Laundering Militarization: Preparedness, Professionalism, and Police Common Sense

Abstract:US police militarization is commonly understood as military violence abroad flowing to domestic policing, where it does not belong. Despite years of reform efforts, attempts to demilitarize local police have thus far failed to effect substantive change. This essay builds on the history of US policing, as well as sixteen months of ethnographic research with police in Maryland, to suggest that the ideological labor of policing contributes to these failures. Specifically, I examine two elements of what I call police common sense: preparedness as moral practice and violence as professional technique. In so doing, I demonstrate how policing metabolizes militarization as an apolitical technical craft that counterintuitively reduces violence, and that allows officers to fulfill their primary ethical role as stewards of public crises. Demilitarization reforms function in tandem with the political work of preparedness and professionalism to consecrate “good” militarization as commonsensical and legitimate. These reforms thus inadvertently lend power to the notion of police as the “thin blue line” between extreme violence and innocent (white) society.