Travis Linnemann

Staring Down the State: Police Power, Visual Economies, and the “War on Cameras”

This paper considers how the politics of security and order are also a politics of aesthetics encompassing practical struggles over the authority and regulation of ways of looking and knowing. To do this, the paper considers the visual economies of police power in the United States by engaging what has been called the “war on cameras”, or the police crackdown on citizen photographers who “shoot back” or “stare down” police. Despite US law generally endorsing the right for citizens to film or photograph on-duty public police officers, in recent years hundreds of cases have been documented where police have confiscated or smashed cameras, deleted film, or intimidated and threatened those wielding an unauthorized camera. For us, this crackdown on the unauthorized stare is a theoretically and politically insightful case study—a diagnostic moment—for engaging more openly and starkly the assumptions underpinning police power more generally, particularly the ways police power aims to actively fabricate social order by eradicating anything it deems a threat in the name of security. Ultimately, we argue that the violence holstered, literally and figuratively, on the hip of modern policing is inseparable from an attendant politics of staring and visuality that further extends and perpetuates state power’s aim of pacification.

Proof of death: Police power and the visual economies of seizure, accumulation and trophy

The phrase proof of life describes visual evidence meant to prove a kidnap victim or prisoner of war is alive. As developed here, proof of death describes a similar technique of seizure and display practiced by hunters, native warriors, soldiers and narco-traffickers meant to denote hunting prowess, domination and death. This article elaborates upon these representational practices, extending them to “police trophy shots”, the police practice of displaying large sums of money, illicit drugs, weapons and other seized materials. In the context of precarious late-capitalist economies, trophy shots as proof of death usefully reveal how police are actively involved in seizing the means of subsistence and administering, displaying and celebrating everyday domination and death.

From ‘filth’ and ‘insanity’ to ‘peaceful moral watchdogs’: Police, news media, and the gang label

This paper engages the cultural politics of criminal classifications by aiming at one of the state’s most powerful, yet ambiguous markers—the ‘gang.’ Focusing on the unique cases of ‘crews’ and collectives within the ‘straight edge’ and ‘Juggalo’ subcultures, this paper considers what leads members of the media and police to construct—or fail to construct—these street collectives as gangs in a seemingly haphazard and disparate fashion. Juxtaposing media, cultural, and police representations of straight edge ‘crews’ and Juggalo collectives with the FBI’s Gang Threat Assessment, we detail how cultural politics and ideology underpin the social reality of gangs and thus the application of the police power. This paper, furthermore, considers critical conceptualizations of the relationship between police and criminal gangs.

Darkness on the Edge of Town: Visual Criminology and the "Black Sites" of the Rural

ABSTRACT “Black” has long been employed to inspire or communicate horror, isolation and dread. Employed the state and capital, from the CIA and municipal police departments to corporations, the “black site” is a geography that conceals the knowledge of its own existence and boundaries. “Rurality” is a spatial concept characterized by the unknown and the blurred edges of its own temporal and material existence. Taking the common rural prison and Contained Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) as examples of rural “black sites”, we contend that efforts to render them visible can be enhanced by the lessons of paranormal/spirit photography.

