British slang for confrontational behavior

Violence

A MICRO-SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

Randall Collins

P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

P R I N C E T O N A N D O X F O R D

Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Collins, Randall, 1941- Violence : a micro-sociological theory / Randall Collins,

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-691-13313-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-691-13313-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Violence—United States. 2. Violence—United States—Psychological aspects. 1. Title. HM1121.C64 2008 303.60973—dc22 2007015426

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Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables ix

Acknowledgments xiii

1. The Micro-sociology of Violent Confrontations 1 Violent Situations 1 Micro-evidence: Situational Recordings, Reconstructions,

and Observations 3 Comparing Situations across Types of Violence 8 Fight Myths 10 Violent Situations Are Shaped by an Emotional Field

of Tension and Fear 19 Alternative Theoretical Approaches 20 Historical Evolution of Social Techniques for Controlling

Confrontational Tension 25 Sources 29 Preview 32 The Complementarity of Micro and Macro Theories 34

PART O N E : The Dirty Secrets of Violence 37 2. Confrontational Tension and Incompetent Violence 39

Brave, Competent and Evenly Matched? 39 The Central Reality: Confrontational Tension 41 Tension/Fear and Non-performance in Military Combat 43 Low Fighting Competence 57 Friendly Fire and Bystander Hits 59 Joy of Combat: Under What Conditions? 66 The Continuum of Tension/Fear and Combat Ferformance 68 Confrontational Tension in Policing and Non-Military Fighting 70 Fear of What? 73

3. Forward Panic 83 Confrontational Tension and Release: Hot Rush, Piling On,

Overkill 89 Atrocities of War 94 Caveat: The Multiple Causation of Atrocities 99 Asymmetrical Entrainment of Forward Panic and

Paralyzed Victims 102

vi • Contents

Forward Panics and One-Sided Casualties in Decisive Battles 1 0 4 Atrocities of Peace 1 1 2 Crowd Violence 1 1 5 Demonstrators and Crowd-Control Forces 1 2 1 The Crowd Multiplier 1 2 8 Alternatives to Forward Panic 1 3 2

4. Attacking the Weak: I . Domestic Abuse 1 3 4 The Emotional Definition of the Situation 1 3 4 Background and Foreground Explanations 1 3 5 Abusing the Exceptionally Weak: Time-patterns

from Normalcy to Atrocity 1 3 7 Three Pathways: Normal Limited Conflict, Severe Forward

Panic, and Terroristic Torture Regime 1 4 1 Negotiating Interactional Techniques of Violence

and Victimhood 1 4 8

5. Attacking the Weak: II. Bullying, Mugging, and Holdups 1 5 6 The Continuum of Total Institutions 1 6 5 Muggings and Holdups 1 7 4 Battening on Interactional Weakness 1 8 6

PART T W O : Cleaned-up and Staged Violence 1 9 1 6. Staging Fair Fights 1 9 3

Hero versus Hero 1 9 4 Audience Supports and Limits on Violence 1 9 8 Fighting Schools and Fighting Manners 2 0 7 Displaying Risk and Manipulating Danger in Sword

and Pistol Duels 2 1 2 The Decline of Elite Dueling and Its Replacement

by the Gunfight 2 2 0 Honor without Fairness: Vendettas as Chains

of Unbalanced Fights • 2 2 3 Ephemeral Situational Honor and Leap-Frog Escalation

to One-Gun Fights 226 Behind the Facade of Honor and Disrespect 2 2 9 The Cultural Prestige of Fair and Unfair Fights 2 3 7

7. Violence as Fun and Entertainment 2 4 2 Moral Holidays 2 4 3 Looting and Destruction as Participation Sustainers 2 4 5 The Wild Party as Elite Potlatch 2 5 3 Carousing Zones and Boundary Exclusion Violence 256 End-Resisting Violence 2 5 9

Contents • vii

Frustrated Carousing and Stirring up Effervescence 261 Paradox: Why Does Most Intoxication No t Lead to Violence? 263 The One-Fight-Per-Venue Limitation 270 Fighting as Action and Fun 21A Mock Fights and Mosh Pits 277

8. Sports Violence 282 Sports as Dramatically Contrived Conflicts 283 Came Dynamics and Player Violence 285 Winning by Practical Skills for Producing Emotional

