Socializing the High Policing Métier: Exploring Counterterrorism Trainings for Frontline Workers

Abstract

Our article examines counterterrorism trainings for frontline workers as a site of socialization to the high policing métier. Here we build on the notion of the police métier as a term that encapsulates the interactive identities and practices that produce the police world. We twin the police métier with recent scholarship on pluralized policing and surveillance to illustrate how a desire to expand surveillance to plural actors requires a socialization process that recirculates key characteristics, identities, and assumptive worldviews that shape the typically reclusive domains of high policing. Through an ethnographic account of a three-day counterterrorism training workshop for an array of frontline workers, our article analyzes what we consider three key features of socialization within the high policing métier: (1) the recirculation of the “war on terror’s” racialized fixation on Muslims and Islam; (2) rationalities of preemption and expanding domains of surveillance; and (3) the sharing fraternal moments through the dehumanization of “outsiders.”

The Declining Significance of Interpol: Policing International Terrorism After 9/11

“…Externally, law enforcement agencies within nations at various levels of jurisdictional authority (local to national) have over the years, and particularly since 9/11, greatly increased counterterrorism capabilities. As seen from the findings in most recent scholarship (Ahmad & Monaghan, 2022; Alexander, 2019; Chalk, 2022; Kirisci, 2022; Monaghan, 2022; San, 2020), police agencies across many parts of the world have also retained this counterterrorism focus, even when problems of terrorism have not materialized to the extent once feared in the uncertain post-9/11 era. Continuing a long-standing process (Deflem, 2002), internationally oriented activities are thereby preferred to be undertaken unilaterally (without cooperation, typically by stationing agents abroad) or otherwise involve relatively small and temporary cooperation efforts enacted through liaison officers, both within and across countries (e.g., Christensen, 2021; Ghani, 2018; Heyer, 2022; Sausdal, 2021).…”