Working at the edge: Police,emotions and space in Rio de Janeiro

Introduction

Rio de Janeiro’s police officers are working at ‘the edge’. Defined as the outer limit of something, as the moment just before something meaningful happens, or as a tense feeling (Oxford Dictionaries, 2019), for Rio’s police officers the edge constitutes both an emotional state of being and a spatial order. The above field vignette illustrates how this edge concretises in emotional and spatial dimensions when in the secret backspace of the police station, the officer loses control in a violent emotional outburst. In this article, I explore police officers as ‘edgeworkers’ and how their emotional and spatial edging contributes crucially to the production of ‘police territoriality’, the attempt to establish urban order and the making of everyday tensions in Rio de Janeiro. I propose two main conceptual contributions both to geography and criminology. The first concerns a comprehension of police territoriality that considers the often-ignored emotional worlds of police officers that, so I argue, are crucially important to understand how the production of space and policing are interrelated. The second regards the concept of edgework that most often lacks an important spatial component. Only by taking both together can we better appreciate the ways in which the police shapes and is shaped by space.

Everyday life in Rio is marked by violent urban conflict. A plurality of actors such as drug trafficking networks, police officers, militias and local politicians uphold a territorialising fight to gain the upper hand in many neighbourhoods (e.g. Arias and Barnes, 2017; Lessing, 2017; Savell, 2016). Characterised by daily shootouts, racialised and violent policing strategies and discursive acts of othering and fear, violent conflict in Rio establishes symbolic as well as territorial borders within the city. Rio’s urban conflict produces everyday physical and emotional experiences for those involved in and affected by the shootings, the police invasions and armed assaults. To live in such circumstances means to be confronted with concrete, desired and imagined urban borders that are experienced with the constant possibility of being abruptly established or to suddenly collapse (Nielsen, 2017: 399). The urban experience becomes one of searching for stability and security in hostile environments characterised by instability and constant tensions.

Rio de Janeiro’s police fundamentally shapes and is shaped by these ongoing experiences at the city’s manifold edges. Much has been written on the responsibility of the police for these processes within Rio’s favelas from the perspectives of the drug traffickers and the community’s residents (e.g. Larkins, 2015; Richmond, 2019; Zaluar, 2004). However, very little is known about how the police officers themselves live with and engage in the urban conflict, and how they deal with being in the epicentre of these everyday urban uncertainties. In this article, I argue that the conditions of Rio’s urban conflict, in which police officers try to establish urban order, produce emotional states that actively generate experiences of insecurity in the city.

In Glück and Low’s (2017: 285–287) scalar approach to security, they investigate the ways in which security is produced sociospatially on global, regional, national, urban, local and bodily levels. They differentiate between ‘security as a state of being’ (the experiential and emotional domain) and ‘states of security’ (the configurations of state power and governance of security). Spatial theory is here conjoined with anthropological ethnographic studies to demonstrate how macro levels of security states, and micro levels of everyday practices and subjective and bodily experiences of security, are produced through sociospatial strategies.

Inspired by this, I combine spatial theory with ethnographic approaches to the police to investigate how emotions contribute to police territoriality. This leads to an understanding of attempts to establish urban order, going beyond the mere physical manifestation of police work. It invokes a sense of the emotional entanglements of police officers that are shaped by and shape the city as a ‘bordered space’ (Christensen and Albrecht, this issue).

I do this first theoretically by considering the relationship between the police and the production of urban space, thereby adopting a relational conception of police territoriality (Raffestin, 2012). I then mobilise an approach to the police using the concept of edgework (Lyng, 1990, 1998, 2005a) that originates from cultural criminology (Ferrell et al., 2015) and its phenomenology of emotions (Katz, 1988, 1999).

Second, in the methodological framework I present the fieldwork that was carried out with Rio’s state security forces. The empirical approach specifically highlights my ethnography with ordinary civil police officers and the civil police Special Forces CORE ¹ and situates these in the complex Brazilian public security system.

