Three-dimensional policeman: Security, sovereignty and volumetric police power
| Author | Justin Turner,Travis Linnemann |
| Published date | 01 February 2022 |
| Date | 01 February 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1362480620981103 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480620981103
Theoretical Criminology
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1362480620981103
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
Three-dimensional policeman:
Security, sovereignty and
volumetric police power
Travis Linnemann
Kansas State University, USA
Justin Turner
University of Massachusetts Boston, USA
Abstract
Rather than thinking only in terms of flat cartographic surfaces, this article advances
current understandings of the political geography of police power by paying close attention
to both height and depth in the fabrication and colonization of three-dimensional or
volumetric political space. Taking aim at a number of police technologies including the
ShotSpotter system which uses highly sensitive microphones to track gunfire and tear
gas which weaponizes the atmosphere, our aim is to bring the volumetric to bear in the
critique of the police power. After having sketched the volumetric and its implications
for contemporary police practices, we conclude the article with some reflections
on how recent interventions in speculative realism and new materialism might allow
us to see all human and non-human objects as part of policing’s broader volumetric
assemblage, thereby revealing the contours of a three-dimensional policeman.
Keywords
Affect, atmospheric, police power, sensory, volumetric
In late 1989, US military forces invaded Panama with the aim of capturing deposed
General Manuel Noriega. With Noriega holed up in the Vatican’s Panamanian embassy,
US forces settled on a novel method—blaring rock music from truck-mounted
Corresponding author:
Travis Linnemann, Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work, Kansas State University, 208 Waters Hall,
Manhattan, Ks 66502, USA.
Email: twl@ksu.edu
981103TCR0010.1177/1362480620981103Theoretical CriminologyLinnemann and Turner
research-article2020
Article
2022, Vol. 26(1) 23–39
loudspeakers—to force his surrender. Four years later, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and FBI employed the same tactics attempting
to drive David Koresh and other Branch Davidians from their Texas compound
(Goodman, 2012). Fast forward again and we find heavy metal and hip hop blared around
the clock as part of the torture programs at Abu Ghraib prison and the black sites of the
war on terror (Cusick, 2013). Each of these instances demonstrates how the US war
power/police power (Neocleous, 2014)1 has identified the ear as a vulnerable target
(Volcler, 2013) and enlisted sound as a weapon (Ross, 2016).
Today, US police and their partners have advanced beyond loud music and perfected
sophisticated aural weaponry. At the 2017 Women’s March, for instance, the Washington
DC Metropolitan Police Department used a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) or
“sound cannon” (Figure 1) “to assist in instructing the crowd flows on continuing to flow
away from the entrances of the stations” (Waltman, 2017). Emitting painful deterrent
sound waves approximating a very loud car alarm LRADs allow police to touch at a
distance in order to direct subjects’ behaviors (Schafer, 1994).
While they insist the LRAD is not a weapon, its inventors admit that anyone within
direct path of the sound cannon’s 15-degree wide cone will experience extreme pain,
headaches and loss of balance and at distances inside 15 meters, potentially permanent
hearing damage (Baldwin, 2014). A powerful instrument of crowd control, LRADs help
police usher unruly subjects along preselected, preapproved paths, thereby producing
normalized behaviors and “approved protests” within the secured and sanitized confines
of the container and kettle (De Jong and Schuilenburg, 2006; Hayward, 2012). While it
may to some seem quite heavy-handed to subject attendees of the orderly Women’s
March to “sound cannon”, LRADs are increasingly common to police arsenals, having
also been aimed at protestors during the 2009 G20 meetings in Pittsburgh, the #NODAPL
uprising at Standing Rock and following the police killings of Mike Brown, Eric Garner
and George Floyd. While we certainly find the LRAD objectionable, we do not wish to
Figure 1. LRAD weaponized cone of sound.
24 Theoretical Criminology 26(1)
To continue reading
Request your trial