Media and the police state, text only

Media and the police state:
Defining the contemporary police state

by special section editors, Namrata Rele Sathe and Soumik Pal

In 2019, the Bharatiya Janata Party was elected to form the government in India for another term of five years. Since its election into power in 2014, there has been a steady decline in constitutional freedoms, and a consistent and quick rise in the heavy-handed work of the government in turning India into a Hindu fundamentalist nation. The winter of 2019 brought in a glimmer of hope when the anti-CAA protests took place all over India. People came out in unison to protest against a law (the Citizenship Amendment Act) that would have prevented Muslim migrants fleeing persecution in neighboring South Asian countries from getting refuge in India. As citizens of all age groups crowded the streets to protest the act from being codified into the Indian Constitution, the state deployed its forces against its own citizens. The police, especially in states such as Delhi (India’s capital) and Uttar Pradesh, clamped down on the protestors by firing at them, beating them up, and spraying tear gas on them. Resistance to police brutality during this time—highly visible on news channels and on social media via citizen-generated videos and images—was equally strong, and unsurprisingly, crystallized within viral works of art.

One particular work of art—reproduced several times in murals and graffiti on walls in public spaces—stands out: a young girl holds her own in front of a policeman; her finger is raised in a scolding gesture as he stands still, a baton in his hands. This artwork, a re-creation of a photograph that appeared in the news, is a depiction of college student Ayesha Renna, protecting her male friend who is lying on the ground, struck down from the blows of the policeman’s baton. Reminiscent of another viral image of Ieshia Evans, a black woman calmly facing down a line of policemen wearing full military-grade armor during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2016, the artwork showing Ayesha Renna standing up to the police highlights certain ideas with regard to the relationship of the police with the state, with the citizens of that state, and the media. The police act as the violent and undemocratic arm of the state, protecting the hegemonic neoliberal elite rather than the citizens that they are ostensibly meant to protect. The police is the executioner of the state’s brutal will against its own citizens, forever-prepared to suppress (through direct violence, surveillance, and arrests) those who might rise against it in dissent and disagreement. In this, the police often replicate the societal and systemic injustices that are at the core of any society, and are motivated to act in racist, misogynist, casteist, and xenophobic ways. However, the images referred to above also show that resistance is possible, that it is often non-violent yet powerful, and that the mediatization of these small and big acts of resistance (whether through news or fictional media) makes it possible for many to meet in movements of solidarity against the police.

In this special section, we attempt to delineate and critically engage with these and other issues pertaining to the relationship between the media and the representation of the police. We have collated critical works from across the world that theorize on a range of diverse subjects, including the work of the police in maintaining the dominance of the neoliberal state, expressly demarcating and deliberately persecuting populations deemed ‘deviant’ by society (such as the poor and minority communities), the police as a primary organizing entity of the modern state, and the weaponization of legacy and new media for the purpose of justifying police brutality violence. Nevertheless, as many of the essays in this special section demonstrate, just as traditional and digital media are appropriated by the police to exercise unmitigated power and create narratives that justify the presence and relevance of the police, these are the very tools that can, and are, used to raise awareness about these acts of brutality.

But before a more detailed discussion of the rationale behind this special issue is possible, it is important to define what we mean by the police state and why we believe it is important to examine its relation to the media at this time. Moving beyond the commonplace understanding of the term “police state” as totalitarian, in this special section we locate the police as the primary arbitrator of the state in creating a general atmosphere of social crisis and panic around safety and security, which (in a perverse case of circular reasoning) it is then called upon to resolve. In addition to its traditional role in the prevention and control of crime, the state has made it possible for the police to exercise its powers in broader and more egregious ways, such as in the criminalization of the homeless, the abuse of those outside the heteronormative binary, and the imprisonment of marginalized populations who protests against the injustices they suffer.

The images of those criminalized by the state and then mistreated by the police are mediatized through television and digital news media, documentary and feature films, in video games, and in our social media feeds to impress upon us that we should not worry: the police are there and are doing their jobs well. The version of police and citizen interactions depicted in the news media, for instance, are often considered to be the ‘official’ accounts, states Regina G. Lawrence (2000, 5). These accounts originate from the police and are then dispersed through news outlets as the truth, thus “faithfully [reflecting] the views, concerns, and activities of the political elite” (Lawrence 2005, 5).

