Uniform Feelings : Scenes From the Psychic Life of Policing

In Uniform Feelings , American studies scholar and abolitionist psychotherapist Jessi Lee Jackson reads policing as a set of emotional and relational practices in order to shed light on the persistence of police violence. Jackson argues that psychological investments in U.S. police power emerge at various sites: her counseling room, manuals for addressing bias, museum displays, mortality statistics, and memorial walls honoring fallen officers. Drawing on queer, feminist, anticolonial, and Black engagements with psychoanalysis to think through U.S. policing—and bringing together a mix of clinical case studies, autotheory, and ethnographic research—the book moves from the individual to the institutional. Jackson begins with her work as a psychotherapist working across the spectrum of relationships to policing, and then turns to interrogate carceral psychology—the involvement of her profession in ongoing state violence. Jackson orbits around two key questions: how are our relationships shaped by proximity to state violence, and how can our social worlds be transformed to challenge state-sanctioned violence? "Uniform Feelings explores emotions and U.S. policing. Utilizing a mix of clinical case studies, autotheory, and ethnographic research, Jessi Lee Jackson examines the emotional and psychological forces that shape U.S. police power. She begins with her work as a psychotherapist working across the spectrum of relationships to policing, and then turns to interrogate carceral psychology-the involvement of her profession in ongoing state violence. The book then shifts toward trainings, museums, and memorials that illuminate the psychic life of policing, and the possibility for its transformation. Within her investigation of clinical practice, Jackson offers a critique of contemporary police psychology, which constructs police as vulnerable heroes in need of protection and normalizes a celebration of gun culture. She also explores the police claim of premature death for officers alongside the creation of premature death for those targeted by policing. Jackson then turns to police psychology's participation in training and consulting with police departments, highlighting that these efforts do not serve to restrain police power, but to legitimate it. In the final section of the book, Jackson explores fantasies and mourning processes around policing at police memorials and museums, rapidly expanding sites where public feelings and state violence collide"-- Provided by publisher Contents 6 Acknowledgments 8 Introduction: Compass 12 1. Gun: Relationships and Revolvers 38 2. Statistic: Frameworks of Precarity in Policing 60 3. Guidebooks: Police Psychology at the Scenes of State Violence 80 4. Manual: The Nonperformativity of Implicit-Bias Training 100 5. Museum: Heroic Fantasies at the American Police Hall of Fame 115 6. Memorial: Blue Mourning at the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial 137 Conclusion: Abolitionist Psychologies 156 Notes 164 Bibliography 194 Index 212