Conquer-good’s call for doing performance ethnography research that “resists the closure and totalizing domination of a single viewpoint” (1986,47). In the world of police training, however, the mandate of performance ethnography to commit to the openness of texts is challenging to uphold when the entire endeavor of Scenario Test Week is the collective rehearsal of a narrow repertoire of police vision. In this article, I ask the reading audience to co-witness how the ethnographic field as a series of interruptions “speaks back” to the ethnographer’s theorizing in order to not only encounter the limits of police vision but also of my own attempts at feminist revision.

Scenario backgrounds

In the weeks leading up to Scenario Test Week, I met with a Senior Training Officer from San Diego’s regional police academy. In our conversation, he explained recruits are pro- vided with 924 h of training during the six-month training program, the final 40 h of which are allocated to Scenario Test Week. Held “off campus” at a training facility next to the San Diego International Airport. To graduate from the academy, recruits must perform successfully in 14 distinct role-play scenario tests as outlined in the POST Basic Course Management Guide, a publicly-available document published on California’s POST website. Training officers are tasked with grading these performances guided by the evaluative criteria provided by POST to which recruits do not have access. While recruits are trained throughout the academy in a variety of scenarios (e.g. use of force, domestic violence, searches and vehicle stops), and thus have a sense of what they may encounter during Scenario Test Week, the specific situations of each scen- ario are purposefully kept secret. These five days of testing are led by the academy’s Scenario Manager, a staff member officially appointed by California’s POST who is responsible for coordinating with training officers and role-play volunteers, and is granted specific access to a repository of role-play scenarios provided by POST to California’s police academies.

Tasked with selecting the 14 scripts from this POST archive, the Scenario Manager is the academy’s veritable trainer-cum-dramaturg, curating a collection of scenarios the academy will stage during Scenario Test Week. When I ask how scenario scripts are devised and written by POST, the Senior TO shrugs coolly before suggesting I seek an answer from “someone with more information.” I smile at his not-so-subtle refusal to divulge further, and decide to withhold my own previous conversations with several training officers in 2015 where I learned that law enforcement from across San Diego County are invited by POST to submit their own scenarios to the organization in writing.⁷ Though the exact process through which these scripts are written, vetted, and selected by POST are beyond the scope of this article, I attempt to address the Senior TO’s tactical silence by turning to how texts are staged “on the ground” of recruit evaluation. In doing so, I examine how training texts – figured as immutable in the language of POST management course materials and manuals – become embodied, interrupted, and potentially revisable in the improvised theater of Scenario Test Week.

After scripts are selected, academy staff send out a call to local law enforcement agencies asking for roleplay volunteers. The selected respondents – working patrol officers, reserve officers, and affiliated personnel – are assigned to one (or several) of the 14 scenarios in the weeks leading up to Scenario Test Week.⁸ “We want someone who will give a good show,” the Senior TO tells me when I ask how the academy selects its role-players. “Otherwise, if the scene isn’t realistic, then what’s the point? The recruits need to feel like what they are experiencing is real.”

Emily Roxworthy echoes this recurring specter of realism in her research on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Training Academy, describing its program as a “journey from realism to reality – whereby trainees gradually move from learning in the classroom to roleplaying in a simulated and highly realistic environment to practicing law enforcement in the ‘real world’” (2004, 87). As a theater of “real world” simulations, Scenario Test Week coheres with the federal training stages of the FBI’s Training Academy in Quantico, Virginia, as well as with other military training sites that include Fort Irwin National Training Center in California’s Mojave Desert (Rice 2016) and the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center in Indiana (Belcher 2014).

Unlike these larger, well-funded training programs, however, San Diego’s regional police academy does not employ professional role-play actors. Instead, its cast is com- prised of volunteer patrol officers from various San Diego County departments. This is a significant difference that not only draws attention to the more modest resources available to local law enforcement academy training in comparison to their federal and military counterparts, but a practical difference that materially shapes how recruits learn during Scenario Test Week. If role-play scripts are sourced from the lived experiences of working patrol officers, then examining these scripts closely suggests they are not simply aspirational, a priori models for police behavior, but rather ethnographic texts that travel on a feedback loop: from the patrol field, to the academy, and back again. Moreover, it is the interpretation and performance of these scripts by patrol officers-turned-actors in the theater of scenario-testing that demands close attention as role-players put texts “on their feet” by bringing them into their bodies, imbuing them with their lived experiences while on patrol (including their imagined relations to racialized others in the field), and transforming them into repertoires of ordinary violence.

Each Scenario Test Day begins with the Scenario Manager presenting the scenarios to be staged, and the selected scripts are circulated amongst evaluators who are paired up with their role-play actors. These troupes disperse across academy classrooms and outdoor areas to read the POST scripts together; evaluators review the grading criteria for each scenario while role-players, under the direction of the evaluator, provisionally devise a scene to stage. Negotiating where to “stage” scenarios so they do not overlap with each other is challenging as constant screams, the firing of blank ammunition rounds, and a cacophony of simulated baton strikes bleed across the boundaries of each scenario, composing the diegetic soundscape of the police academy.