In fictional accounts, such as cop shows, we witness the heroic, meticulous work of the police in solving crime, in the manner of behind-the-scenes actors, positioned as sincerely going about their thankless jobs in the service of the nation and the greater good. In this, the representation of the police acquires a gloss of the tragic hero persona, which, interestingly, as Santana Khanikar has shown in her ethnography on the police in north India, is how many police personnel regard themselves (2018, 61). Loic Wacquant (2009) observes that issues pertaining to law and order are increasingly being carried out for the purpose of being exhibited. “The absolute priority is to put on a spectacle” adds Wacquant (2009, xi). The continual reinforcement of visuals portraying the police as saviors inhibits critical and intellectual engagement and presents the police as-is, an indispensable part of the modern state, without alternative. Thus, the media is implicated in justifying the violent, intrusive, and undemocratic work of the police in framing the institution as immanent, morally good, and intrinsic to the crisis-ridden modern state.

Using the media as a lens to theorize on the police state, however, allows us as media scholars to use a dialectical method and underscore the notion that media images can be both emancipatory and controlling. Thus, the varied analyses of media images in this special section showcase both the democratic and anti-democratic potential of media images. What we find is that whether the images are used to fulfill their democratic potential or further the authoritarian impulse of the police state depends on the context of the usage of the images. We have all witnessed the revolutionary potential of bystander recordings of police brutality against Black people in the United States and the far-reaching movement these videos have engendered. We have also been able to see, in these videos, visual proof of the police’s violent work in systematically targeting Black people and murdering them, without waiting for the so-called due course of justice. Thus, in this special section we intentionally remain cognizant of the idea that the regime of visuality within media images in regard to the police is full of contradictions and must not be assessed on a simplistic good-bad scale.

The police state and the protection of capital

Scholars of the history of policing have repeatedly commented on the fact that the institution of policing has direct links to the protection of capital. For instance, we can witness the similarity in the case of those most detrimentally affected by policing and the carceral system in the historical events of slavery and colonization. The carceral system of policing in the United States, explains Michelle Alexander, in her influential work The New Jim Crow (2019), originated in strategic laws that allowed the persistence of slavery even after it had been abolished. Alexander states that since “slavery remained appropriate as punishment for a crime,” African Americans were disproportionately imprisoned in jails perpetuating the racist law (32). This forced African Americans into a system of “extreme repression and control” that continues to this date, argues Alexander (2019, 32). Jill Lepore, in her historical examination of the police in the United States, observes that “stop and frisk, stop and whip, shoot to kill” laws were in place eighteenth century New York to target black people held as slaves (2020, n.pag.). Lepore mentions that the police acted as “slave patrols,” signifying “the role of slavery in the history of the police (2020, n.pag.). In a parallel fashion, the idea of “bad characters” that pervades the Indian policing system even in the present times and refers to those who are deemed ‘habitual’ criminals, states Khanikar, comes from a colonial mindset wherein this group was “readily identified with the poor, unemployed, and rural migrants” (2018, 52). Thus, those groups of people who are policed, surveilled, and incarcerated to the maximum degree today are victimized by historically discriminatory systems. This reality has deep-rooted connections to how marginalized groups are represented in the media as such communities are either deprived of means to self-represent in media images or have been negatively stereotyped in the media (Lawrence 2000), reinforcing the notion that certain groups of people (such as black people or lower castes in India) are by default criminals from whom the rest of society needs protection.

It is necessary, at this point, to briefly examine the role of policing and its representation in United States media and how that has become a template for the same across the world. Wacquant notes that the US ideology of “War on Crime”—a proclamation made by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s which was directly responsible for the criminalization and incarceration of Black and Hispanic people—is today seen as the “theoretical source and practical inspiration” for justice systems around the world (2009, xiii). According to this ideology, the blame of crime and criminality is placed on the “personal irresponsibility and immorality of the criminal” rather than on systemic and policy failure (2009, xiv). As the welfare state was replaced by a “police and penal state” post the Civil Rights movement in the US, explains Wacquant, the “criminalization of marginality and the punitive containment of the dispossessed” became social policy (2009, 42). Wacquant, in his work, convincingly argues in favor of a direct link between the entrenchment of neoliberal values and policies in the social, interpersonal, and personal and the penalization of those disenfranchised by “financialized capital and flexible wage labor” (2009, 1).

Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton implicate the US police’s “broken windows policy,” that is, the relentless policing small types of (urban) crimes in order to prevent major crimes from occurring, in what they term an “ideological and political project” that vengefully targets marginalized urban populations (2016, n.pag.). This official policy has shifted the focus away from social welfare to “security,” exacerbating the issue in neoliberalized, deindustrialized, and gentrified cities (2016, n.pag.). As Lepore insightfully observes in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder, “[t]he crisis in policing is the culmination of a thousand other failures—failure of education, social services, public health, gun regulation, criminal justice, and economic development” (2020, n.pag.).