Third, I unfold my analysis to show how Rio’s police officers are working at the edge in three respects. In part I, I explore the metaphor of ‘drying ice’ that police officers use to express a loss of control when trying to cope with their everyday work routines, and how its emotional dynamics produce spaces of secrecy. In part II, I show how police officers perceive their jobs emotionally as a vocation, which produces specific spaces of exposure and lays bare the severity of the drying ice dilemma. While police officers like what they do, their work exposes them to ongoing dangerous situations outside the bounds of professional life. Finally, in part III, I look at the Special Forces’ activities as a specific form of edgework that helps overcome the drying ice dilemma. The work of the Special Forces is emotionally and materially comparable with that of soldiers in war zones, which produces the city as a space of war. In the conclusion, I argue that if we want to appreciate how urban space, bordering processes and urban order are produced through policing, we have to study more closely the police officers and their daily struggles, and in particular their emotional work at the edge.

Policing space, emotions and edgework

From the theoretical and empirical contributions of the ‘geographies of police’ (Yarwood, 2007) in human geography and urban studies, we know that police work and space are mutually related (e.g. Fyfe, 1991, 1995). Police officers’ spatial tactics influence the maintenance of urban order (Franzén, 2001: 214), and as Fyfe (1992: 471) has noted, space is ‘directly involved in police work’. A wide range of literature has looked into different spatial police dynamics such as protest policing (Wahlström, 2010), private policing (Paasche et al., 2014), hybrid policing (Albrecht, 2019), border policing (Reeves, 2011), gentrification and policing (Künkel, 2017; Raco, 2003), policing of certain social groups (Stuart, 2014) and the governance of space through policing mega-events (Fussey, 2015; Klauser, 2013). Yet, there are only a few ethnographic studies that focus on the police officers themselves and how they concretely ‘make and mark space’ (Herbert, 1997: 21).

One exception is Steve Herbert’s (1996, 1997: 161) study of officers in the Los Angeles Police Department, showing how police behaviour is defined by territoriality and organised by normative orders that ‘provide structure and meaning to police actions’. Herbert uses a behavioural concept of territoriality inspired by Robert Sack (1986: 1), who defines it as ‘a spatial strategy to affect, influence, or control resources and people by controlling area’. In this article, however, I adapt a relational conception of territoriality, inspired by francophone geographer Claude Raffestin (2012), to understand the police as ‘agents of territoriality’ (Mynster Christensen and Albrecht, this issue). I do this to bring to the fore the emotional worlds of police officers that are rarely considered, but are an essential component to better grasp the relationship between the police and space.

Acknowledging the conceptual debates in geography around the different meanings of territoriality (Klauser, 2012, 2017; Murphy, 2012), the reason for my decision lies in a perception of space as a relational scheme inspired by the Lefebvrian ‘production of space’ (Lefebvre, 1991). Raffestin (2012: 129) apprehends relational (and mediated) territoriality as ‘a system’ within which an exchange and ‘flux of all sorts between exteriority (the physical environment) and alterity (the social environment)’ continuously takes place. Space in this sense turns into ‘territory’ when it is produced by the human activity within it (Raffestin, 2012: 124). In Raffestin's (2012; 130) theory, the production of territory is comprised and activated by three main elements, ‘(1) things and material states, (2) states of conscience, emotion, and subjective knowledge, and (3) knowledge taken objectively’. The focus on the emotional side of the production of territory creates the possibility to investigate the emotional world of the police that I argue shapes the territorial practices of the officers in Rio de Janeiro.

To bring spatial thought and the emotions of police officers together, I borrow from cultural criminology’s relational framework of crime and crime control. Cultural criminology recognises that emotions play an important role in understanding the roots of transgression, as the social structures within which they are embedded (Hayward, 2004: 151, also Ferrell et al., 2015: 73). An inspirational source for cultural criminology’s focus on emotions derives from Jack Katz (1988, 1999), who argues that we have to assess the foreground of social performance in order to make sense of other explaining background structures. Katz (1999: 5–6) differentiates between three distinct emotional states and reactions where (1) emotional outburst means to react to and engage with directly and beyond a given situation, (2) the emotional states of a person regarding the reaction and interpretation of others onto these conditions, and (3) how persons move from one emotional state into another that drives the sense of emotions as a bodily experience (‘sensual metamorphoses’). This three-dimensional concept orients us to emotions as ‘self-reflective actions and experiences’ that are ‘corporal metaphors that operate implicitly at the foundations of all of our conduct’ (Katz, 1999: 7).

