OFFICER SAFETY TIME: Police Scenario Training and Thinking Threat First

Abstract

U.S. police reform advocates often press police departments to replace “fear-based” survival trainings with scenario or “reality-based” trainings, which involve immersive role-playing scenarios such as effecting an arrest. Temporality is a key facet of these exercises: by decelerating and replaying stressful situations, scenarios promise to allay the impulsive fear presumed to drive racialized police violence. Drawing on ethnography with officers in Maryland, I argue that scenarios instead translate fear through what I call “officer safety time.” This hegemonic temporal regime encourages police to “think threat first,” read danger in the subjunctive mood, and inhabit a hetero-masculine habitus of state power. While presumptively color-blind, officer safety time seals anti-Black violence into a single decision point evacuated of alternate futurities. I argue that scenarios deploy temporality to hail police as simultaneously threatened and threatening, and more broadly, cultivate the temporal orders of state violence in police—while immunizing them against substantive reform.