Scholars such as David Graeber (2015) and Mark Fisher (2009) have pointed out that, contrary to popular belief, neoliberalism has been characterized by the proliferation of bureaucracy that has come to define and dominate all aspects of our lives. Regina Lawrence’s account of how the police’s version of events is passed off uncritically by news media as “official” points to the fact that institutions under neoliberal capitalism, such as the police and the news media establishment, are inherently bureaucratic in nature. As Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann had shown in their now famous “propaganda model” of media, the news media are predisposed to quote bureaucratic accounts as they are perceived to be factual because they reinforce a normative order of society and also, shield themselves from the task of investigative journalism and the threat of libel suits. Citing Mark Fishman, they call this “the principle of bureaucratic affinity” because “only other bureaucracies can satisfy the input needs of a news bureaucracy.” (1988, 19)

This mutual symbiosis between the police and the media actually goes further as these establishments have modelled themselves on, and even fused into, each other on a global scale. Karen Fang writes about Hong Kong police, “…media production and self-promotion are now major sites of police labor and operations, symptomatic of the force’s modernization and professionalization.” (2017, 105) Looking at US American policing, Christopher P Wilson (2000) shows how news reporting (especially, crime reporting) models itself on the police through practices such as crime news beats following police precinct lines or the press acquiring rooms inside police stations to the extent that reporters have been mistaken for police personnel by city dwellers and the act of reporting itself has been likened to policing. This has profound effects not only on news production and policing but also what constitutes crime and ultimately, on the idea of society itself. Wilson succinctly sums up the far reaching effects of such practices,

“By reflecting the enforcement priorities of the police; by heroicizing the investigative prowess of the police and the reporter him- or herself ; by offering a social-pathology view of crime and by personalizing victims into “all that is pure and admirable”—by these and many other conventions, many an argument goes, crime news legitimates those “narrowed grooves of institutional meaning” that often begin with police departments and intersect with other agencies of cultural knowledge and social control.” (4)

The pathologization of crime and the mediatization of the various crises caused by neoliberalism plays right into societal anxieties that demand locking up and/or violently dealing with those deemed responsible for this crisis. One of the US-origin shows that we remember watching in the early days of cable television in India was a show called COPS, which played out real-life incidents of street arrests and take-downs of criminals. The opening credits of the show played out to the band Inner Circle’s catchy number “Bad Boys,” as police hauled in (mostly young Black boys as) criminals. Research into the narrative practices of such shows has revealed that the police are often asked to be more aggressive for the cameras in order to create tension and make the narrative more dramatic (Molofsky 2020). There are many such shows on Indian television as well: Crime Patrol (2003-present) and Savdhaan India (‘Be warned India’, 2012-present) being the most popular. Even a quick scroll through the thumbnail images of the episodes available on YouTube will clearly prove how both shows sexualize images of assault against women and sensationalize stories constructed around illicit sexual relationships to be related for voyeuristic consumption. The long-lasting presence and repeat telecasts on TV of cop-based reality shows serves to both heighten the crisis and insecurity around the issue of crime and societal instability and provide relief in the form of the re-enacted investigations of the police. A common ideological thread runs through shows of this type, a severe limitation of imagination plagues them: the police are the one and only solution to various socio-economic issues and they are doing their work in an exemplary fashion. Furthermore, the fusion of the media establishment and the police has gone on so far so as to eschew any semblance of ethics on the media’s part and due process on the police’s part. For example, in India, celebrity news media anchors (not journalists) nowadays conduct elaborate media trials based on spurious or non-existent evidence as they play judge, jury and executioner. This deliberate shaping of public opinion by these media personalities against entities deemed “problematic” by the state legitimizes and is followed by police action against them, forming a sinister ecosystem. These ecosystems manufacture support for the police amongst common people, against their own interests, that lead to slogans like “Blue Lives Matter” in the United States or “Dilli police tum lath bajao/ Hum tumhare saath hain (Delhi police you wield your batons/ We are with you).”

But, as the works in this special issue will demonstrate, the idea that more policing is the only solution to social problems is difficult to reconcile with the other type of media images of the police we witness today and have been witness to over time: images of police brutality and violence that contradict the belief that the system of policing is the only objective solution to criminality and functions is fair and lawful ways.

Cop heroes, mass entertainment, and the justification of spectacular violence

David Graeber shows that the “police are bureaucrats with weapons.” (73) Their role is, contrary to popular opinion, is not to “fight crime” but to violently uphold the bureaucratic structure of global finance capitalism, something that Heath Schultz discusses at length in his essay in this special section. Graeber points to the elaborate structures of image making that construct cops as heroes, contrary to Max Weber’s predictions about bureaucratic societies becoming devoid of charisma, enchantment and romance. (74) In fact, the rise of bureaucracies since the advent of finance capitalism, that are premised on a skewed distribution of information managed by violence, have been necessarily accompanied by cultural work that have portrayed bureaucrats as heroes (or heroes operating within bureaucracies). The “cop hero” is at the forefront of this phenomenon.