Energy Dominance 296 The Timing of Player Violence: Loser-Frustration Fights

and Turning-I'oint Fights 302 Spectators' Game-Dependent Violence 307 Off site Fans' Violence: Celebration and Defeat Riots 311 Offsite Violence as Sophisticated Technique: Soccer Hooligans 315 The Dramatic Local Construction of Antagonistic Identities 324 Revolt of the Audience in the Era of Entertainers' Domination 328

PART T H R E E : Dynamics and Structure 335 of Violent Situations

9. H o w Fights Start, or N o t 337 Normal Limited Acrimony: Griping, Whining, Arguing,

Quarreling 338 Boasting and Blustering 345 The Code of the Street: Institutionalized Bluster and Threat 348 Pathways into the Tunnel of Violence 360

10. The Violent Few 370 Small Numbers of the Actively and Competently Violent 370 Confrontation Leaders and Action-Seekers: Police 375 Who Wins? 381

Military Snipers: Concealed and Absorbed in Technique 381 Fighter Pilot Aces: Aggressively Imposing Momentum 387

In the Zone versus the Glaze of Combat: Micro-situational Techniques of Interactional Dominance 399

The 9/11 Cockpit Fight 409

11. Violence as Dominance in Emotional Attention Space 413 What Does the Rest of the Crowd Do? 413 Violence without Audiences: Professional Killers

and Clandestine Violence 430 Confrontation-Minimizing Terrorist Tactics 440 Violent Niches in Confrontational Attention Space 448

viii • Contents

Epilogue Practical Conclusions 463

Notes 467

References 527

Index 555

Illustrations and Tables

Illustrations

1.1 Bystanders keep back from fight (New York City, 1950). 12 1.2 Turkish members of parliament fight while colleagues hold

each other back (February 2, 2001). 13 2.1 Tension/fear in military combat. One man fires, eleven take

cover (October 2000). 42 2.2 Tension in face and body postures: Palestinian gunmen battle

Israeli soldiers (2002). 43 2.3 Police SWAT team moves in cautiously upon a single gunman

holding hostages in restaurant (Berkeley, California, 1990). 44 2.4 Fear in faces and body postures of Palestinian boys, throwing

rocks at an Israeli tank (2002). 45 2.5 Soldier backs up, unarmed crowd advances (Baghdad,

October 2004). 72 3.1 A,B After 100 mph chase, a patrolman catches and beats the

last of a truckload of illegal immigrants (California, April 1996). 84

3.2 Rodney King beaten by four policemen after high-speed chase (Los Angeles, March 1991). 90

3.3 A, B Killing surrenderee: Afrikaner resistance fighters, already wounded, are killed after a failed attack (South Africa, 1994). 96

3.4 Kenya market thief stomped by two men while crowd watches (Nairobi, 1996). 116

3.5 Group attack on fallen victim: Turkish versus Greek Cypriots (1996). 117

3.6 Standoff between crowd-control forces and aggressive edge of protesters (Serbia, 2000). 122

3.7 Two rock-throwers in front of crowd of demonstrators (Genoa, July 2001). 123

3.8 Crowd breaks up as soldiers fire machine-guns (Petrograd, July 1917). 124

3.9 Cluster of rock-throwers in Argentina demonstration (2002). 126

5.1 Bullying in Pre-school Networks. 157 5.2 The Faces of Bullying and Playing the Victim (2002). 165

x • Illustrations and Tables

5.3 Situational dominance in a street confrontation (New York, 1997). 177

6.1 French sword duel with large audience (1901). 218 8.1 Masculine athlete in unviolent sport: pole-vault champion

(2004). 287 8.2 Boxers' pre-fight stare-down (2001). 288 8.3 Limiting the scuffle by use of protective equipment

(July 2004). 293 8.4 A ritual team brawl (2004). 295 8.5 Male and female players display identical gestures of

domination (2004). 306 8.6 Soccer hooligans gang up on isolated fans of opposing team

(Munich, 2001). 323 9.1 Angry confrontation, momentarily stabilized by repetitious

gesturing (Jerusalem, October 2000) . 365 10.1 Visibility of targets at various distances: 1942 Soviet

sniping manual . 386 10.2 American pilots in World War I with flying top hat emblem. 390 10.3 Ace scoreboards (1945). 393 10.4 Korean war pilots show off their squadron's collective

scoreboard. 394 10.5 Police shootout at close range (1997). 401 10.6 Winning by emotional dominance: faces of basketball

rebounders (2006). 408 11 .1 . Multiple layers of a riot: front line, near supporters, middle,

back (Palestine, 2003). 415 11.2. Ultra-activist, front cluster, plus background onlookers.