Whiteness and critical white studies in crime and justice

As a discipline, criminology has long attempted to come to terms with the ways in which race is implicated in crime causation, everyday criminal justice practice, policy formation, and punishment. While the attempt is honest and ongoing, much criminological writing ignores crucial historical and structural textures, flattens the complexity of race as a social phenomenon to a single dimension of identity, and treats it as something to be ‘controlled for’. Thus, for much of the mainstream study of crime, to speak of race is to invoke a relation of binaries, in which ‘race’ really means non-white, black, or Hispanic. This sort of binary ontology or ‘dummy variable’ approach, positions whiteness as a ‘reference category’ and helps it to escape careful scrutiny or disappear altogether. It is this dearth of historical, structural, and political depth that instigated a series of roundtable conversations at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology in 2011 and 2012 on the topic of critical whiteness studies. Out of these productive discussions emerged the idea for this special issue and, of course, many of the papers included here. To be clear, the papers in this collection do not simply argue for greater attention to be paid to whiteness in order reify it as a discrete category in its own right or necessarily push it to the forefront of criminological analysis – far from it. Rather, our aim here is to understand race as a dialectically constructed social phenomenon in order to apprehend the ways in which whiteness and white identity help to perpetuate disparate social relations. So for instance, sociologist BonillaSilva (2012) has encouraged his readers to think about the ways in which racial domination is accomplished through a quotidian, yet insidious racial grammar. For Bonilla-Silva, grammar is not only language composition, but also pertains to the deep structure, logic, and rules of social interaction, which are negotiated and reproduced through and as practice. It is this racial grammar which structures how race is seen, understood, felt and lived, in everyday life. As an example, BonillaSilva points to the term ‘Historically Black College and University’ (HBCU). At first glance, HBCU is a rather innocuous way of linguistically designating institutions that have traditionally focused upon the needs of black students and the black community. Yet as he rightly points out, the character and difference of Historically Black Colleges and Universities is always already encoded in their very name, thereby obscuring the question: where are the Historically White Colleges and Universities? The answer is of course, everywhere. It is the normalized, ‘invisible weight’ of whiteness that provides meaning for the difference and crafted inferiority of the other. At work all around us, this sort of racial grammar is particularly evident in criminological scholarship that treats race as a flat, fixed, immutable trait.

Black sites, “dark sides”: War power, police power, and the violence of the (un)known:

The US Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture and the Guardian’s exposé of the Chicago Police Department’s “off-the-books interrogation compound” at Homan Square have again thrust torture into debates concerning the nature and limits of state and police violence. Following a longstanding pattern, key actors framed both cases as revelatory and exceptional and used them as fodder for public condemnation and calls for reform. In order to confront and contest similar patterns of facile outrage, we theorize a cultural-cognitive process of disavowal, whereby the inherent violence of the US state is willfully situated by its subjects in politically and culturally redacted black spaces. Here, black spaces allow political subjects to disavow the many horrors—rendition, torture, murder—committed on their behalf and in the name of security. We argue that these are not simply metaphorical, imaginary spaces, but rather material landscapes linking the certainties of US imperial violence to routine and uncontested acts of police violence and the interrogation rooms, jail cells, and prisons of an intensely racialized, yet largely disowned mass-carceral regime. Our aim, then, is to map the state’s black spaces in order to demonstrate the reciprocities between war and police and to situate the politics of redaction within broader systems of violence and dispossession.

Bad cops and true detectives: The horror of police and the unthinkable world:

The first season of the HBO series True Detective has drawn attention to Eugene Thacker’s horror of philosophy trilogy and his tripartite mode of thinking of the world and the subject’s relation to it. This article is an effort to read Thacker’s speculative realism into a critique of the police power. Where the police concept is vital to sustaining the Cartesian world-for-us, a world of mass-consumption and brutal privation, the limitations, failures or absence of police might also reveal horizons of disorder—primitivism, anarchism—the world-in-itself. A critical reading of True Detective and other police stories suggests that even its most violent and corrupt forms, as inseparable from security, law and order, the police power is never beyond redemption. What is rendered unthinkable then is the third ontological position—a world-without-police—as it exposes the frailties of the present social order and the challenges of thinking outside the subject.

MCJA 2007 Student Paper Award Winner: ENEMIES AT THE GATE: TOWARD A THEORY OF COURT-LEVEL RACIAL THREAT

ABSTRACT This research proposes a theoretical model of judicial decision making that integrates individual-level focal concerns perspective with the contextual influences of racial threat. Relying upon a large sample of felony court data, the study examines the interaction between court context, individual offense/offender characteristics and corresponding sentencing outcomes. Findings suggest that courts processing a high volume of threatening populations are more likely to sentence defendants to prison and impose sentences of greater length than courts that process a relatively low volume of threatening populations.