ABSTRACT
This chapter charts how prime recruits during police training role-play scenarios should not only expect hostile encounters with motorists on the road, but also how they should see and stage their responses to civilians in anticipation of the immediacy of imagined threats. This chapter turns toward this specific genre of police training and testing known as the ‘Vehicle Stop’ or the ‘Traffic Stop’, the simulated encounter between a Responding Officer on patrol and a Motorist on a public road, to illustrate how police vision in practice reveals the racial optics of state violence that are improvised and performed in the academy. I describe my experience as a participant-observer of these staged stops while conducting ethnographic observations of interactions between recruits and training officers at a regional police academy in Southern California and argue that an ethnographic attunement to these unfolding scenes reveals how a racialized police vision is curated and enforced in staged encounters of asymmetrical threat.