To apprehend how emotions are an essential part of police territoriality, I consider police officers as edgeworkers (Lyng, 1990, 2005a). Embedded in the Katzian conception of emotions and combined with the sociology of risk taking, the notion of edgework focuses on those who perform highly risky endeavours at the verge of legality, criminality and/or between life and death, and thus assesses the boundaries between ‘order and disorder’ (Lyng, 1990: 585). This is strongly connected to cultural criminology’s take on the act of transgression, which in itself ‘contains distinct emotions, attractions and compensations’ (Ferrell et al., 2015: 73). In late modern living conditions, social inequality, monotonous everyday working routines and unsuccessful attempts at self-realisation are often felt as dull, humiliating and as losses of identity and control. By engaging in edgework, the protagonists seek to regain a bit of that lost control and to compensate for emotional humiliation by developing specific skills through activities such as sky diving or extreme motorcycling. Edgeworkers try to follow a mechanism that makes them take voluntary risks and push themselves to the edge, in search of a rush of adrenaline through constant exposure to risk and the permanent possibility of sudden death or severe injury (Lyng, 1990: 857–859). Many transgressive acts in urban environments can be seen as edgework and attempts at retaking control in ontologically insecure worlds (Hayward, 2004: 165). Typically, police officers or combat soldiers, who possess very specific skills, have jobs that carry the possibility of such risk-full moments, where adrenaline rushes can serve as an escape from the humiliating experiences of not being able to do what they are trained to do, or to control what they are supposed to control (Lyng, 1990: 857).

To date, however, there has been little research that conceptualises the police as edgeworkers (e.g. Ilan, 2016). For instance, literature on anarchist movements (Ferrell, 2005), financial trading (Smith, 2005), drug taking (Reith, 2005) or doing research in high risk environments (Hamm, 2005; Lyng, 1998), sheds light on different facets of edgework. While there are important criticisms of edgework for not acknowledging sufficiently gendered dimensions within the concept (Naegler and Salman, 2016: 360–363), I want to highlight that there is also a compelling opportunity to address both how state actors become edgeworkers themselves and how the police as edgeworkers produce territoriality. Appreciating police officers as edgeworkers affords me the opportunity to combine the relational approach on territoriality with the emotional concept of edgework, to show through three empirical instances the relationship between policing and space and how police officers’ emotions are produced by, and contribute to, the production of Rio de Janeiro’s urban conflict.

The empirical approach to Rio’s police forces

Empirically, this article draws on data collected during eight months of fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro between 2013 and 2016. During this period, I had privileged access to the city’s security forces, specifically civil police officers in police stations and in their Special Forces’ headquarters.

The civil police are one of two main forces within the Brazilian state and the backbone of the country’s public security system (alongside the federal police that operates across state boundaries). Whereas the military police patrol the streets, civil police officers investigate crimes, interrogate suspects and file cases with the judiciary, and can be seen as an agency of surveillance and an auxiliary branch of the juridical system (Kant de Lima, 1995: 85). Although the civil police as an organisation has a clear civilian character, it is anchored in Brazil’s militaristic past (Zaverucha, 2000: 9). This past still resonates today in its hierarchical, military and hypermasculine everyday working environments.

In Rio’s civil police Special Forces CORE, this is especially obvious. As one of its members says,

Here in Rio de Janeiro we use rifles, war equipment like helmets, bulletproof vests against rifles. … This is military equipment, which for us has become a routine. The CORE is exactly this: Within the civil police, we are a paramilitary force.