The cop hero, that marks the popular cop film and show, is usually shown as morally upright but not averse to stepping outside of the bounds of the legal. Other common elements are, focus on the procedure of solving a crime, extrajudicial violence enacted upon the bodies of supposed criminals (the ‘villains’ of the narrative) that is justified in favor of serving the greater good, and action scenes that contribute to the image of bravado and fearlessness of the cop hero. Fictional cop stories, which are also often action films, conflate a specific type of violent, unhinged masculinity with the idea of societal justice. The physical prowess of the cop-hero is always and explicitly in service of beating up and overpowering the less physically proficient criminals. The focus on the physicality and its relation to conventional masculinity is underscored by the fact that the cop is generally played by well-built, muscular actors, for instance, Bruce Willis, Steven Segal, Danny Glover, Will Smith (in Hollywood cinema) and Akshay Kumar, Salman Khan, Ajay Devgn, Ranveer Singh (in Hindi cinema). Camera angles and close-up slow motion shots spend ample time fetishizing the body of the actors as they perform their stunts and action scenes, creating a spectacular presentation of violence that would otherwise be horrifying and almost certainly fatal. The ideology, entrenched in popular depictions of the police, reiterates that going against direct orders and defying the system is for the greater good, further bolstered by the fact that the cop-hero is inevitably rewarded in the end by the capture of the criminal-villain.

In his essay “Class in Action,” Chuck Kleinhans (1996) explains that this is a specific type of masculinist as well as working class fantasy, foregrounded in action cinema featuring a working class cop hero: being able to act against the system to expose corruption without any consequences. However, in real life, argues Kleinhans, these types of actions would lead to serious fallouts such as loss of livelihood and income for the individual. Important ideological constructs are folded into this type of narrative, then, as Kleinhans states; the cop hero who is working class (or coded as working class via mise-en-scene, background etc.) is “authorized to be violent in order to be the agent of justice” (1996, 260). The violence, therefore, is completely justified in this type of ideological suturing in representations because it allows the cop character (socially repressed yet institutionally powerful) to act against evil and more powerful ‘villainous’ individuals to serve the national/international community at large.

These beliefs are based within an understanding that, institutionally, the police is paternalistic, patriarchal, and masculinist in its essence and functions as a protector of a nation and its people. The institution of policing follows the general trend of the masculinization of the state under neoliberalism, argues Wacquant, in which the state is positioned as virile and punitive via its law and order systems (2009, 15). Similarly, in Khaniker’s ethnography of the police in north India, violence and torture is perceived by her subjects as necessary and useful for the pursuit of ‘true’ justice, and also serves to reaffirm the masculinist identity of the perpetrator (2018, 61). In a such a case, wherein the neoliberal state is “muscular” with regards to national security, argues Rajnish Rai, the display of spectacular violence (in the name of law and order) is routinized and becomes the primary visual language of the repressive and coercive state (2019, 113). Rai adds,

“Transforming national security discourse into a spectacle becomes the heart of the neoliberal project, as it nurtures a form of citizenship that is actively invested in the commodification and consumption of state violence. Spectacle and identity politics play a central role in neoliberal consumerist projects, as fandom and citizenship are immersed in cultures of violence” (2019,113).

Rai also goes on to implicate the news media (and popular cinema, we would add) in beaming these spectacular narratives for its citizens to consume in the name of entertainment, fully participating in the “neoliberal state-corporate nexus” (2019, 123). The problem of glorification of the violence and extra-judicial work of the police, thus, takes place within a web of institutions geared towards accumulating profit or power or both as their ultimate aim.

Scholars, writing on the issue of police violence, have also commented on how those belonging to minority and/or marginalized communities in society are doubly victimized by the unequal institutional practices. In the context of Central America, Cecilia Menjivar argues that less dramatic and often invisible acts of violence routinely occurring against marginalized groups, which the author terms acts of “symbolic violence,” can cause long-lasting harm (2021, 4). Menjivar includes instances in which complaints of domestic violence made by women might go ignored and un(der)reported, reflecting a reliance on “discriminatory stereotypes” of patriarchal bureaucratic institutions such as the police (2021, 8). In the United States, scholars explain how black and Native American lives are considered disposable and threatening to the hegemony of white supremacy and the police actively work with a callous state to ‘eliminate’ these groups (Kelley 2016; Heatherton 2016). In an interview with Christina Heatherton, Indigenous activist Nick Estes draws attention to the idea that a violent and persecutory police presence is necessary in a settler colony such as the US. Estes states that since colonization is “never a complete process,” policing of Native Americans in the US “happens in the present and also in the future” (Heatherton 2016, n.pag.). Robin D. G. Kelley connects the continuing policing of African Americans in the US to the historical caricaturing of black people within media forms such as “coon shows, soapbox sermons, darky films, and mass advertising” (2016, n.pag.). These media representations, Kelley argues, have contributed to the dehumanization of black people, making their deaths from police brutality routine.

