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.”