The civil police with its CORE unit is an integral part of Rio’s history of policing the poor, based on militaristic strategies to establish urban order by any means (Fischer, 2008; McCann, 2014). Race defines the criminal other in Rio de Janeiro and is identified as black, poor, young and male from the favelas – a narrative which is historically and deeply engrained in public perceptions to which the media, political figures and the wider public contribute (Grillo, 2013: 225, 235; Misse, 1999: 176). Hence, racial profiling is not the exception, but the rule, and race is the defining element when it comes to police discrimination and police killings of mostly young, black and poor men (Cano, 2010). With clear spatial components this is mainly – if not exclusively – exercised in poor and majority-black communities in Brazilian cities where the black body is the number one target of ‘police terror’ (Alves, 2018).

Nonetheless, we know relatively little about how police officers themselves deal with doing police work in a city like Rio. Only a few studies have focussed on the civil police officers themselves, including Guaracy Mingardi’s (1992) ethnography with civil police officers and Graham Denyer Willis’ (2015) ethnographic account of homicide detectives in São Paulo and Roberto Kant de Lima’s (1995) and Flavia Medeiros’ (2018) brilliant work with Rio’s civil police. Being a police officer in Rio also means to be entangled with, participate in, and suffer physically and mentally from the working conditions in a hierarchical organisation and a most deadly police routine (Cano and Magaloni, 2016).

Methodologically, I draw on a growing body of anthropologically informed literature that highlights the phenomenological, subjective and bodily experienced emotions of the police (Fassin, 2013b, 2017; Garriott, 2013; Karpiak and Garriott, 2018). Jeff Ferrell’s (1998: 27) ‘criminological verstehen’ allowed me to engage in subjective interpretation and compassionate engagement with the research subjects, embedding this into wider sociological and ‘rational understandings of social action and social meaning’. In many visits to the Special Forces headquarters and during month-long stays during day and night shifts in the police station, I was able to record 31 interviews with officers, accompany them during their work inside and outside the station, ride with them in police cars, go for lunches and dinners, and pass long hours waiting with them for something to happen. My status as a white European male, who speaks Brazilian Portuguese, had crucial influence upon my position and access as an ethnographer in the field. Learning the language of the field (Van Maanen, 2011: 13), my long-term stay with the officers in the most varied circumstances, from tranquil and calm to hectic and stressful, allowed me to assess the structure of the social processes that appeared repeatedly over time and helped to differentiate between normal, enacted and exceptional emotional states (Duneier, 2001: 338). I concur with Beatrice Jauregui (2013: 148), who has powerfully described writing ethnography as an ‘ethical process’, and as a ‘dirty job’, but who believes ‘that somebody has got to do it’.

The drying ice dilemma: Losing control everyday

In Rio de Janeiro, police officers continuously use a metaphor to describe their police work, referring to the act of enxugando gelo – to dry ice from a melting, but ever-growing ice block. As one of the CORE officers told me in an interview,

Well, we have a civil and a military police [institution], and two different budgets to do the same things … In reality, they don’t get there, they don’t do anything. It’s not that you don’t want to do anything, it’s that you can’t. It’s an expression which is often used today, enxugar gelo [to dry ice]. Every day you rub the ice and it’s put back into the cumbuca, into the fridge, again and again, and each time with a little bit more water. And then again, the ice block returns and nothing that you have done pays off.

The continuity and omnipresence of the drying ice metaphor were clear throughout my fieldwork. On several occasions, Special Forces members would tell me how they had to go to the same territories again and again, to do the same job, without actually seeing any change. The police officers find themselves in a dilemma. On one hand, the police officers want to do their jobs, but feel desperately unable to do it. On the other, if they did not do it, the ice would grow even faster. Police officers are trapped in the drying ice dilemma, and are pushed to emotional edges, which has concrete spatial consequences.

The opening vignette of this article illustrates the emotional and spatial dynamics of the drying ice dilemma. The officer complained about the boys being out of custody quickly and that he would need to do the same work with them again soon. These kinds of situations are not isolated phenomena, but repeated everyday realities. I have observed multiple settings where ordinary police officers deal with the same suspects several times. Arrested, brought to prison or to children homes, released and back at the station a few days later for the exact same charges. At that same time, those officers that undertake the investigative desk work in the police department have to rummage through piles of case files that grow each day without really solving many of them.

