Stop. Rewind. Replay.: Performance, police training and mental health crisis response

Abstract

Can performance be the means by which a ‘Use of Force‘ paradigm in police training is decentralized? Footage of lethal force encounters between police and individuals in mental health crisis is ceaselessly in the news cycle, dispersing eyewitness accounts to millions who watch the endless replay of these incidents on social media. In the replay of these incidents, spectators observe with bewilderment the missed opportunities, the alternative courses of action that seem so apparent to the outside eye–all that could have been done differently. What if officers themselves could hit rewind and replay on the lethal force encounter with an individual in mental health crisis? Can performance be a vehicle for embodied replay and repetition that generates and makes tacit new forms of bodily knowledge? When performance is made the operative framework in police training, it can set the stage for scenarios that seem reassuringly familiar. But in its high-fidelity repetition of the familiar, performance can de-realize patterns of recognition, altering the course of entrained decision-making to make alternative pathways towards peaceful resolution conceivable, actionable and possible. In this article, Alvarez examines the methodological implications of a four-year research study she conceived in 2016 and initiated in 2017 in Toronto, Canada to design and measure the efficacy of a scenario-based training programme to improve police response to individuals in mental health crisis, with co-investigators Dr Yasmine Kandil (University of Victoria) and Dr Jennifer Lavoie (Wilfrid Laurier University), and a national team of theatre makers; people with lived experience of mental illness; experts in communication, anti-discrimination and cultural safety curriculum design; community advocates; forensic psychologists; clinicians; and police trainers. The training is grounded in the belief that the deceptively familiar hypotheticals of scenario-based training can unsettle sedimented habits, stigmas, and assumptions and naturalize ways of knowing premised on procedural justice.