ABSTRACT
This chapter approaches police as an institution through which the ambient structural violence of a given social order is transformed into an agentive force conserving that order. On this basis, I propose to define “police culture” as the process, specific to modern government, through which structural violence is translated into active form. Police culture is where the invisible violence of ordinary life is made visible, where subtextual violence is made explicit. I develop this concept through a reflection on the way the American Department of Justice reacted to the killing of Mike Brown. I use a selective literature review to supply an intellectual rationale for this definition. And I advocate for the utility this approach contributes to anthropological engagement with police, and to the larger anthropological contribution of policing studies more broadly.