The last statement by the police officer in the vignette, that beating would be the ‘only way’ of doing ‘at least something’, is as devastating as it is insightful. The officer expressed the essence of the drying ice dilemma, with the fact that the boys would just be taken to a children’s home and be released the next day. In his opinion, there was nothing he could do to prevent them stealing in the neighbourhood again. In other words, he was enxugando gelo. This illustrates how the drying ice dilemma pushes the police officer to his emotional edge and makes him an edgeworker.

As has been shown with the edgework concept when linked to criminal activity, humiliation is the direct emotional certainty that edgeworkers often encounter. The transgressive act can configure a compensation for this humiliation and channel it through another set of emotions grounded in rage and fury (Lyng, 2005b: 29). Much as edgeworkers from economically privileged groups engage in dangerous motorcycling to escape the dullness of everyday life (Lyng, 1998), the rage-driven activity creates a situation in which ‘losing control of oneself, has the immediate consequence of imploding time and space distinctions’ (Lyng, 2005b: 29). Many criminal and violent acts in urban settings can be seen as an escape from a humiliation experienced in everyday life (Hayward, 2004: 165). The humiliation is then channelled through rage or other emotional states and can allow the edgeworker to overcome this emotional pandemonium (Katz, 1988: 312).

The police officer from the opening vignette tries to take control within a micro situation while he is unable to change the ontologically insecure and disordered world of the wider public security situation in Rio. While this does not justify his actions, it does make them palpable and understandable in the sense of a ‘criminological verstehen’ (Ferrell, 1998). It is embedded in both the structural conditions of Rio’s urban conflict and the phenomenology of the police officer’s emotional worlds marked by the drying ice dilemma. By the use of violence, he attempts to regain a bit of the control he has lost, or perhaps has never had, over the general public security dynamics.

This emotional reaction to the drying ice dilemma also has effects on the spatial components of police work. A police station is divided into a publicly accessible front part and a restricted area in the back for police officers. There is a territorial border that divides the station into an accessible public and inaccessible secret space. In other words, the police produce their territoriality in different ways in the front and in the back of the station (Goffman, 1959). While police officers perform a publicly visible role in the front, the behaviour in the private backspace in police stations is expressed differently (Fyfe, 1992: 477–479). In the example considered here, the relational and emotional component of producing territory comes to the fore (Raffestin, 2012: 124). Driven by the emotions of the drying ice dilemma, police territoriality is here materialised in a space of secrecy. In this sense, the emotions provoked by the drying ice dilemma, the feeling of losing control, influence the production of police territory in a relational way where the emotions are as important as are the structural components. The loss of control is therefore not only emotionally but also spatially felt, and it is expressed, shaped and extended beyond the professional work place of police officers as we will see in the following section.

Vocation and exposure: Rio’s police and their everyday edges

The drying ice dilemma is paired with other narratives exposed in the following interview with a CORE member,

You know what happens? A lot of people say that something must be done. But very few really have the courage to come here and do it. If you really count the people – even among police officers – who go into favelas to confront an enemy when they fire rifle shots at you, these are very few. … Because everyone has a certain fear of dying. Some have it a lot less. I can say that here in the CORE, in the sector I work in, this fear is very low. But no one wants to die.

The following interview extract, where a CORE member explained to me how much they have to risk their lives in doing their work, may help to answer these questions. When I approached the issue of why he thinks he is doing his work – despite the fact that he had been close to getting fatally shot so many times – he started to search for words, his eyes filled with tears and he started to cry, saying with a faltering voice: ‘We say [pause] … it’s our vocation. It’s because of that … [pause]. We like to do that’. The police officer’s emotional breakdown makes us understand that he comprehends his police work, despite all the difficulties, as his duty and as an inner vocation, that fills his work routine with sense – with meaning as ‘an ongoing, everyday process of sense-making’ (Ferrell, 2013: 258).