As one-to-one performances between one role-play actor and one police recruit (or, in some cases, one recruit and two volunteer actors), stagings themselves become an effort in emotional and physical endurance; while role-play actors are not explicitly directed to “play out” rote performances with identical dialogue or gestures, there is an expectation that each staged scene should be similar to the one that came before so that no recruit is disadvantaged by improvised variations. One training officer I spoke with described this condition as an egalitarian principle of academy training, where “evaluators need to make sure as many recruits have a similar experience of the scenario as possible.” While predictable repetition is the implicit, platonic ideal of police training paradigms (Wolfe et al. 2020), the long arc of Performance Studies scholarship consistently marks the ephemeral temporality of performance as a condition where something otherwise – improvised, unscripted, excessive – might happen, perhaps never to happen again (Phelan 1993).⁹ This article suggests, however, that the following performances resist disappearance by emerging as citational possibilities in the afterlife of the police academy. These forms persist despite the conditions of this fieldwork, where, through intimate co-presence with officers and recruits, the ethnographer risks becoming “immersed... entangled with, even ravished by the cocreative process such that the subjectivity of the researcher is diffused within, even to the point of disappearing into, the field’s body” (Pollock 2006, 326, emphasis mine). It is wholly risky work, from willingly being thrown to the ground and cuffed during a mock arrest to the emotionally concussive force of faking one’s own death over and over again. Herbert Blau’s (1982, 156) haunting maxim reminds us, however, that despite theater’s imagined artifice the “elemental fact” of the actor’s mortality on stage remains: “Someone is dying in front of your eyes.”

In the following acts, I trace these concerns through different scenario scripts and their stagings, beginning each section with the POST-developed script. While recruits are funneled through scenarios one after another, there is a small break between the end of one scenario and the start of another. During this intermission, I moved “off-stage,” rapidly writing field notes to capture the interactions and conversations that emerged between the recruit, training officer, and myself as role-play actor. These embodied shifts – moving from the seemingly-bounded stage of the scenario to the seat of ethnographic field writing – played on my own sense of entanglement in this site as both a performance ethnographer critically reading the interactions and interpretations of my interlocutors, and a performer necessarily rendered a racialized object of control. In the following pages I lean into these tensions, tracing the possibilities and limitations for performing a feminist revision of police training in co-present interaction as I attempt to “read against the grain” of training scripts and their inscriptions of ordinary violence.

Act I: //‘Cause my own eyes can see, through all your false pretenses//10

Pedestrian Stop Scenario:

Thomas Roberts is a white, forty-something Sergeant from a local police department. Initially mistaking me for a patrol officer, he sidles up next to me as we leave the 7am briefing session with our role-play training packet, leaning closer to inquire, “Not a bad gig, eh? Easiest overtime pay.” Though I correct him and mention that I am a non-law enforcement volunteer, I have participated as a role-play actor previously in 2015; this is the first time, however, that I will be volunteering for the entire duration of Scenario Test Week.

We arrive at a stretch of asphalt near a spartan obstacle course Thomas haphazardly selects to stage our scene, planting his thermos on the ground like an Artic expedition flag. Moments after staking symbolic claim to this section of blacktop connecting the adjacent public road to the parking lot filled with patrol cars that sits at the center of the training academy, another evaluator walks by with two role-play actors in tow, slapping his clipboard against Thomas’ shoulder with a playful whack and lamenting that he “took” his spot. Thomas shoots off a friendly “Sorry, bud!” before unclipping the sheet of paper detailing our scenario and holding it in front of me to read.

“Alright. Looks like you’re ... ” Thomas’ voice trails off as he scans the script, eyes narrowing before expelling a cavalier chuckle and handing me the paper. “Homeless!”

Thomas says we will run this scenario about 50 times over the course of the day to get through as many recruits as possible, and I turn the sheet over in my hands, reading the list of evaluative criteria he will use to score recruits’ performances underneath a sub-headed section titled “FOR EVALUATORS ONLY”: (1) Does the responding recruit inform the transient that hitchhiking is illegal within city limits? (2) Does the recruit perform an identification (ID) check? (3) Does the recruit call in to dispatch to check for outstanding warrants?

While the scenario script is billed as a “Pedestrian Stop” meant to inform the transient pedestrian that hitchhiking is illegal, it is clear from the grading criteria that performing a pedestrian stop of someone hitchhiking – a minor violation – becomes an opportunity for the recruit to practice a common police tactic known as a “pretextual stop.” Pretextual or pretext stops grant carte blanche to officers who are trained to cite minor violations as a way to conduct more intrusive and extensive searches of motorists and pedestrians in the hopes of finding more egregious offenses, such as outstanding felony warrants. Widely criticized as a strategy for racial profiling (Epp et al. 2014), the pretext stop emerges in this script as the unspoken text that implicitly trains recruits to use every encounter as an opportunity to perform intrusive searches.

“Well, if you’ve got it down ... ” Thomas begins carefully, retrieving the sheet of paper from my hands as though I have lingered on the other side of the script for too long, “I’ll go grab the first recruit. Is there any way you could ‘rough up’ a bit? Maybe do something with your hair?”

In Thomas’ seemingly innocent suggestion to “rough up” my appearance – a phrase that performatively marks transience as requiring visual and aesthetic coherence so as to be identifiable to officers – he predestines how recruits should learn to see transience. As the following scene suggests, these directorial choices create visual models for how acts of transience are potentially subject to acts of racial profiling and ordinary police violence in the patrol field. Absent a formal props department, I retrieve a blue sarong a friend left in my car along with my backpack.

When Thomas returns with the first recruit, I am walking down the stretch of asphalt, thumb erect and extended in a beckoning gesture to passing imaginary drivers. With a makeshift scarf loosely tousled around my head, prominent Assyrian nose protruding from my cowl, I am multiply transmogrified: a folkloric figure in the vein of Baba Yaga, a dead ringer for my Assyrian great-grandmothers, survivors of the Assyrian Genocide we call Seyfo (ܣܝܦܐ), and the elderly woman I have seen routinely walking down Main Street in El Cajon, her silky cream hijab and pendulous grocery bags illuminated by our passing patrol car’s LED lightbar.

A white male recruit in his twenties dressed in full uniform – duty belt, steel-toed black boots, shoulder-mounted radio – approaches me cautiously, looking toward Thomas for recognition that the scenario has begun. This glance is the first indication that the world of the scenario does not begin with the embodied role-player, but comes into performative being under the evaluator’s directorial gaze. Thomas dramatically sweeps his clipboard midair in mock performance of film director, laughing to himself before exclaiming, “Action!”