In a right-wing fundamentalist state, write Srinath Jagannathan and Rajnish Rai (2015), individual members of minority communities deemed the “enemies” of the state are subject to indiscriminate violence. Any opposition to this type of illegal violence, by dissenting police personnel or concerned citizens, is framed as anti-nationalist and either punished or subdued, thus, normalizing state and police violence. Jagannathan and Rai specifically point towards a type of violent act carried out by the police (in the Indian context) called a police encounter. According to the authors, encounters are “a set of police actions of questionable ethical and legal content,” in which criminals are killed by the police in “spontaneous shootouts” (2015, 709). They are often “stage managed” and take place with state sanction (2015, 711). The authors highlight that encounter killings are “celebrated” in public imagination as spectacles of violence that are necessary for national security and as “tough” retaliatory action against those who threaten that security (2015, 722). A successfully executed encounter is seen as a professional achievement in the career of the police officer, the officer termed as an “encounter specialist” in popular culture and media.

Popular Hindi films, such as Ab Tak Chappan (‘56 Till Now,’ 2004, Shimit Amin) present the encounter specialist cop as a courageous rule-breaker, forging his own rules within a corrupt and bureaucratic law and order system. The title of the film, referring to the number of ‘encounters’ the cop has had in his career, is worn like a badge of honor, depicted as a sign of quick and clean justice in a dirty system. Similarly, the “Cop Universe” films of Hindi film director Rohit Shetty —that include the Singham, Sooryavanshi, and Simmba series—focus on the brute strength of good-hearted, savior-type cop heroes of narratives in which they save women, the poor, and the powerless from threats such as feudal landlords and terrorists, legitimizing their masculinist anger and violence as righteous and imperative in the pursuit of justice.

In recent times, police procedurals have become popular on online streaming platforms in India, wherein, interestingly, police characters are portrayed as belonging to minority backgrounds, such as women cops in Delhi Crime (since 2019) and Aranyak (‘Wild,’ 2021), a gay woman cop in The Fame Game (2022), and a Dalit woman cop in Dahaad (‘Roar,’ 2023). Films such as Badhaai Do (‘Congratulations,’ Harshavardhan Kulkarni, 2022) and Kathal (‘Jackfruit,’ Yashowardhan Mishra, 2023) do make an effort to provide complexity and depth to the marginalized cop character (a gay cop and a Dalit cop, respectively) to bring out the contradictions of identity and profession. Nuanced portrayals of the fraying of neoliberal India’s sociality available in shows such as Paatal Lok (‘Hell,’ since 2020) and Kohrra (‘Fog,’ 2023), centralize the working class cop and provide commentary on violent masculinity and its detrimental effects. However, a common ideological foundation guides these shows and films: empowerment is seen in terms of inclusion within authoritarian and violent systems, as recourse to alternatives is obscured.

The conventions of mainstream action cinema and fictional programming are, thus, ideally suited to exemplify and magnify the image of the heroic cop character in public imagination. The action scenes, thrilling and (in some cases) pleasurable to watch, construct an idealized world in which the evil and unjust are brought to justice, with the sole efforts of the cop hero. The maintenance of this idealized morality, then, can be achieved by any means necessary: brutal shootings, the merciless thrashing of those who are considered criminals, and the strategic ‘elimination’ of terrorists. Such depictions fold neatly into the perception of police brutality in real life, minimizing the distance between the real and cinematic, the morally acceptable and the morally reprehensible.

In this special section, we have attempted to bring together writings that focus on various national contexts (Iran, the United States, India, Japan) in order to uncover the aligned work of the police state and its representations in the media. These works centralize the contemporary police state’s work with and within the discriminatory practices of a society to further marginalize those who already lack visibility in law and order systems. Many of the articles call attention to the embeddedness of new and digital media technology to the perpetuation of the police state, while also demarcating these tools as resistant and liberatory. We have made an effort to collate essays that explore diverse manifestations of the contemporary police state and its relationship to the media. This academic endeavor is our way of participating in a resistance movement that seeks to dismantle the status quo and look towards avenues of reform and change.

