Working at the edge: Police, emotions and space in Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

Rio de Janeiro’s police officers habitually work on the edge of a border – between rationalised and ordered routines on one hand, and risk, disorder and incipient violence on the other. The article argues that this edge has distinct emotional components and concrete spatial consequences for the production of the city as a bordered space. Conceptually, the article combines spatial thinking about the production of territoriality with an emotional understanding of the police as ‘edgeworkers’ grounded in cultural criminology. Empirically, this piece uses ethnographic material from research with ordinary civil police officers and Special Forces in Rio. Across three empirical sections, the article explores police emotions and their significant spatial effects. First, the article mobilises the metaphor of ‘drying ice’ that police officers use to symbolise their everyday struggle with Rio’s urban conflict, and which leads them to produce spaces of secrecy. Second, the article shows how the police consider their job to be a vocation, a stance which simultaneously produces spaces of exposure. Finally, the Special Forces’ activities are compared to those of soldiers in war zones, assessing how the officers as edgeworkers find ways of escaping their emotional dilemma, thereby producing the city as a space of war.

The Permeable Olympic Fortress

“…Doing research with the police also means to consider that these offi cers are oft en involved in situations where they are criticized, are declared as enemies, and are themselves both the targets and articulators of violence (Pauschinger 2019). Rio's police kill and spread fear more than many other police forces, but are also killed much more frequently than in many other cities.…”

“…Moreover, the invisible that has always existed turned visible for him. Yet, police offi cers of the Special Forces, who are essentially those that produce spectacle in the respective territories, who procure a way out of their everyday emotional dilemma of sensing their very police work as a vocation but expose themselves to deadly risks while carrying out their work, are thus both the products and producers of Rio's urban confl ict (Pauschinger 2019).…”

Dealing with violence: Varied reactions from frontline workers acting in highly vulnerable territories

“…We consider that (1) the State is a set of heterogeneous actors and institutions, and not a monolithic power (Sharma and Gupta, 2009) ; (2) that it has to dispute its monopoly of violence with other actors (Elias, 1939(Elias, /2000North, 2009); and (3) that it does so within specific territories in which conflicts emerge (Pinto and Do Carmo, 2016;Wacquant et al, 2014;Zittoun, 2014). Applying these definitions to the frontline workers, while some of them are expected to deal directly with situations of violence, such as police officers (Epp et al, 2017;Nicholson-Croty et al, 2017) and those tackling issues such as violence against children or women (Frattaroli and Teret, 2006;Hong, 2016;Levenson and D'Amora, 2007;Morin, 2013;Pauschinger, 2019;Riccucci et al, 2014;Rivera and Ward, 2017). Other workers who implement policies not directly related to violence can be affected by it, having to deal with situations of criminality or violence.…”

“…Contemporary studies, inheriting the problem from classic sources, have been trying to understand how the State deals with the monitoring of its monopoly on legitimate violence (Johansen, 2019; Kyed, 2019; Morin, 2013; Pauschinger, 2019; Reid-Henry, 2015; Rivera and Ward, 2017) and with challenges in controlling social violence. This includes research on borders and their intersection with violence and conflict (Brambilla and Jones, 2019; Jones, 2015; Schindel, 2019; Weber, 2012), the relationship between institutions, violence, and crime (Barnes, 2017; Vigneswaran, 2014), narco-traffic (Ballvé, 2012; Warburg and Jensen, 2018), and terrorism (Ezcurra, 2017).…”

Introduction

“…Th e geographies of terror and security portrayed in this special section highlight the level of experience as a central yet neglected domain for understanding discourses and practices of terrorism and counterterrorism. Th e literature on geopolitics, confl ict, warfare, and security has recently been shift ing toward embodied (Fluri 2011;Ochs 2011;Wilcox 2015), performative (Katz 2007;Martin 2010;Mustafa et al 2013), emotional (Johansen 2018;Pauschinger 2019;Skidmore 2003), aff ective (Anderson and Adey 2011;Gökarıksel and Secor 2018;Laketa 2016), and atmospheric (Adey et al 2013;Fregonese 2017;Klauser 2010) approaches. We build on these approaches and apply them to the study of terrorism.…”