Introduction to Visual Arts Research Special Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

On Wednesday, January 6, 2021, the world gawked as a nearly all-White mass of so-called protesters, many openly carrying law enforcement identification as well as battle-grade weaponry, violently entered the U.S. Capitol with almost no state interference. While one Capitol police officer was killed, and another assaulted by a man holding a pro-police “thin blue line” flag, others greeted the masquerading marauders amiably and posed for selfies, all enabled by the brazen provocations of a few officials and the noteworthy inaction of numerous others.

While the events of the January 6 insurrection will be analyzed for years to come, the image of the police, entangled within this violence, serves as a starting point for this special issue. From the origin of the term “police” up to the present day, the police as a concept has designated much more (and much less) than a specific group of public officers tasked with maintaining civic order. From 19th-century taxonomic archives to contemporary forms of electronic and online monitoring, alongside the practices of cognitive and academic testing that emerged from eugenics, the image of a harmonious society has relied on the policing of those who must be excluded.

Meanwhile, artists have contributed to a visual culture of the police by critiquing practices of exclusion. A vast body of artwork grapples with the role of the police, from Honoré Daumier’s lithographs of police brutality in 19th-century Paris, to recent projects such as visual artist Dread Scott’s lynching banners. By highlighting the work of art educators, art historians, activists, and artists responding to modern and contemporary policing practices, this special issue hopes to tease out aspects of the aesthetic aura that surrounds the idea of order, embodied in state agents whose legitimate use of force is practically unlimited.

Origin of the Word “Police” and the Aesthetics of Public Order

As feudalism collapsed in late 15th-century Europe, the mechanisms in place for maintaining the public order shifted in response (Neocleous, 2000). Policing projects emerged in newly formed towns to address a rise in perceived social disorders within a labor pool that was now more mobile and economically sufficient. The etymology of “police” finds its origins in this historical moment; from Middle French comes the word “police,” referring to “organized government, civil administration” (Online Etymology Dictionary, n.d.). Over the next 3 centuries, the meaning of “police,” as the civil force ensuring the maintenance of the public order, ossified in European societies in their negotiation of the powers and responsibilities of the “enlightened” state. The English jurist William Blackstone, in his 1769 Commentaries on the Laws of England, provided a description of the purpose of the police that portends later policing practices such as broken-windows policing, noting that police maintain “the due regulation and domestic order of the kingdom,” through “the minutiae of social life” (as cited in Schrader, 2019). Consequently, when the two British models of modern policing—the paramilitary Royal Irish Constabulary (1822) and the unarmed, civilian-controlled Metropolitan Police of London (1829)—were established in the early 19th century, the social necessity of a police force to maintain order had already been fabricated both in practice and ideologically.

The emergence of modern police forces was also tied to shifting ideas about crime. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the assessment of crime was transformed; formerly a social evil, crime was now viewed as socially, environmentally, and/or biologically produced. Through relations of domination and exclusion, particular bodies and desires were medically scrutinized and legally criminalized. Modern police forces were tasked with scanning and tracking specific types of bodies to detect and predict potential crimes, and still are to this day.

The aesthetics of the modern police drew inspiration from other arms of government. The image of the uniformed police officer, or even the abstracted conjuring of the police as a “thin blue line” in the United States, reveals a historical link between the visual politics of the police and a modern nation-state’s armed forces. The symbolic effectiveness of the...