In the special section

Novotny Lawrence reads the 2017 Jordan Peele film Get Out as a powerful critique of colorblind post-racial fantasies in the United States in the post-Barack Obama era as well as a commentary on the history of depiction of slavery in Hollywood and independent cinema. Lawrence begins by looking at the Lost Cause tradition which had as a primary aim to reunite the North and the South in a revision of Civil War history while downplaying the foundational role of slavery in the formation of the United States. The Lost Cause tradition played down the effects of slavery by portraying the South’s efforts as honest nation-building against all odds. In Hollywood, the Lost Cause tradition manifested itself in Reunion films claiming to represent the perspective of the South; such films recast white slave-owning characters as benign, honorable, chivalrous characters evoking feelings of empathy for the South, and defined and policed the “right ways to be Black.” The article then looks at how Get Out mirrors and critiques the Reunion films by taking all the familiar tropes of such films and subverting them. The article also develops a history of how independent films, in contrast to mainstream Hollywood, have critically looked at the institution of slavery and presented a powerful critique of the Panoptic plantation—a horrific construct built for surveillance and control of Black bodies especially for the cotton trade. Get Out uses the Panoptic plantation structure in a contemporary setting as a living metaphor for contemporary racism.
Gloria Negrete-Lopez shows that the “border” is constantly created and maintained as a source of problems in the public view by the state to justify its policing. The state regularly constructs an entire regime of visual imagery that constructs the “border” as the problem, either through criminalizing people of color by showing them crossing the border illegally or by showing harrowing images of victimhood, the blame implicitly being put on the victims. This reinforces a sense of need for policing and surveillance of the US-Mexico border which is then circulated by 24-hour news cycles of mass media. Negrete-Lopez’s article on the made up “necessity” of the border points out the importance of the border in the global capitalist order. At a time when there is unparalleled global mobility of finance capital, the violent policing of the borders makes sure that the global community of labor is kept separated, which severely weakens their position with respect to capital which has the state and its coercive apparatus, such as the police, at its disposal.

Border policing along with detention and deportation, Negrete-Lopez shows, are dehumanizing practices that separate families and result in the “slow death” of communities. These practices also follow racial lines as the entire edifice of the territorially bounded nation-state of the United States with borders to protect, was built on slavery and racial capitalism. Thus, the work of the US-Mexico border police is premised on locking up black and brown bodies. However, there is resistance to this inhumane practice through art and Negrete-Lopez highlights the abolitionist work of artists like Melanie Cervantes who not only counter this narrative through their artwork, but also provide imaginative radical alternatives to the border and border policing. She shows that such artists do the very important work of imagination that shows people “…other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” These artistic practices are rooted in the theory and practice of feminism that foregrounds community safety without othering or exclusion or criminalization of communities. The essay also makes the connections between the prison system and national borders by showing how a punitive state machinery criminalizes and keeps the communities of color under repressive control.
Writing about the “Women, life, freedom” movement in Iran, Tania Ahmadi explains that Iran has had a long history of feminist activism going back to the nineteenth century, fighting on the issues of women’s literacy and access to public education, hygiene, vocational training, women’s seclusion from public life, polygamy and domestic violence, unequal inheritance laws. While the instating of the Islamic Republic in 1979 reversed much of the progress made by those feminists, such a reminder about the existence of this feminist history situates the contemporary protests against the current patriarchal Islamic state within a glorious feminist tradition.