Soccer riot in Russia (2002). 416 11.3. Single demonstrator confronts police line while crowd

remains unfocused (Genoa, July 2001). 417 11.4 {four-photo sequence) Lone demonstrator, energized by small

group of supporters, runs forward to taunt police and is shot (Gothenburg, Sweden, 2001). 419

11.5 Crowd of protesters run from police; three rock-throwers remain forward (Jerusalem, 2002). 421

11.6 Ritual solidarity gestures between violent front line and supporters. Palestinian youth displays blood on his hands after lynching (October 2000) . 423

11.7 Ritual desecration of enemy in victory celebration. Charred corpses of American civilians hung from a bridge in Fallujah, Iraq (April 2004). 424

Il lustrations and Tables • xi

11 .8 Violent cluster in demonstration (Ankara, Turkey, 2 0 0 1 ) . 4 2 8 11 .9 Contract Killers. " M a d D o g " Sullivan ( 1 9 8 2 )

and Joey Gallo ( 1 9 5 7 ) . 4 3 4 1 1 . 1 0 Suicide bomber poses for photo shortly before attack

(March 2 0 0 2 ) . 4 4 3 1 1 . 1 1 Four suicide bombers beginning their mission (July 2 0 0 5 ) . 4 4 5 1 1 . 1 2 Suicide bomber escaping after a failed attack (London,

July 2 0 0 5 ) . 4 4 7

Tables

2.1 Frequency of firing in life-threatening enemy confrontations 52 2 . 2 Percentage of troops firing in combat photos 53 6.1 Seriousness of fight affected by audience behavior 2 0 3 6.2 Seriousness of fight affected by size of belligerent groups 2 0 4 6.3 Severity of fights in scheduled and unscheduled situations 2 3 6

Acknowledgments

I AM INDEBTED to the following for advice, comments , or information: J a c k Katz , Eli jah Anderson, Earry Sherman, Anthony King, Curtis J a c k s o n - J a c o b s , Georgi Dcrlugian, David Grazian, M a r c Sageman, Tom Scheff, Eric Dunning, J o h a n Goudsblom, J o h a n Heilbron, Murray Mi l - ner, Robin Wagner-Pacifici , Katherine N e w m a n , Dan Chambliss , Jerry M. Lewis, Geoffrey Alpert, Jens Ludwig, Meredith Rossner, Wes Skogan, Lode Walgrave, Ian O ' D o n n e l l , Nikki J o n e s , Peter M o s k o s , Alice Gof fman, Deanna Wilkinson, Maren McConnel l -Col l ins , Ken Donow, J o n Olesberg, J o n Turner, Rae Lesser Blumbcrg, Anthony O b - erschall, Rose Cheney, lrma Elo , Patricia Maloncy, Mol l i c Rubin , Clark McCauley, Judith M c C o n n e l l , Heather Strang, Stefan Klusemann, Don- ald Levine, Rober t Emerson, J e f f Goodwin , Richard Trembley, and An- thony McConnel l -Col l ins . I thank also col loquium participants at the universities of Amsterdam, Cambridge, Copenhagen, Galway, Univer- sity College Dublin, Notre Dame, Princeton, Kent State, U C L A , and at the Internationa! Institution for the Sociology of Law at Onat i , Spain; officers of the San Diego and Philadelphia Police Departments , Cali for- nia Highway Patrol , New Jersey State Police, and the Irish Garda ; and members of my classes in social conflict at University of California River- side and University of Pennsylvania. I owe special thanks to Danielle Kane , who provided invaluable research assistance. T h e Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolit ical Conflict has provided a stimulating environment for discussions of multiple aspects of conflict , as have the Jerry Lee Center for Criminology and the Department of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Violence

C H A P T E R 1

The Micro-sociology of Violent Confrontations

T H E R E IS A VAST ARRAY of types of violence. It is short and episodic as a slap in the face; or massive and organized as a war. It can be passionate and angry as a quarrel; or callous and impersonal as the bureaucratic administration of gas chambers. It is happy as drunken carousing, fearful as soldiers in combat, vicious as a torturer. It can be furtive and hidden as a rape-murder, or public as a ritual execution. It is programmed enter- tainment in the form of sporting contests, the plot tension of drama, the action of action-adventure, the staple shocker of the news edition. It is horrible and heroic, disgusting and exciting, the most condemned and glorified of human acts.