RESPONDING OFFICER

Excuse me, ma’am? I got a call about someone walking in the middle of the road. I’m going to need to ask you to come over here.

PEDESTRIAN

الرجاء المساعدة11

RESPONDING OFFICER

Uh ... I’m sorry, do you speak English?

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Thomas’ eyebrows arch in surprise, peeking over the polycarbonate rim of his sunglasses. This is clearly not what he, nor the recruit, had in mind. Bewildered, the recruit takes a step back from me, turns his body at a 45-degree angle and grabs the handle of his plastic training gun.

I have memorized only a few Arabic phrases taught to me by my Iraqi-Assyrian father, yet this improvised revision emerges from my experience riding along with officers from departments that patrol East County San Diego, home to some of San Diego’s fastest growing refugee populations. During ride-alongs, I observed officers negotiate daily interactions with newcomers from Syria and Iraq, many unfamiliar with American law enfor- cement interactions. Even in banal situations, such as pulling drivers over for expired registration tags, officers predictably take on a more aggressive stance and tone with people they perceive to be, in the more polite words of multiple veteran officers I have spent time with in the patrol field, “fresh off the boat.” As evidenced above, these racia- lized subjects elicit more suspicious methods and styles of everyday policing, such as the use of a “tactical interview stance” in the field. Described in the academy as a tactical position for maximizing officer safety by interviewing all witnesses or suspects at a 45-degree angle, thereby minimizing the officer’s body as a possible target, I have witnessed this stance used more often with Black and Brown drivers and citizens in the field than with their white counterparts.

Suspicion and aggression saturate patrol encounters in situations where officers do not share language or cultural norms with policed citizens. When responding to calls at an Assyrian, Arabic, or Chaldean home, these same officers will openly reject proffered acts of hospitality (such as being offered شاي, or “chai”), returning to their patrol cars while commenting to each other (within earshot of the ethnographer) on the “dirty” con- ditions of immigrant domiciles, or what one officer called “shithole apartments.” Though many officers were clearly practiced in the art of polite and professional refusal, others seemed less inclined towards such graces: smirking at accents, snapchatting each other while standing in the middle of someone’s living room. One white officer in his late forties, with two tours in Afghanistan under his tactical duty belt, memorably declined a steaming bowl of Makloubeh – a familiar staple of rice, stewed meat, and vegetables in many Arabic and Assyrian households – from a widowed refugee from Mosul, Iraq. “Eat, eat. It’s good.” Fadia insisted, smiling earnestly in spite of the officer’s firm, thankless “No.” Walking back to his patrol car after interviewing Fadia, he told me the smell of “these apartments” reminded him of his time patrolling the streets of Kabul and how his unit was advised to reject food from residents as a safety protocol. “You never know if some pissed off local wants to poison your ass. It’s also kind of gross,” he began before quickly closing down the possibility of an actual conversation with a rhetorical question, queuing up his mic bead to inform dispatch we were on our way to a new call, “You know they eat with their hands, right?”

These moments from my fieldwork illustrate how language barriers and assumed cultural differences can lead to racialized and racist practices performed by officers that emerge as tacit repertoires that not only uphold white supremacist logics, but also maintain the constancy and force of sweeping epistemological categories like “officer safety.” As a core tenet of police training, officer safety is the ideological specter summoned into every scenario test by both the POST script and the training evaluator, whose stone gaze and sin- ister clipboard scribbling drives home the tacit lesson of Scenario Test Week: never stop being aware of the self-evident threats to your very survival lurking behind earnest pleas or kind words, stashed in the bottom of someone’s bag, or hidden in a waistband. This training paradigm, where recruits are enculturated and primed to imagine themselves as targets for threats and acts of bodily violence, cultivates a “warrior mentality” marked by a “hypervigilant focus on preserving officer safety at all costs” (Stoughton 2015, 228).

Lessons on officer safety are consistently reinforced by the academy’s broad curriculum, which includes screening Hollywood films like Antoine Fuqua’s 2001 Training Day to teach recruits how to envision themselves as threatened outsiders in the “urban jungle” of the patrol field (Aushana 2019). Anthropologist Aisha Beliso-De Jesús (2020) argues these rhetorical and practiced lessons reinforce the anti-Black “jungle logics” of police training, illustrating how the seductive metaphor of the jungle shapes the racial imaginary of recruits; just as Alonzo Harris introduces Jake Hoyt to the “Jungle” of Baldwin Village in Training Day, so too can recruits expect to find themselves in comparable jungles of San Diego’s many neigh- borhoods where racial others await them, from Somali youth activists in City Heights (Abumaye 2017) to resettled Chaldean and Assyrian refugees in El Cajon still coping with the effects of America’s ongoing imperial violence across the Middle East (Ludwig 2016). Mobilized by the academy’s “lure of excursions into racial otherness and criminality” (Beliso-De Jesús 2020, 145) – a world of unknown Others and uncertain outcomes “out there” – recruits enter the patrol field fully directed toward the primacy of officer safety and its imagined assailants. These violent rehearsals implicitly mark the certainty that threats to patrol officers are not a mere possibility, but an inescapable script playing itself out.

PEDESTRIAN

ساعدني

RESPONDING OFFICER

Can you understand me? What are you doing out here? What’s your name?

PEDESTRIAN

Miriam. I need to leave. My family in Arizona. Please, I am leaving.

RESPONDING OFFICER

Do you have identification? What’s in your bag? Take a seat right there, and don’t move. I’m going to take a look in your bag.