The current protests started in 2022 when 22-year old Mahsa Amini was murdered by Iran’s Morality Police for wearing an improper hijab. Soon, the movement became characterized by the use of self, body, media and symbolism. Iranian women not only subverted formal Internet censorship by using VPNs but also stereotypical, Orientalist images of them in the West. Ahmadi points out in her article that some of the rebellious gestures adopted by the women were directly drawn from earlier such gestures, thus adding to an inherited feminist tradition. Ahmadi also shows that while on the one hand, the patriarchal, extremist Islamic police state used different oppressive measures such as sexual harassment, homophobic censure, poisoning of schoolgirls etc., the protestors fought back on every single issue, adopting innovative tactics. What stands out is the way the women used media (particularly social media) and the circulatory power of the image to their advantage to construct their own narratives, and counter the misogynist narratives of the state as well as the racist narratives of the West that reduces them to the status of mere victims.
In Brett Hack’s article reading of two Japanese anime series—Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and Psycho-Pass—in the context of Japan’s experience of neoliberalism, he looks at the fictional representations of police institutions and personnel as “techniques of imagination” that make it possible to “visualize large-scale systemic forces beyond the perception of ordinary citizens.” Since neoliberalism is characterized by the undermining of non-authoritarian institutions, and authoritarian institutions that are largely inaccessible to the general public, Hack argues that “police characters are sometimes the only plausible vessels for depicting large-scale forces.” Even though the fictional police characters themselves reiterate the authoritarian, institutional perspective, reading them as “a repertoire of imaginative techniques” opens up the possibility for viewing the police institutions in their proper social context and thus, subject to critique. The history and development of animation in Japan takes on an important role here as political realities, such as the role of postwar police in annihilating leftist movements, appear as a particular aesthetic in anime. Hack shows how anime’s techniques of “limited animation” and compositing of different layers renders itself viable to a referential style that manages to depict different, often opposing, political and historical forces. The anime depiction of police thus becomes an imaginative technique woven into “anime’s techniques of image creation.” But complexly, if on the one hand, a social critique is rendered through police visuality and its accompanying contextualization, on the other hand, this world made visible through police eyes “reifies a given social order as inevitable.”
Sasha Crawford-Holland’s reflective essay, “Documenting State Violence,” borne out of his class at the University of Chicago, responds to a persisting lack of non-theatrical media in mainstream pedagogy and to the potential “pragmatic insights that film and media studies can lend activists.” The class aims to equip students, who come from a wide mix of academic backgrounds, with academic, pedagogic and practical tools to respond to a “contemporary conjuncture of power, technology, and activism.” The classroom process eschews simplistic binaries (like technophilia vs technophobia), and allows nuance and ambivalence while dealing with media. The article highlights that an openness of pedagogy means acknowledging that while examples of police atrocities from across the world are structurally connected through capital and the state, there is no one size fits all as far as activism is concerned. Embrace of ambivalence is central to this pedagogical exercise because opinions and approaches that are contradictory to each other are often simultaneously true. Crawford-Holland shows how social media, for example, is the site of both anti-police or anti-authoritarian media activism as well as the domain of insidious and far-reaching state propaganda. The fundamental ethos of the class and the article combines both creation and critique, as it acknowledges that the media is not only influencing reality but in actually making it. At a time when state domination through police control is at an all-time high, this educational process gives hope to and encourages media activists to go out and create media, and imagine and lay the foundation of a more egalitarian reality in the process.
Heath Schultz examines the post-Ferguson police technologies in the light of Nicholas Mirzoeff’s history of visuality to theorize about the Policing Complex. Schultz theorizes that the modalities of Mirzoeff’s concept of the ideological construction of “visuality” namely, classification, separation and aestheticization of separation specifically operate in the Police Complex as racialization, policing and legitimation of policing. Racialization/ classification divides humanity into humans and feral subjects, policing violently organizes the subjects along racial lines, and the legitimizing of policing occurs through a logic of the “thin blue line.” That ideology of the thin blue line comes from the idea of a “civilizational crisis” where the line, representing the police, protects civilization from perpetual threats to it, thereby necessitating its presence at all times.

Schultz deftly situates policing within the structures of contemporary finance capitalism in which the focus of capitalism has shifted from production to circulation, thus shifting the primary mode of protest from strikes to riots. In the US context, riots are racially coded as Black (where White represents order) and the police are essential for the protection of order (or capital). He shows with examples that contemporary policing is just organized plunder in the service of finance capital.

Schultz closely reads two works of art to demonstrate how the ideology of the thin blue line is constantly recreated and maintained—Secret Santa Saves Christmas, a 2014 a pro-police television segment for the CBS program Sunday Morning, and a 2019 work of installation art, My Blue Window, by American Artist that is critical of the institution of police. The article shows that the CBS segment is a fluff piece in praise of the police that showcases all that is good and needs to be protected, while the installation piece demonstrates the feralization of subjects that are then deemed to be threat to civilization. Thus, while one operates from “above” the thin blue line on the side of civilization, the other shows that the police operates from “below” to contain the perceived threat of the feral subjects threatening civilization.
Maren Feller points out that the murder of George Floyd cannot be found on the Minneapolis Police Department’s Crime Location Map and thus, if the department considers its former colleagues as beyond the law, it ought to be deemed a criminal organization. As the police is silent on its own crime and Floyd’s murder is invisibilized, it’s the symbols used by activists that register this heinous crime. Drawing from these contrasting approaches, Feller asks if cartography can go beyond discrimination and containment, and whether maps can generate imaginations of togetherness, sharing space and world building, or in other words, a “map of the commons.” The role of the map as a means of control has been central to the bureaucratization of police departments in the 19th and 20th centuries. Police mapping is now used to predict crime based on past events. With the advent of algorithms and artificial intelligence, the maps replicate and compound the existing hierarchies of racism, bigotry and discrimination. They fundamentally transform geographies into racialized, class-based lines of segregation and discrimination, and enable the interpellation of subjects into the overarching structures of racial capitalism.