This vast array can be explained by a relatively compact theory. A few main processes, in combination and in differing degrees of intensity, give the conditions for when and how the various forms of violence occur.

Two moves will set up the analysis. First, put the interaction in the center of the analysis, not the individual, the social background, the cul- ture, or even the motivation: that is to say, look for the characteristics of violent situations. That means looking for data that gets us as close as possible into the dynamics of situations. Second, compare across different kinds of violence. We need to break down the usual categories—homi- cides in one research specialty, war in another, child abuse in another, police violence yet elsewhere—and look for the situations that occur within them. Not that all situations are the same; we want to compare the range of variation in situations, which affects the kind and amount of violence that emerges. This will turn the wide variety of violence into a methodological advantage, giving clues to the circumstances that explain when and in what manner violence unfolds.

V I O L E N T SITUATIONS

Not violent individuals, but violent situations—this is what a micro-socio- logical theory is about. We seek the contours of situations, which shape the emotions and acts of the individuals who step inside them. It is a false lead to look for types of violent individuals, constant across situations. A huge amount of research has not yielded very strong results here. Young

2 • Chapter 1

men, yes, are most likely to be perpetrators of many kinds of violence. But not all young men are violent. And middle-aged men, children, and women are violent too, in the appropriate situations. Similarly with back- ground variables such as poverty, race, and origins in divorce or single- parent families. Though there are some statistical correlations between these variables and certain kinds of violence, these fall short of predicting most violence in at least three aspects:

First, most young men, poor people, black people, or children of di- vorce do not become murderers, rapists, batterers, or armed robbers; and there are a certain number of affluent persons, white people, or products of conventional families who do. Similarly, the much asserted explanation that violent offenders are typically past victims of child abuse accounts for only a minority of the cases. 1

Second, such analysis conveys a plausible picture of the etiology of violence only because it restricts the dependent variable to particular cate- gories of illegal or highly stigmatized violence; it does not hold up well when we broaden out to all kinds of violence. Poverty, family strain, child abuse, and the like do not account for police violence or for which soldiers do the most killing in combat, for who runs gas chambers or commits ethnic cleansing. No one has shown that being abused as a child is likely to make someone a cowboy cop, a carousing drunk, or a decorated war hero. No doubt there are readers who will bridle at the suggestion; for them, violence naturally falls into hermetically sealed sections, and "bad" social conditions should be responsible for "bad" violence, whereas "good" violence—which is not seen as violence at all, when it is carried out by authorized state agents—is not subject to analysis since it is part of normal social order. In this way of thinking, there is an intermediate category of innocuous or "naughty" violence (i.e., carousing that gets out of hand), or violence that is committed by "good" persons; this is ex- plained, or explained away, by another set of moral categories. Such dis- tinctions are a good example of conventional social categories getting in the way of sociological analysis. If we zero in on the situation of interac- tion—the angry boyfriend with the crying baby, the armed robber squeez- ing the trigger on the holdup victim, the cop beating up the suspect—we can see patterns of confrontation, tension, and emotional flow, which are at the heart of the situation where violence is carried out. This is another way of seeing that the background conditions—poverty, race, childhood experiences—are a long way from what is crucial to the dynamics of the violent situation.