As this scene unfolds, so too does the thread of racial (il)logics woven throughout the academy’s tapestries of unspoken norms, including the problematic notion that officers should expect everyone they interact with in the patrol field to speak English. Incoherent subjects need not be accommodated, only dominated by an officer’s hypermasculine choreography and commands. This is the casual and practicable enactment of the logics of white supremacy that reinforce the heteronormative cis-male whiteness of policing (Beliso-De Jesús 2020). Faced with a language he cannot understand, the recruit’s immediate interpretation is mobilized by the White supremacist and colonial logics identified by sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist Jonathan Rosa (2019, 5) that render the “co-naturalization of language and race” through histories and practices of anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure, and against which raciolinguistic performances – even improvised, off-the-cuff articulations such as mine – are forced to cohere.

The recruit instructs me to sit on the curb and reveal the contents of my bag. While trying to explain myself in both English and Arabic, the recruit pretends to call dispatch on his radio (and is answered by Thomas standing three feet away, performing both role of “evaluator” and “dispatch”), then says he is going to search my bag before warning me,

If there is anything sharp in here, I need you to tell me right now, do you understand me? I don’t want to have to escalate things with you, so it’s better for you and for me if you’re honest with me now.

I am about to answer when a sidebar is requested by the recruit, pausing our enactment.

“Sorry,” he says quietly to the training officer, seemingly off-stage, “Is it, like, okay for me to say that?”

“Sure,” Thomas answers, “Do or say what you need to in order to get that compliance, because that’s what we’re always looking for, right? Within reason, of course.”

What do “reasonable” acts of violence look like to both recruits and training officers, and how are they made visible and ordinary in the staging of simulated scenarios? To imagine an answer, I argue we must first address police training as a performative practice. Following J. L. Austin (1962) and Judith Butler (1988, 1990, 2004), acts of police training – from the scenario training scripts themselves to the small interruptions by training offi- cers that cause a break in the action – can be understood as performative, in that they actively shape and constitute the world they are tasked with apprehending, recording, and arresting. Butler’s (2004) examination of gender performance and its production through reiteration is useful here, particularly her argument that the citationality of performance “allows for certain kinds of practices and action to become recognizable as such” (42, emphasis mine). For Butler, performativity is a process through which see- mingly fixed, embodied experiences are produced through citational acts.

In the dialogic performativity of Scenario Test Week, the formation of what appears “reasonable” to recruits is made legible through an iterative process where recruits rehearse restricted styles and roles which become enforceable, editable, and revisable through the practiced vision of training officers. Scripts become seemingly flexible propositions where recruit vision is shaped in dialogical interaction with training officers and role-players. They are dialogical in both a Bakhtinian sense, emerging through dialogue in the shared world and vocabulary of police training, and in the performative stance offered by Conquergood (1985), for whom dialogic performance is “a kind of performance that resists conclusions, it is intensely committed to keeping the dialogue between perfor- mer and text open and ongoing” (9). Despite the improvizational, inherent “openness” of staging scenarios, it is clear Thomas’ directing in the scene above guides the recruit toward a narrow goal of achieving compliance rather than expanding the locus of his attention toward the fact that he and Miriam do not share a common language, which behooves the recruit to, for example, seek translation assistance.

In another iteration of the “Pedestrian Stop Scenario,” a white recruit with a sharp crew cut approaches me (“Ramina”), immediately incensed that I am hitchhiking. When I explain I am living in housing precarity, he advances on me – right palm finding that familiar place on his holster – while stating, “Ma’am, that really isn’t my problem, but I promise you’re going to have an even bigger problem if you don’t cooperate with me right now and move your entire body over here so that I can talk to you.” Defiant, I curse him. The recruit gives a frustrated look to Thomas, seemingly unsure of how to continue.

“Okay, okay,” Thomas gently interrupts,

Let’s say she finally comes over here ... you know, you manage to convince her. Then you look through her bag, and find an ID. When you call in to dispatch, you find out she has an outstanding warrant for her arrest. Now what do you do?

I concede to this fast-forwarding and sit on the curb as directed. In circumventing moments of impasse or ambiguity where multiple interpretations of an event might be possible, the training officer’s generous and improvizational direction accomplishes two things: that the recruit will likely pass this scenario by being lead to the “correct” course of action (i.e. stop pedestrian, perform search, identify pedestrian, and check for outstanding warrants for her arrest), and it instantiates a citational model for future interactions that structures how this recruit may learn to see racialized others in the field of patrol work as targets for pretext stops. In situations where recruits might encounter women like Ramina and Miriam, the stakes of a performative analysis could not be more clear: the institution of policing, enacted on the stages of Scenario Test Week, reproduces the objects of its own inquiry, and reinforces tacit acts of racialized police violence as ordinary, even in scenarios that do not require recruits to be tested on explicit uses of force.

In the final act below, I return to this article’s opening scene to examine the performative construction of command presence that shapes routine performances of racial violence and the currents of anti-Blackness coursing through these citational models of idealized patrol vision. By living through the deadly premise of the academy’s “Deadly Use-of-Force” script, I gesture toward the conditions and limits of embodied performance exceeded by performativity’s pull to enforce, constrain, and cement methods of interpretation.

Act II: //But homicide be looking at you from the face down//12

Deadly Use-of-Force Scenario

You feel that you have been unjustly fired from your job, and return to work the next day demanding to have your job back. You refuse to leave and decide to take matters into your own hands.

“Did you use deadly force because you feared for your life?”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Beneath the instructive gaze of the training officer, the recruit struggles to cup both of my wrists together at my lower back as I “play dead” on the floor of the academy class- room. He fumbles with the steel fastener on the nylon handcuff case fixed to his duty belt, struggling to get a good grip. After what feels like a few minutes (and long after my arms have fallen asleep), the recruit manages to secure the handcuffs around my wrists. Sighing with exertion, he sits back on his haunches. With the clipboard cradled against her hip, Training Officer Tara idly fingers a stray hair from her curled eyelashes and addresses the recruit with barely disguised impatience, “She’s dead, recruit. Now what do you do? Are you going to sit on her handcuffed corpse all day?”

