Screening Racial Visions, Scripting State Violence: The Performance and Visual Culture of Patrol Work and Police Training in San Diego

This dissertation considers sites where policing is visualized, staged, rehearsed, and performed to theorize how performances of racialized police violence become ordinary in the constructed training worlds of police officers. Through methods in performance and visual culture, I ethnographically examine the materials that shape officers’ and recruits’ training and professional vision. By focusing on the ways these visual logics travel across sites of policing, I argue that racialized police violence emerges as a tacit expectation of police training rather than an object of its address. Through tracking the violent logics embedded in policing’s historical and lived material culture, I theorize how training performances become citable in the field of patrol work, work which “feeds back” into acts of training.Based on more than 24 months of fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2021, I examine the material history and contemporary practices of the police ride-along by observing police-civilian encounters from behind the windshield of the on-duty patrol car. While “riding along” with officers from the El Cajon Police Department through heavily policed communities of refugees in East San Diego County and while performing as a role-play actor in San Diego’s regional police academy, I turn my interpretive attention toward the scripts officers and recruits mobilize to stage and rehearse police vision. I historicize this vision through 19th-century parallel mobile technologies of automobility and cinema that prefigure the ride-along and its cinematic mobilities. I trace this “mobile police vision” through the methodological entanglements between press, police, and academic researchers, and the consequences of this vision for Assyrian, Chaldean, and Arabic policed communities in El Cajon. Lastly, I employ performance ethnography to “read against the grain” of training scripts in the police academy by role-playing in scenes opposite officers and recruits. I argue that engaging policing’s scripts – from cinematic architectures to role-play scenarios – figures new language for theorizing the mobility and visuality of these performances as they travel between the academy’s “backstage” and the “front stage” of everyday policing, appearing in both sites as mimetic re-enactments of racial violence, anti-immigrant sentiments, and anti-Blackness