On the other hand, activists were able to rename the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue (the site of Floyd’s murder) as George Floyd Square (GFS) on the map and by the dint of being on maps, GFS became real. By projecting acts of sharing and addressing the commonality of labor onto GFS, people have begun to imagine a counter-cartography. These competing ideas of cartography represent power of life (activists and common people) in contrast to power over life. While the police’s cartography represents and enforces classification for the sake of coercion and domination, the counter-cartography makes space possible for community organizing around principles of care and freedom. In a sense, the counter-map becomes an “infrastructure of sharing.”
Zachariah Anderson problematizes the uncritical use of police body cam footage by documentary filmmakers of the “true crime” genre and challenges the “true” in “true crime.” By extension, he provides a critique of the regime of surveillance used by the contemporary police state. Anderson looks at the 2020 Netflix documentary film American Murder: The Family Next Door to prize open the seemingly obvious connection between the “true crime” genre and veracity. Anderson applies here Elizabeth Cowie’s arguments on the documentary form as enacting a process to satisfy audience’s desire to encounter and know the real. In the context of the “true crime” genre, this desire is satisfied by making the audience inspect evidence, which Anderson calls the “jurification” of the audience. This means the audience is made to identify with the police in a way that such shows amplify the normalization of police work. Moreover, Anderson shows how body cam footage, devoid of the institutional contexts in which it is filmed and reproduced, can reinforce the sense of threat as perceived by the police; alternatively, by showing non-violent police work, the footage can gloss over serious threats posed by the police. Either way, these perceptions legitimize even more surveillance and an increased presence of the police in social life. This essay thus shows how even documentary, apart from popular fiction, can contribute to police propaganda.
Catherine Saunders shows in her short article that the carceral system is a totalizing system for Black people in the United States because a Black life is earmarked as a potential life of crime even before birth within the mother’s womb. The Black woman’s womb as the site of birthing the labor force to be exploited, has been instrumentalized as the site of social reproduction since the days of slavery, and it continues to play the same role in the modern day carceral United States. In this system, black lives are, to use Althusser’s term, “overdetermined.” This can lead to a mode of destructive self-expectation as more and more black people are imprisoned unjustly and seeing more black bodies in the prison system reinforces the belief that black people are more prone to crime. Socially, the idea of a loop of criminality ultimately reinforces the perceived need for an even more robust and strict prison system. However, Saunders also posits that the Black woman’s womb can also be the site of the death of the carceral state if it does not reproduce at its command, which, in turn, proves the highly political status of the Black maternal womb in carceral United States.
Maya Ranganathan and Selvaraj Velayuthan look at the concomitant histories of policing in society in Tamil Nadu and policing in Tamil cinema. Policing in Tamil Nadu began as private policing introduced by the East India Company which was later reorganized into centralized state policing that acted as a state arm. Existing caste hierarchies were reproduced in the police as caste expertise made the task of a small number of policemen easier and recruitment to the police force was itself caste based. Looking specifically at cinema, Ranganathan and Velayuthan apply CRW David’s categorization of the genre of Indian “socials” to Tamil cinema and track an evolution of films from being about the dilemma of the individual at home at a time of intercultural exchange, then to being about the struggle of the individual against an unjust system, and finally to becoming “authentic socials” that draw from serious problems and events in society. As part of the last category, the authors look at the films Karnan and Jai Bhim, both based on real-life events, as examples of films that take a critical look at the institution of policing and how the completely partisan way it operates holds up and reinforces the caste hierarchy. The cinematic analyses show that contrary to commonsensical understanding, the police do not react to “crime” but their actions, i.e. policing of oppressed communities, are premeditated. The article shows that the police station is a “spatio-carceral” state of exception—one that materially manifests and embodies state power and authority over deviants, alleged offenders, victims of crime and ordinary citizens, especially from the marginalized communities.
Through a reading of the video game Disco Elysium, Seunghyun Shin indicates how scholarship on video games has emphasized concepts, such as interactivity and the sense of agency that players experience, in an overstated way. Shin focuses on the game’s garrulous protagonist cop Harrier Du Bois to both extend and challenge the “interactive experience” argument. That is, opting for different choices does not matter in the end because a video game’s consequences are the same (and limited). A better model for understanding the player’s sense of agency along with an illusion of choice is that of “interpassivity.” Interpassivity, while feeling like interactivity, relieves the subject (video game player) from actually experiencing emotions, feelings, or the burden of taking decisions etc. without them realizing it because their identification is with outer agents (characters in the game). In Disco Elysium, the players are required to choose distinct political alignments as the cop protagonist Harry Du Bois, but Du Bois and other non-playing characters make those choices on behalf of the players, making the relationship between the players and the game an interpassive one. However, of the four available political alignments in the game, communism is the only active and anti-status quo one which offers the promise of change from the current capitalist system, in line with the game’s developers’ ideology. The experience of playing Disco Elysium is a combination of interactivity and interpassivity which reveals the nature of experience under capitalism by revealing who someone is in the dominant capitalist culture through their political choices.

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