Interrogating The Shield

3. Sound Policing

43 Sound Policing Attending to Acoustic Matters in The Shield Nicholas Chare Setting the Seen The police—those tasked with maintaining order, enforcing the law, protecting individual persons and property, and preserving the executive powers of the state—are associated with particular images in the popular imaginary. A vision of the police exists that distils that large and varied organization into a few select symbols—the badge or shield, the baton, the blue uniform, the patrol car, the handcuffs.1 The police are figured primarily as a force of law that is there to be seen. The increasing importance of community policing as a law enforcement strategy is in part motivated by the recognition that, for the public, to see is to believe. It is a form of policing that “emphasizes building closer ties between police and members of the community” (Miller 1999, 4). Officers involved in community policing spend significant amounts of time patrolling on foot or by bicycle, traversing alleys and footpaths, I am grateful to Christine Adkins, Betsy North, and Dominic Williams for their insightful comments and criticisms of earlier drafts of this essay. 1. As Susan Martin, for example, remarks, “In uniform the officer is visible and ‘different ’; he or she is invested with authority that ordinary citizens lack” (1980, 132). Malcolm Young suggests, in similar fashion, that the uniform, through the uniformity it inspires among its wearers, shapes a “forceful barrier” that expresses “a demonstrative separation between the culture of control and the individuality of the controlled” (1991, 67). 3 44 | Nicholas Chare interacting with local people. In contrast to the officer in a patrol car, they are proximate, easy to see, and easily able to observe what is around them. Their mode of patrolling allows them to look in places that are off road. The police are not just there to be on view, but to watch over. They are “professionals of seeing,” experts in observation for whom “seeing is learned” (Rifkin 1993, 94). It is through constant surveillance that the police seek to detect crime and to prevent it. A sense of being constantly surveyed ensures docility from citizens. The visual is therefore of paramount importance in both the practice and perception of policing. The acoustic, however, also forms an important but relatively neglected aspect of police work. In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Louis Althusser gives as an example of interpellation—that is, the transformation of individuals into subjects of ideology: the “most commonplace everyday police . . . hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’” (2001, 118). The individual who responds to this hailing, who recognizes that it is addressed to her, becomes interpellated—acquires an identity as one subject to the law. As Judith Butler explains, this police reprimand at once demonstrates “the power and force of the law to compel fear” and offers the individual recognition as a subject, albeit “at an expense” (1993, 121). A clear and commanding voice of the kind conceived of by Althusser is still frequently a necessity in police work. However, the public usually encounters law enforcement acoustically not through direct address, but by way of the sound of sirens or the drone of a police helicopter overhead. In the past, they might also have heard the police as they “signaled each other for help by rapping their clubs on the sidewalk or by blowing a whistle” (Parsons and Jesilow 2001, 17). These days, calls for assistance are voiced over the radio. During a patrol officer’s shift, “the police radio is on all the time, and there’s constant noise, much of it nearly incomprehensible unless you know what to listen for and how to speak the language” (Hays 1992, 57). Policing is therefore often as much about being a professional of hearing as being a professional of seeing; it necessitates being audible as well as being visible. This chapter analyzes these often neglected sonorous dimensions of policing through a consideration of the ways they manifest themselves Sound Policing | 45 in the FX series The Shield (2002–2008). Sound in The Shield is considered here in a number of different ways, but primarily in relation to its realism, although the ethics of some of the sound practices employed in the show are also explored. Realism is considered in several ways. First, it is taken to refer to the accuracy or otherwise of The Shield’s depiction of the acoustics of police work, focusing in particular on the...