Meant to test recruits’ capacity to not only use deadly force but importantly justify their use of force, this scenario trains recruits to participate in a form of police vision that is devastatingly reductive: deadly force is justified and reasonable no matter the complexity of the situation. If a weapon is exposed or produced, recruits are expected to shoot to kill; no aiming for limbs to impair or injure, only center of mass. There are no requests made to a Psychiatric Emergency Response Team (PERT), nor any use of less “lethal force” options such as tasers or batons. When I first meet Tara at the start of the second day of scenario testing, she hands me the script with one hand and a decommissioned Smith & Wesson Model 5903 9mm pistol with the other, explaining that the scenario is meant to test recruits’ understanding of when it is appropriate to use deadly force.

“Do I want them to shoot me?” I ask, perhaps a little too frank.

“If you feel like they truly compel you to drop your weapon, then, sure, drop it,” she responds nonchalantly, “Otherwise, shoot them if they take too long to draw their firearm. We’re making sure they recognize when they need to pull their duty weapon to protect themselves. That’s all I’m trying to assess here. It’s basic stuff.”

Hours later, secured in handcuffs and cheek pressed to the linoleum floor, I stare side- ways through Tara’s casual, shearling footwear. I want to ask the recruit – who, seemingly frozen by nerves and stuttering, is as motionless atop me as I am beneath him – about the moments before he drew his replica training gun and simulated shooting me with a verbal “bang!” What did he see when he entered the classroom and saw me sobbing with a handgun pointed muzzle-down at the floor? How did his vision, fortified by ideologies of officer safety, objectivity, and transparency embedded in academy training, read the choreography of my body?

The query that crosses my lips, however, escapes before I can choose my words with more care:

“Could you just ... give me a second?” I ask, interrupting the scene, “Can’t ... breathe.”

“Now, now,” the evaluator’s voice lilts in playful chastisement, pointing her pen down toward my face. “No talking. You’re dead.”

Dead women tell no tales. This is the shared legacy of Black and Brown lives dis- patched by the long history of police violence (Aymer 2016; Muhammad 2019; Rodríguez 2006; Vargas 2018). What I couldn’t have known then in the fall of 2019 was how this speech act, this citational refrain in the longue durée of America’s anti-Black history, would in 2020 again coalesce as a death knell and rallying cry for justice for Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, George Floyd, Andres Guardado, Atatiana Jefferson, Sean Mon- terrosa and those many others whose names will arrive in future headlines and Twitter timelines that the snail’s speed of academic publishing cannot accommodate here.

Anti-Blackness emerges here as more than an enduring organizing principle of Anglo-American law enforcement and U.S. state formation (Wilderson 2018; Sexton 2017); it is itself a performative citation that surfaces in scenes of academy training. Marquis Bey (2016) traces this anti-Blackness through histories of criminalization of Black bodies made legible and punishable by the interpretive White gaze, noting that, “ ... the continuance of anti-Black violence is neither discreet nor isolated but constant and in possession of numerous precedents” (276). While scenario scripts are nominally, “officially” colorblind – making no discrete mention of racial identifiers – it is their staging that constitutes an ongoing anti-Black canon of “numerous precedents” of ordinary racial violence. The White gaze that orients police vision in the academy maintains this constancy of normalized violence by not turning on itself. It hides and reanimates its citations under the guise of trans- parency and objectivity projected into the bodies and life histories of its victims. In the following scene, learning to use deadly force becomes a citational model that does not simply teach novice recruits – many visibly unsure and uncertain for how to proceed – how to see danger, but how to perform the no-less-lethal mandate of command presence that creates and sustains the very volatile conditions it claims to avoid (Sierra-Arévalo 2021).

In most iterations of this scenario, I took on the persona of a single mother fired from her job and enacted her fear and loss by yelling, crying, and gesturing erratically before drawing my concealed weapon. Upon revealing this weapon, all recruits are quick to draw their firearms in response yet not always keen to shoot. In the following scene, the male recruit does not shoot me right away, which becomes a problem for the evaluator:

RESPONDING OFFICER

Ma’am, put down the gun. Put it down right now!

FIRED EMPLOYEE

How could they just fire me like that? Don’t they realize I have a family? They didn’t care. They just use and throw you away when they are fucking done with you.

When the recruit advances, I draw my weapon and aim it at the floor while warning him to stay away. Convinced he can scream me into compliance, he fills the five feet between us with his bellowing refrain of “Put the gun down.” We are at an impasse, and the evaluator intercedes:

“Are you kidding me right now, recruit? Are you serious? You’re just going to let her draw down on you like that? Run it again. This is embarrassing. Where is the command presence?”

In Tara’s insistence that the recruit reperform the scenario and alter his vision of the fired employee as a more immediate threat, she underscores “split decision-making” as one of the police academy’s organizing principles that demands recruits learn to either kill quickly, or be killed. Moreover, though I explicitly avoided aiming at the recruit’s body,Tara’s critique that the recruit “let” me “draw down” on him (police jargon for pointing a loaded gun at someone) reveals the expansive scope of his error: if he hesitates to use force in the patrol field, he risks not only failing to prevent a gun-wielding individual from harming themselves or someone else; he jeopardizes losing control of the unfolding situ- ation. Here, a failure to act on the use of deadly force is not only “embarrassing,” but con- structs the loss located in Tara’s inquiry (“Where is the command presence?”) that stops the scenario dead in its tracks. Without a convincing display of command presence, there is no possibility to continue, despite the fact that the Responding Officer and Fired Employee are only at a temporary standstill, interrupted and unable to see where an absence of deadly force might take them.

