The Horror of Police by Travis Linnemann

Author:Travis Linnemann [Linnemann, Travis]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: SOC022000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture, SOC004000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Criminology, PER004030 PERFORMING ARTS / Film / History & Criticism
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2022-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

We might read the transformation of Melendez’s body and behavior for clues, not only to his inner cop-fantasy life but to the transformative power of policing’s broader symbolic order. As we will see, the fabrication of his own body, his racist violence, and his wanton illegality must also be understood as authorized by both the symbolic order of police and the broader imperatives of racial capitalism. And so, with the mechanistic violence of robocops like Melendez in mind, we might alter Hegel’s famous dictum and say that no longer is the spirit a bone; the spirit is, in fact, a metal.

Through the process of becoming robocops, or rather Frankencops, Melendez and others take their place in the “armed formation comprised of people,” as Adam Greenfield puts it, “whose pumped-up bodies, fragile psyches, and febrile politics are fundamentally unsuited to maintaining the peace of the twenty-first-century United States.”113 Greenfield’s observations map neatly onto the figure of what Anna Feigenbaum and Daniel Weissman have called the “vulnerable warrior.” That their duties invariably place them in harm’s way, under constant threat of attack and in a state of ordinary emergency, is perhaps the most widespread and pernicious of all police myths. The exaggerated vulnerability of the “warrior cop” underlines, among other things, the irrepressible “I feared for my life,” “him or me” mantra, the bad-faith justification for all manner of violence, coercion, and brutality. Following insights from transcendental materialism, however, we move one step further and consider how the ideologies of “warrior cop” and “vulnerable body” operate dialectically and map mutually reinforcing ontological circuitry, necessitating the transformation of mind and body into a cop, a distinct political subject—a killing machine.114 From this vantage, Melendez’s “Terminator” physique, embodiment of police weaponry, robotic inhumanity, and near quarter-century career of violence and disrepute are not mere by-products of a noxious institutional culture. Instead, they mark the transformation of a man into an actual machine, designed and produced for a particular set of tasks.115

Of course, it is not my actual intention to impute the political subjectivity of Melendez, or anyone else, for that matter, through a superficial reading of secondary source material. My aim, rather, is to offer a speculative model to account for the production of hypermasculine, hypermilitarized “warrior cops” that does not reaffirm the simple rotten-barrel model of police deviance. Continuing in that spirit, we can look to not only Melendez’s deeds, which are many, but also his words. Given the opportunity to speak on his own behalf at his sentencing hearing for the crimes he committed against Floyd Dent, instead of offering an apology to his victim, community, and profession, Melendez chose instead to read aloud a version of the poem “The Final Inspection.”

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