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 heteromasculine 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. 

Keywords

policing; temporality; scenarios; training; anti-Blackness; violence; United States

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2025 Jessica Katzenstein

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.