Like its theatrical corollary “stage presence,” command presence is the sine qua non of any effective and affecting police performance. As the modus operandi of patrol work and primary tool recruits must cultivate over the course of academy training, command presence becomes a key competency (as described in POST manual materials) evaluators search for across the 14 scenarios recruits perform in; there is no scenario where command presence is not, in the words of a senior training officer during a morning briefing session, “absolutely essential.” Animated by idealized gendered performances of confidence and authority – what some police scholars, citing the vague language used by officers themselves, have broadly described as “some quality essential to being a police officer” (Newman 2006, 487, emphasis mine) – command presence is the tacit, embodied method by which police recruits learn to perform heteronormative chor- eographies of masculinity.

Writing on the embedded white supremacy of police training, Beliso-De Jesús (2020) argues “molding” recruits into idealized subjects that can effectively “command respect” in police-citizen encounters involves Black and Brown recruits learning how to “suppress their identification as people of color” as they “consume and absorb the ideological con- ditioning and internalization of white supremacy, perform deference and malleability, and attain physical athleticism with macho comradery” (147). Thus, command presence naturalizes the whiteness and toxic heteromasculinity of policing as recruits are trained to identify stereotyped neighborhoods and its residents as “ghettos” (Fassin 2013) that must learn respect through violent policing tactics. I argue that even the allegedly “color-blind” mandate for performing command presence becomes a de facto anti-Black citation for future patrol work, emerging in scenario tests on use of force with predictably devas- tating consequences. When we run the scenario again, the recruit reenters the room and, before I can wipe our previous scene’s tears from my eyes, shoots me immediately.

In the 15 iterations of the “Deadly Use-of-Force Scenario” I performed, there was only one time I survived:

RESPONDING OFFICER

Put the gun down! Ma’am, put it down, please.

FIRED EMPLOYEE

I ... I don’t want to die. I want to see my sons. I’m doing this for my kids. I do it all for them. I don’t want to die.

RESPONDING OFFICER

I care about your kids, ma’am. Please, you can go home to your family. I can help you get home to your kids. Just put the gun down. Trust me. You will hold your children tonight. I promise you. No one has to get hurt today, no one has to die.

Compelled, I drop my gun and the recruit directs me to step away from it, turn away from him, and drop to my knees. He comes up behind me and says, “I’m just going to pull your arms back so I can reach my cuffs, okay? You’re doing great. It’s going to be okay.” He cuffs me, and the scenario is over.

Tara looks through her notations seemingly satisfied, then proceeds to ask him for a quick run-down of his decision making process.

“You did well to seek cover behind that concrete pillar, very nice. You seemed relatively calm,” she pauses for a moment before smiling beside herself, “You also didn’t run out of the room like a little bitch once you saw she had a gun like some of your fellow recruits.”

The recruit offers a conciliatory laugh before continuing, “Well, I just ... she didn’t seem like she was going to shoot me, you know? I felt like I had control of the situation.” When their conversation concludes, Tara instructs the recruit to uncuff me, and, having both dropped our performances, I relax into his grip as he lifts the steel from my skin. I take his proffered hand and he helps me off the floor before asking, “Are you alright, ma’am?”13

I dust off my knees and answer in the affirmative, finally seeing him up-close for the first time: a Filipino man in his 30s with closely-cropped black hair, flushed cheeks, and sweat beads collecting in the folds of his neck, soaking the starched edges of his uniform collar. I let the creeping thought in, giving it just a bit of space – too much – to overcome me. It is the same thought that haunts my experiences after riding along with the same patrol officers I have later seen photographed at protests in full riot gear for- mation, batons at the ready and faces obscured behind polycarbonate visors. It is the thought that comes while standing toe-to-toe, mask-to-mask, with the unfamiliar faces of police officers at Black Lives Matter protests in Los Angeles and San Diego: maybe he is one of the good ones.

When the recruit jogs out of the classroom on his way to the next scenario, this thought evaporates in the wake of his exit. Like his fellow recruits before him, he will leave the academy with a repertoire of embodied citations practiced and staged during Scenario Test Week, forming what Butler (1993, 22) identifies as a “citational chain” of preceding practices that may transform into a naturalized thin, blurred blue line (Stoughton 2017). Like the police recruit, the performance ethnographer is never outside of this citational praxis, carrying with her past iterations, stories, and revisions from the ethnographic field into the provisional theater of the police academy.

Summoning ethnographic others When I began this ethnographic project on policing five years ago, I had the opportunity to volunteer as a role-play actor in San Diego’s regional academy for the first time after riding along with officers from two different departments for over half a year. With smeared lip-stick under my eyes (an improvizational flourish requested by a training officer to simulate a black eye delivered by a lover’s blow) and recklessly eager to submit to the experimental constraints of embodied performance-making in a police academy, I stumbled my way through multiple stagings as a domestic violence victim for over 50 recruits. With each iteration initiated by a new recruit cautiously rapping on the simulated front door, I summoned the ethnographic field into the room, morphing into multiple variations of “dom- estic violence victim” for each recruit.

In doing so, I inadvertently performed a long citational chain of women I had both met on police ride-alongs, and elsewhere: here was a middle-aged manager on her knees sobbing into the crisp fibers of a recruit’s freshly laundered uniform; here was a stoic Chicana and mother of four, battered but not broken; here was a newly-married Assyrian immigrant unfamiliar with spoken English, whose attempts to communicate outside of her indigenous language seemed to repel the recruit in front of her; here was a Mexican-Amer- ican salon owner invoking a silent litany offered by her grandmother, “Líbrame señor de las aguas mansas que de las fuertes corrientes me libro yo,” turning these words over in her mind as the emotionless recruit wrote down her information; here was an Iraqi refugee’s body rocked by waves of grief, her erratic screams resulting in the wide-eyed, confused recruit pulling his duty weapon from his holster and aiming it at her, shocking her to stillness; and here was a twenty-something graduate student abused by the lover – a police officer – she thought she could save.