Third, even those persons who are violent, are violent only a small part of the time. Consider what we mean when we say that a person is violent, or "very violent." We have in mind someone who is a convicted murderer, or has committed a string of murders; who has been in many fights,

Violent Confrontations • 3

slashed people with a knife, or battered them with fists. But if we consider that everyday life unfolds in a chain of situations, minute by minute, most of the time there is very little violence. This is apparent from ethnographic observations, even in statistically very violent neighborhoods. A homicide rate of ten deaths per 100,000 persons (the rate in the United States peak- ing in 1990) is a fairly high rate, but it means that 99,990 out of 100,000 persons do not get murdered in a year; and 97,000 of them (again, taking the peak rate) are not assaulted even in minor incidents. And these violent incidents are spread out over a year; the chances of murder or assault happening to a particular person at any particular moment on a particular day during that year are very small. This applies even to those persons who actually do commit one or more murders, assaults, armed robberies, or rapes (or for that matter, cops who beat up suspects) during the course of the year. Even those persons who statistically commit a lot of crime scarcely do so at a rate of more than once a week or so; the most notorious massacres in schools, workplaces, or public places, carried out by lone individuals, have killed as many as twenty-five persons, but generally within a single episodes (Hickey 2002; Newman et al. 2004). The most sustained violent persons are serial killers, who average between six and thirteen victims over a period of years; but these are extremely rare (about one victim per five million population), and even these repeat killers go months between killings, waiting for just the right situation to strike (Hickey 2002: 1 2 - 1 3 , 241-42) . Another kind of rare cluster of violence, crime sprees, may continue for a period of days, in a chain of events linked closely by emotions and circumstances so as to comprise a tunnel of vio- lence. Leaving these extended sequences of violence aside for the moment, I want to underline the conclusion: even people that we think of as very violent—because they have been violent in more than one situation, or spectacularly violent on some occasion—are violent only in very particu- lar situations. 2 Even the toughest hoodlums are off duty some of the time. Most of the time, the most dangerous, most violent persons are not doing anything violent. Even for these people, the dynamics of situations are crucial in explaining what violence they actually do.

M I C R O - E V I D E N C E : SITUATIONAL R E C O R D I N G S , R E C O N S T R U C T I O N S ,

AND OBSERVATIONS

Surveys of individuals orient our theories to the characteristics of individ- uals, packaged in the terms of standard sociological variables. To move to a sociological theory, not of violent individuals, but of violent situa- tions, we must emphasize a different way of collecting and analyzing data. We need direct observation of violent interaction to capture the process

4 • Chapter 1

of violence as it actually is performed. Our theories are constrained by having been based upon statistics assembled after the fact, packaged by the criminal justice system, or upon interviews with convicted prisoners or other participants. Victim surveys are a step in the right direction, but they remain limited, not only by the issue of to what extent victims are telling the truth, but also by the problem that persons are generally not good observers of the details and contexts of dramatic events. Our ordi- nary discourse does not provide the language in which to describe micro- interaction well; instead, it offers a set of cliches and myths that predeter- mine what people will say. This is true also of military violence, riots, sports violence, or even ordinary quarrels; when participants talk about violent situations, they tend to give a very truncated, and by their own lights, idealized version of what went on.

A new era has emerged in recent decades as it has become possible to study violence as recorded on video tape from security systems, police recordings, and news and amateur video photographers. When ordinary observers see such recordings, they are usually shocked. A riot eventually followed the publicity given to a video recording, taken by an amateur with a new camcorder, of the Rodney King arrest in Los Angeles in 1991 . Events are always interpreted in terms of prevailing ideological categories; the concepts easily at hand were those of a racially motivated beating. But what was so shocking about the Rodney King video was not its racial aspect; it was the beating itself, which did not look at all like what we think violence is supposed to look like. Visual evidence shows us some- thing about violence that we are not prepared to see. The pattern looks much the same in a wide range of incidents, in many different ethnic combinations within and across ethnic group lines (we will examine some of these in chapters 2 and 3). Racism may contribute to building up some situations of violence, but it is one lead-in condition among others, and neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition; the situation of violence itself has a dynamics that is more pervasive than racism.

Violence as it actually becomes visible in real-life situations is about the intertwining of human emotions of fear, anger, and excitement, in ways that run right against the conventional morality of normal situations. It is just this shocking and unexpected quality of violence, as it actually appears in the cold eye of the camera, that gives a clue to the emotional dynamics at the center of a micro-situational theory of violence.