The breakdown had filled the situation with emotions and laid bare the officer’s pure human condition while he was deeply moved by the activities he carries out on an everyday basis. He moved from one emotional state (talking about his daily routines) to the other (breaking down) and uncovered his emotional metamorphose (Katz, 1999). The situation opens up a world of fragility and emotions that profoundly influences – beside the above-mentioned aspects of racial profiling, militarism and hypermasculinity – the work of the civil police. More than that, the emotions attribute meaning to the police practises and enhances our awareness of how deeply involved the police officers are with their daily routines. The drying ice dilemma, however, damages this involvement and produces a humiliating factor that influences and questions the raison d’être of the CORE member in the interview. The police officer experiences the powerful force of drying ice on a bodily level, and the negotiation he must undertake to go out there, time and again, and dry ice.

The vocation of being a police officer therefore produces spaces of exposure. Police officers experience their daily routines in Rio de Janeiro as extremely dangerous. They feel unsafe when they are at work, go home or commute around the city with their families. This makes them embody a 24-hour preparedness, as one of the CORE members once said, ‘Even when I go to the toilet I take my gun with me. I am always armed’. These are not merely empty claims. I remember one morning when I arrived very early at the civil police headquarters called the ‘Police City’ in Rio’s North Zone. That morning, a CORE officer prepared to go home after his 24-hour shift. This tall man with a hoody had two huge, shimmering silver guns in his hands and put one in the front and the other in the back of his trousers, to make his way home ‘safely’.

The possibility of death not only accompanies the officers during their working hours, but is also present in their private lives as spaces of exposure. As an example, consider the following two situations in which two of the CORE agents died after I finished my fieldwork. The first one was shot on duty during a mission of the Special Forces in the favela of Jacarezinho in August 2017 next to the headquarters. The second one, however, was shot off duty. At the end of 2016, the officer was on his way home from a dinner with his girlfriend when five armed assailants approached his car in a dark and narrow street. As he always carried his firearm, he knew that if they discovered that he was a police officer, he would certainly die. He made the first move and started shooting immediately. He killed one of the attackers, but had no chance to survive the many bullets that perforated his body.

The drying ice dilemma poses such emotional challenges to the police officers, because they comprehend their job as a vocation that extends beyond their daily working routines. Furthermore, this turns them into even more vulnerable subjects in terms of their life outside of work. On one hand, the police produce territories of exposure through their work when they ‘go into favelas to confront an enemy’. On the other, the city turns into a space of exposure for them outside of their daily working routines through the embodiment of their vocation. Territoriality as a system of relations between the physical and social environment (Raffestin, 2012: 129), here appears in the ways in which the emotional states of police officers (the social) define their movements within the city’s urban conflict (the physical). We here see how the activity of the police officers themselves, their acting as police in and outside of their working hours and – more importantly – in the spaces ‘provided to them’, produces territoriality (Raffestin, 2012: 124).

This section has shown why the emotions invoked by the drying ice dilemma are so defining for police in Rio de Janeiro, as the officers understand their work as a vocation. In what follows, I explore how the work of the Special Forces is best understood with the edgework concept as a strategy to compensate for and escape from this dilemma.

‘We entertain ourselves’: Pleasure, excitement and war in Rio de Janeiro

A leaked video which was nationally broadcast by the Brazilian news show Fantástico in 2012 features scenes from a mission with a CORE helicopter. A police unit has spotted the drug dealer Matemático in a car in the North Zone of Rio. The helicopter roars above the highly populated area, following its target which rapidly moves through the narrow alleys of the city’s outskirts. The police officers’ voices are heard through their radios followed by automatic rifle fire. The images and dynamics from the video are reminiscent of war-scenes, similar to those of the released WikiLeaks video showing the US military shooting at a van and killing Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen (McGreal, 2010). ³

Most pressing, however, are the ways in which – and more importantly in what kind and tone of voice – the officers communicate with each other. For a while their voices go on in a tranquil and controlled manner. But then, suddenly, they start to yell at each other with excited screams, with a high pitched, almost hysterical sound they exhaustingly shriek ‘shoot, shoot, shoot’, only interrupted by the gun fire that kills the drug trafficker. In the following interview extract, a CORE officer narrates what it feels like to go on such a mission with his team,