Each of these (re)performances illustrate the potentialities of performance ethnography to mobilize and inhabit these citational chains. Looking back at my fieldnotes, I see the naïve and excited formulations of a novice ethnographer trying to make sense of police training scripts as sites for performative revision: they are both performance texts, waiting to be enacted, inhabited and role-played by police recruits and role-players, and evidence of a citational process where recruits must learn to take on the propositions of each scenario as simulations that idealize how recruits must act in the field of everyday patrol work. In performing them, they not only became “alive,” but became livable possibilities. If they were livable, then they could be inhabitable otherwise, and a revision might emerge within the conventions of scenario training.

Years later, sitting alone in the corner of the classroom in the emotional aftermath of this use-of-force scenario after the final recruit has been tested and the evaluators have left for the day, I must contend with the fact that I have brought the experiences of Arabic, Assyrian, Mexican, and Chicana women from over-policed communities in San Diego into these classrooms with me as material to perform. I wipe the sweat and tears from face, tracing my own Assyrian and Colombian features in a meditative gesture echoing the powerful maxim of D. Soyini Madison’s (2006) description of critical per- formance ethnography as “body-to-body fieldwork,” a process in which “over time, you will shed parts of yourself – others press upon your bone and skin and heart, and it is not just you anymore (it never was)” (323, emphasis added).

If policing creates the very conditions through which people, objects, and other “ghostly matters” (Gordon 2011) are read, organized, and interpreted, then the perform- ance ethnographer can work to inhabit the subject positions – multiple and many – inter- pellated by police vision as a way of rendering visible policing’s performativity to the recruits and training officers involved in this very process. However, in antagonizing the presumed epistemic authority of incredibly simplistic scripts, my performances furtherrevealed how invisibly and tacitly their provisional staging directed by evaluators informs recruits’ vision before they become officers. Recruit subjectivity is continuously constituted through repetitive stagings – accompanied by training officer critiques – that reinforce normatively violent performances of command presence and idealized authority. In trying to read against the grain of training texts in front of training officers, it is their authorized revisioning that performatively marks how an ordinary violent police vision is taken up in the academy by recruits: stopping a scenario to redirect a recruit’s attention, forcing recruits to run a scenario again if they experience stage fright, or otherwise mocking their performances as a hazing ritual that trains them to “conform to aggressive masculinity” (Beliso-De Jesús 2020, 152). If training officers broadly read performance ethnographies (or any ethnographies), they might begin to grapple with the notion that it is their performances of evaluation and critique that offer the most powerful citational models for police recruits’ vision.

(Post)script: final gestures on complicity and performance In foregrounding performativity as an analytical mode for reading how scripts iteratively congeal in recruit’s interpretive performances, one must acknowledge that the stakes of such an analysis include its possible alignment and complicity with the language of police reform; those convinced that more and better training of recruits and officers could reduce police violence may read these situations as evidence that the citational chain of training scripts can be retrofitted with new citations, or otherwise revised. The risks of this kind of work – of being not only committed to studying officers’ everyday practices of state violence, but complicit in it – pose both ethical and methodological problems for ethnographers of policing. Beatrice Jauregui (2013) identifies the binds of complicity in her “dirty anthropology” with officers in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, arguing that, despite one’s feelings or political commitments, “When by virtue of their social position(s) your interlocutors are de facto transgressing boundaries ... then you must transgress with them ... even if you are not enacting violence yourself” (147). Drawing on the work of Gayatri Spivak (1988), Jauregui suggests ethnographers reframe participation as “strategic complicity” to call attention to violence in the field while “allowing said Other to exist and contribute to the building of knowledge with its own voice” (147). In some ways, the research I have undertaken is a radical revisioning of what it means to be engaged in “strategic complicity” with policing; by performing these scripts alongside officers, we have collectively devised scenes of racial and gendered violence together in the training of new recruits despite my interventions to stage otherwise.

While this article has relied on the conceptual work of performativity to make an argument about police vision, I turn here to the explicit methods of bodily performance that address the limits of revision, invoking legacies of theorists and artists like Anna Deavere Smith (1994, 2019), Xandra Ibarra/La Chica Boom (2013, 2015, 2017), Dorinne Kondo (2018) and Koritha Mitchell (2011). Reflecting back on my scenario per- formances, I understand the imperative to perform through Smith’s (1994) description of her own praxis in the making of her one-woman play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. Like Smith, I am not proposing solutions to the normalized acts of violence performed in the police academy, but rather “I am looking at the processes of the problems. Acting is a constant process of becoming something. It is not a result, it is not an answer ... I see the work as a call” (1994, xxiv). Performing alongside recruits in Scenario Test Week – taking on the proposals of each script by taking them into my body in the process and act of “becoming something” – is a call to experience how intractable these training worlds are. Returning to this article’s opening scene reveals how, even in attempting to become otherwise through performance, it is a knee in your back that becomes you, anchoring you to the ground while grounding the recruits’ understanding and interpretation of violence as a normative enactment of police vision.

It is the improvizational moments that emerge around and through these scripts, rather than the “bounded” worlds of any given script, that mobilize training officers’ revisions and responses. Through acts of coperformance with recruits, these “off stage” dynamics become hyper visible. In this way, the situated, partial vision of recruits is consistently supplanted by the state-sponsored, “professional vision” (Goodwin 1994) of training officers, one that stresses aggressive command presence and enforcing compliance above all. Therefore, while the premises of scripts described here are embedded with racialized, misogynist visions, I argue that it is the citationality enforced by the training officers evaluating these scenarios that exceeds the script, carrying recruits forward into the field as they become further entrenched in citational models beyond the police academy, and into acts of forcing compliance at all costs, seemingly without concern for jurisprudence or justice.