We live in an era in which our ability to see what happens in real-life situations is far greater than ever before. We owe this new vision to a combination of technology and sociological method. The ethnomethodol- ogists of the 1960s and 1970s took off as an intellectual movement in tandem with the use of newly portable cassette tape recorders; this made it possible to record at least the audio part of real-life social interactions,

Violent Confrontations • 5

and to play it back repeatedly, slowing it down and subjecting it to analy- sis in a way that had been barely possible with fleeting observations in real time, giving rise to the field of conversation analysis (Sacks, Sche- gloff, and Jefferson 1974; Schegloff 1992). As video recording devices became more portable and ubiquitous, it has been possible to look at other aspects of micro-behavior, including bodily rhythms, postures, and expressions of emotion. Thus it is not surprising that the period from about 1980 onward has been the golden age for the sociology of emotions (Katz 1999, among many others).

It is not literally true that a picture is worth a thousand words. Most people will not see what is in a picture, or will see it through the most readily available visual cliches. It takes training and an analytical vocabu- lary to talk about what is in a picture, and to know what to look for. A picture is worth a thousand words only for those who already have inter- nalized an adequate vocabulary. This is particularly so when we have to train ourselves to see micro-details: the movements of some facial muscles rather than others that distinguish a false smile from a spontaneous one; the movements that display fear, tension, and other emotions; the smooth- ness of rhythmic coordination and the hitches that indicate disattunement and conflict; the patterns in which one person or another seizes the initia- tive and imposes a rhythm upon others. The methods of visual and auditory recording now available open up the potential to see a vast new landscape of human interaction; but our ability to see goes in tandem with the expan- sion of our theories of what processes are out there to be seen.

This is so also in the micro-sociology of violence. The video revolution has made available much more information about what happens in vio- lent situations than ever before. But real-life recording conditions are not like Hollywood film studios; lighting and composition are far from ideal, and the camera angles and distance may not be just the ones a micro- sociologist would prefer. We need to disengage ourselves from the conven- tions of dramatically satisfying film (including TV commercials) where the camera cuts to a new angle every few seconds at the most, and a great deal of editing has gone on to juxtapose an interesting and engaging sequence. A micro-sociologist can spot the difference between raw obser- vational recording and artistically or editorially processed film, usually within seconds. Raw conflict is not very engaging, for all sorts of reasons; as micro-sociologists, we are not in it for entertainment.

Other approaches besides live video have opened up the landscape of violence as it really happens. Still photography has gotten better through- out the past century and a half; cameras have become more portable, and lenses and lighting devices have made it possible to capture scenes that previously would have been limited to static posed shots in relatively sheltered conditions. Professional photographers have become more in-

6 • Chapter 1

trcpid, particularly in riots, demonstrat ions, and war zones; the number of photographers killed has gone up drastically in the past ten years, far above any previous period. ' This too is an opportuni ty for micro- sociologists, although the aforementioned caveats again apply. Still pho- tos are often better than videos for capturing the emotional aspects of violent interaction. When we analyze a video of a conflict sequence (or indeed any video of interaction), we may slow it down to segments of micro-seconds (frame-by-frame in older camera film) to pull out just those details of bodily posture, facial expression, and sequence of micro- movements. In depictions of riots, which 1 use extensively in this work, still photos dramatically show the division between the active few on the violent front and the supporting mass of demonstrators . The danger is in assuming one can read the still photo without sociological sensibilities. Highly artistic or ideological photographers are less useful here than rou- tine news photographers; some photos of demonstrat ions or combat have an artistic or political message that governs the whole composition; we need to look from a different vantage point to get at the micro-socio- logical aspects of conflict.

An intellectual stance on what to look for has gone along with techno- logical advances, and sometimes preceded them. The military historian John Keegan (1976) set out to reconstruct battles from the ground up, investigating what must actually have happened as each segment of troops rushed forward or fell down; as horses, men, and vehicles got tangled in traffic jams; as weapons were wielded skillfully, accidentally, or not at all. Other military analysts have found out how many guns were loaded when recovered from dead troops on battlefields; and historical battles have been reconstructed with laser beams. What we have learned about sol- diers in combat has opened the door for understanding violent situations in general. The emotional relationships between soldiers and their com- rades, and between them and their equally human enemies, provided one of the first clues to how violent situations unfold. 4

In our ordinary compartmentalized way of viewing things, it is a leap from military history to reconstructions of police violence, but the meth- odological and theoretical parallels are strong. We can understand the occasions on which police are violent by techniques such as video re- cordings and through methods of reconstructing events, such as ballistics