UC Berkeley

This dissertation is an ethnographic description of how police recruits learn to use force. I became a police recruit at two academies in order examine the process whereby police recruits learn to deploy calibrated physical force as a body technique (Mauss 1979) central to policing. Body techniques are traditional, technical and efficacious ways of using the body that are embedded in contexts of social value and symbolic significance. Police force, as calibrated body technique, is social: they pre-exist and outlive individual recruits; have to be learned and passed on from staff to recruits; they are to a degree constraining as recruits encounter social pressures to use their bodies in institutionally appropriate ways (as their bodily practices are praised, rewarded, evaluated, made fun of, and stigmatized). A police officers forceful bodily techniques are also social in the sense that they differ from how groups like boxers, soldiers, or gang members use their bodies forcefully. In other words, groups create forceful body techniques that inculcate and give meaning to the technique as well as delimit the boundaries of the group.

I challenge the prevalent view of police force as deriving from attitudes and values by focusing on force as an embodied action. Police force€€-- pursuing, command presence, searching & seizing, handcuffing, shooting, swinging a baton − is an intensely corporeal activity; and in tensely unfolding social encounters, new police officers are expected to react with skilled use of their bodies to the dangers and conflicts that they face. A police officer's embodied forceful acts are not the result of conscious deliberation but follow from practical reasons only to later be translated into articulate, verbal accounts after the fact, e.g. during report writing or the demand from supervisors to justify past actions. For police recruits learning to understand force isn't an act of "comprehension" so much as of "apprehension" by apprehending hands. "Knowing" how to be forceful is just being able to do it.

Theoretically approaching police force as a calibrated bodily technique allows us to bring together the subjective life of the recruit's body with its objective social situation. Body techniques are subjective in the sense that they are forms of knowledge and understanding. But these same techniques are also objective in that they are social facts characterized by a social distribution and origin and they are encountered as external constraints, meaning that recruits feel compelled to use their bodies in certain ways.

I also don't treat the forceful skills as only technical. Recruits do invest themselves in forceful practices as preparation for often-inflated perceived dangers. But I show that more importantly, recruits embrace police force because, in the daily experience of the academy, having a forceful body -- a body imbued with fighting potential, strength, speed, and physical skill-- confers recognition and respect from the academy staff and from peers. To be overweight, poor with a firearm, bad at driving, unable to keep up on a run, or seemingly incapable of tolerating pain, is to be relegated to a stigmatized status by staff and peers.

By attending to how body techniques are learned I discovered a central conflict in the academies use of force training: the perceived need to overcome recruits' own "normal" and therefore pacific dispositions. Since most recruits are new-comers to using their bodies forcefully, there was persistent talk and training regarding how to make seemingly pacified recruits forceful but not too forceful. This was because recruits were initially incompetent in using force and academy staff had to make force "explicit" so recruits would "get it." In attempting to balance the need to make pacified recruits forceful and at the same time temper the use-of-force, I show how recruits sensibilities toward the use of force are honed, affect economies cultivated, and calibrated force is routinzed as a skillful response to social encounters.

The introduction, chapter one, defines the problem of learning to be forceful. It shows how being forceful is a central concern of the academy and central to the very definition of competence. Chapter two reviews the literature on police academies, police socialization, and police culture to reveal large gaps in the literature. The research on academies has neglected the question of how recruits learn force and has been preoccupied with how police recruits learn to see themselves as members of a professional group. The literature on police socialization and has favored ruminations over how police officers talk and think about force, often long after it has occurred. I respond to the literature by outlining how Mauss's notion of bodily technique and Bourdieu's notion of habitus can fill in the gap and give a more complete picture of police culture and how it is learned. I also examine how other social groups provide objective social contexts in which subjective bodily knowledge is collectively shaped.

Chapter three outlines the methods and procedures I used to conduct this study. It also describes the recruit classes and the training staff of the two academies I studied. In chapters four and five I examine how academy staff try to teach recruits use their bodies forcefully. In chapter four I begin by examining how recruits learn their hand to "search and seize." Recruits use their hands more than any other part of their body, other than their mouths, to be forceful. Because forceful use of the hands is routine, it is an ideal place to begin examining how recruits learn to use their bodies to exert situational dominance over another using their body. Academy staff refer to this colloquially as "control." In chapter five I describe in detail how police recruits learn to use deadly force with their firearms. Unlike skilled use of hands firearms are rarely used by police but intense value is placed on mastering shootings skills. I examine how a particular technique of shooting, "double tapping" is learned as a bodily technique. Once this bodily technique is mastered as a system of postures and coordinated movements it is normalized and made familiar as a skillful bodily response to perceived "threats." I argue that lethal force becomes "normal force" when it is grasped by recruits in a practical mode like any skill. In chapters three and four I also examine how staff teach recruits learn what is a "threat."

While chapters four and five are about how recruits learn to deploy force, in chapters six and seven I look at how recruits are "hardened" in preparation for potentially violent and uncertain encounters on "the street." In chapter six I focus on daily negative rites like physical training that imbue recruits with a valued social body. This body is cultivated within a symbolic economy based on recognition and respect on the one hand and shame and insult on the other. The suffering of physical training also serves as a daily ordeal for recruits to overcome and that helps mark the police world as a separate sacred and heroic world that stands above the profane world recruits came from. In chapter seven I focus on an episodic negative rite, "Chemical Agents Day." During this rite recruits are expected to overcome the intense pain of exposure to chemical agents, with poise, in order to demonstrate their character. But in addition to be a test of moral self worthy by way of bodily self-control, the rite functions as a way of building a deep visceral bonding of the recruits to one another through a shared sense of pain and humiliation. Recruits also are bonded to their trainers as they overcome their suffering with the help of the very trainers who exposed them to physical pain and vulnerability.

In the final empirical chapter, chapter eight, I provide one in depth interview with a recruit. This interview is important because it provides a sense of how a fairly typical recruit experienced the discipline, shame, as well as pride in bodily and emotional self-mastery. In particular we get to hear how a recruit thought and felt about the stressful and uncertain environment created by the academy staff in order toughen up recruits.