The people [his CORE colleagues] here are like me. They are here because they like it. What we earn here [pause] no, is not the reason, will not cover our risk. Will not cover what we do here … it is difficult to explain, it is the action, adrenaline, liking to do what is right. … As I said, we are at home, if we hear anything, if we see there is a major operation within which there will be a lot of gunfire, we are leaving our home, we come here, put on our clothes and we go, because we like it. It is not that we like to get shot, no! … We like the confrontation, the togetherness of our team, arriving in the community [favela], dominating that community, arresting people and fighting. We like that. … This is it, perfect. You know. In reality first comes the conviction that we do the right thing … and the majority here likes the adrenaline, with pleasure, we even, I will even risk to say this in an abusive way: we entertain ourselves.

It is clearly noticeable how the officer talks about the ways in which they enter a ‘community’. The officer clearly asserts that they are doing what they ‘like’ to do. They also do something they know how to do. Something they are trained and skilled to do. Said differently, it attributes to them a notion of control over very specific circumstances: the ‘domination’ of a community in a situation that contains danger, insecurity and uncertainty, namely the wider picture of the urban conflict, which they are unable to change. In this particular case, the Special Forces officers are looking for the adrenaline rush and their highly skilled job to regain a bit of the control they lose when they are trying so desperately to dry the ice. In other words, their agency is an act of consciously and controlled loss of control in order to experience a rush of adrenaline and ‘to take control’ (Ferrell et al., 2015: 74).

Per contra, the most striking part in the interview is how the police officer emphasises the feelings of pleasure and excitement as essential aspects of what members of the Special Forces do. They are ‘entertaining’ themselves, while they are performing their daily routines. These reflections point towards behaviours that seem to stem from an existential need to survive, a crucial element in the edgework approach as ‘the participants in edgework perceive that there is a direct link between survival capacities and the survival outcome’ (Lyng, 1990: 873). This, in turn, gives meaning to police work within the Brazilian public security context and allows us to understand their activity as acts of survival and an escape from the drying ice dilemma.

To fathom how the CORE officers as edgeworkers have direct implications for the production of territoriality, there is another significant emotional element at work. Special Forces narratives about the classification of their activities have, in the end, crucial spatial dimensions and produce some parts of the city, as spaces of war. One of the CORE members said about their team,

In the SOTE we are only 37 in total. And really, we are functioning like brothers. Sure, there are some conflicts, disputes, discussions … but we are one family. Everyone protects everyone, everyone helps each other … everyone looks after the life of the other … because we only have us right? If we can’t count on each other, we can’t count on anyone.

Although war is clearly something horrific, many soldiers, once they have come home from the battlefields, miss spending time in war zones (Junger, 2011: 233). Soldiers involved in war have shown in accounts how even the most cruel scenes hold very specific attractions and can even be ‘captivating, especially for those whose lives are experienced as dull, unexciting, unfulfilling, meaningless and solitary’ (Cottee, 2011: 456). Fighting can become something that gives meaning and purpose although it is highly destructive and may, in many ways, be ‘fighting for its own sake’ (Gray, 1998: 52–53). For those involved in it, war can provide many things simultaneously. It makes the daily trivia visible and helps to overcome it; it provides purpose, and a reason to live; and works as an ‘exciting elixir’ (Hedges, 2002: 3).

In the case of the CORE officers, these elements are present, as the Special Forces experience their work as necessary, find pleasure and excitement within their daily battles and in the performance of combat. They ‘entertain’ themselves by doing what they like to do. In addition, ‘the delight of comradeship’ (Gray, 1998: 28–29), so important for soldiers in battle, comes to the fore in the narratives of the CORE officers who consider themselves as ‘one family’. The CORE officers perceive themselves in a similar way to the platoon in Afghanistan: united, trusting only themselves as a group, and feeling an almost desperate fulfilment in battle as the life outside can exhibit despair arising from the daily attempt to dry the ice. As the CORE officer in the interview says: ‘We like the confrontation, the togetherness of our team … and fighting’. The war-like activity, and the Special Forces routines, turn into an experience at the edge and serve as an effective leverage to make the drying ice dilemma less humiliating, less painful and more bearable.