Understanding how acts of staging and rehearsing vision structure recruits’ practices in the academy is key to moving away from individual-centered narratives ensconced in police reform campaigns and instead move us toward acknowledging how racist and racialized iterations of POST-scripted scenarios are made sensible and carried forward relationally in a long citational chain of scripts, training officers, field officers, department policies, and so on. Scripts are powerful propositions that enforce the chain of command by mobilizing citational chains of idealized authority, normatively-masculine command presence and control inexecutable in practice and thus must be performed again and again – from training academy to patrol and, in so many cases of racial police violence, unto death. Whether we are scholars committed to the ongoing project of abolition, or police officers deeply embedded in these training worlds, examining how policing is performed enables furtive glimpses into the pervasive citational chains that inform these performances. We are reminded, furthermore, of how deeply we are embedded in these chains even as we revise them to survive them.

Acknowledgements

This work would not exist without the enduring support of Elana Zilberg, Patrick Anderson, and Ricardo Dominguez: my understanding of what it means to risk embodied copresence with others has been shaped by each of you. Deepest gratitude to Kim Bobier, Marisa Williamson, the editorial collective of W&P, and my anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback and engagement with this piece. Special thanks to Yelena Gluzman, Tara Pixley, and Michael Berman for reading different versions of this unruly text along the way, and to Mark for everything in between.

Notes on contributor Christina Aushana is a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. Her writing on the intersections of police training and the visual culture of policing has been recently published in the journal Surveil- lance & Society. Aushana is co-founder of the research collaboratory Feminist Theory Theater, a group dedicated to staging feminist theory as an intervention in situated meaning-making in the academy and beyond.

Notes

1. I foreground the names of those police officers responsible for the acts of murder and brutality that have destroyed and stolen the lives of Eric Garner, Alfred Olango, and Rodney King. ↩

2. See Balto (2019), Felker-Kantor (2018), Schrader (2019) and Vitale (2018) ↩

3. See also Brown (1988), Manning (1977, 1982, 1988), Martin (2019), Muir (1977), Skolnick (1966), Manning and Van Maanen (1978), and Westley (1970). ↩

4. In Policing Contingencies (2003), Peter K. Manning explains, “the metaphor of drama is not only about individual consciousness; it is about the structure of relations ... The social world is not simply seen, heard, or smelled, but it is interpreted” (5). Despite Manning’s acknowledge- ment of interpretation here, making sense of police work as “drama” foregrounds a familiar narrative that individual, “good” officers may be innocently caught within larger “theaters” of violence beyond their control while also reinscribing divisions between a totalizing “police culture” and the world beyond, including the position of the ethnographer who imagi- nes himself as outside of the interactions he observes. ↩

5. Founded in 1959, POST is composed of law enforcement professionals, city and county admin- istrators, and members of the public appointed by the Governor of California. For more on the historical development and early organizational management of POSTs, see Christian and Edwards (1985). ↩

6. The use of role-play methods in the police academy serves as an apparatus for police training that informs how sociality (Alves and Costa Vargas 2017; Karpiak 2013), negotiating role-taking (Lundman 1980; Van Maanen 1973; Moskos 2008), and symbolic performances of authority, objectivity, and legitimacy (Barker 1999; Manning 2001) are performed in the patrol field. ↩

7. While attempts to corroborate this information have come up against a predictable blue wall of silence, it has been echoed in conversations with other police and training officers, suggesting that this practice is provisionally enacted despite the absence of an official acknowledgement. ↩

8. These 14 scenarios include: Ethics, Domestic Violence/Victim Assistance, Force Option – Baton, Force Option – Control Hold, Deadly Force, Pedestrian Approach, Nighttime Vehicle Pullover, Suspicious Person, Building Search, Critical Incident, Ambush, Preliminary Investi- gation/Felonious Assault, Death Investigation, and Mentally Disordered Person. As of this writing, California’s POST has proposed to remove the carotid restraint, also known as a “choke hold,” from mandated police training. ↩

9. While Phelan’s canonical, “syllabus-haunting staple” (Switzky 2018) remains an incisive con- tribution to the field of Performance Studies, her thesis must be carefully considered in the longue durée of anti-Black mortality and resistance. See recent works by Women & Perform- ance contributors Henry Washington, Jr. (2021), Jesse A. Goldberg (2021), and Joshua Chambers-Letson (2016). ↩

10. This act’s title is sampled from Lauryn Hill’s 2002 song “I Find It Hard to Say (Rebel),” from her live album MTV Unplugged No. 2.0, and which was inspired by the murder of unarmed Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo by four New York City Police Department plainclothes officers on February 4, 1999. ↩

11. Here and elsewhere, I resist translation both as an enactment of Tina Campt’s (2019) call towards a politics of refusal, and to rhetorically perform the uncertainty of meaning and inten- tion that recruits navigate during Scenario Test Week. ↩

12. This act’s title is sampled from Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 song “Alright,” off of his album To Pimp a Butterfly. I invoke Lamar’s writing here for its allusions to police violence, and because of its exalted status as a “protest song” following the spate of killings committed by police officers in 2020. ↩

13. This small moment demonstrates how post-performance acts of care exceed the seemingly- bounded limits of the training scenario, and stand in stark contrast to the televisual images of routine and spectacular enactments of police violence that animate the institution of American policing. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, citizen-recorded video of Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck capture the disciplinary force of legitimated state violence in Chauvin’s posture: with hands in his pockets, Chauvin appears untouchable as he casually ends George Floyd’s life. Surrounded by fellow officers who stand in resigned witness to Floyd’s murder, this scene becomes a familiar citation in the long history of extra- legal police killings in the United States.

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