These war-narratives expose how the CORE members regard their police work emotionally and in practice as war. Consequently, the officers also identify and produce certain neighbourhoods in the city as spaces of war. The ways in which the CORE officer in the interview above narrates how his team enters favelas, and likes to ‘dominate’ and to fight in them, are the very means through which police territoriality is produced by waging war. Urban order-making in these communities is here produced through the appropriation of territories, through the territorial marking and reclaiming of space by the police activity within it (Raffestin, 2012: 124). The spatial edges of Rio, in this case the many favelas and peripheral neighbourhoods, are in this sense territorialised spaces of war by the emotional edges of the Special Forces. This comes at the cost of producing Rio de Janeiro as a city with such a violent urban conflict and therefore as a bordered space.

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that police officers’ emotions contribute fundamentally to the ways in which urban order is produced in Rio de Janeiro. I have explored the police as edgeworkers and shown across three instances, how the emotional has concrete spatial effects. The three elements must be understood as different but interrelated aspects of how the emotions of the police contribute to police territoriality and add necessary spatial components to the edgework concept. Considering the role of emotions in the production of police territoriality and complementing edgework with a spatial component leads to a better comprehension of the ways in which the police shapes and is shaped by space.

In the first part, I have shown how the urban conflict creates an emotional world defined in the article as the drying ice dilemma that officers sense as a loss of control. On one hand, the dilemma undermines the possibilities for the police officers to do their jobs. On the other, the drying ice dilemma allows us to conceive how emotions have materialised effects on the practices of producing police territoriality in the city. On its micro scale within a police station, it produces the spaces of secrecy within which the police officers work outside the view and control of public accountability.

Second, and to get to the core of the extent to which the drying ice dilemma represents an issue for the police officers in their everyday routines, I explored how approaching their jobs as a vocation produces spaces of exposure. The vocation and the exposure are two sides of the same coin. The officers have to navigate through these spaces of exposure by dealing with their conditions at work and the many dangers they encounter when both on- and off duty.

Finally, I have shown how pleasure and excitement as components of edgework are strategies to find ways to re-take control and to overcome the drying ice dilemma which produces emotional and spatial strategies of war. The CORE officers’ emotional universe is comparable with the narratives of soldiers in war zones. The war-like activities themselves reward them with meaning to compensate for the dilemma. It is noteworthy that this produces the territorialisation of spaces of war in the many favelas and outskirts of Rio.

Taken together, these three elements comprise an emotional approach to the production of police territoriality. The empirical data presented in this article are best understood through a relational take on territoriality as the ‘ensemble of mediated relationships of individuals or social groups’ (Klauser, 2012: 110), what Raffestin (2012: 129) conceptualised ‘exteriority (the physical environment) and alterity (the social environment)’. I have shown how the urban conflict in Rio as the exteriority, and the inner emotional life of the police officers as alterity, are mutually interrelated. Territory is then produced by the human activity within it, that is in this case, the police officers as edgeworkers and their emotional edging and its consequential spatial expressions. Yet, these emotions are produced by the conditions that are immanent to Rio’s public security complex. In other words, one does not exist without the other. Rather, the exteriority and alterity in Rio are interdependent and have to be thought in relation to each other. Said differently, the urban conflict produces the drying ice dilemma, and the drying ice dilemma produces the urban conflict: it shapes the police as edgeworkers who find strategies to overcome the dilemma, and who by doing so produce the conditions of the urban conflict.

Coming back to the opening vignette of this article, it can serve to demonstrate how the emotional and spatial edges of police officers produce a vicious circle of violence in Rio’s urban conflict. By the use of violence, police officers try to re-establish a moral order that in their view has been lost (Fassin, 2013a: 106). The specificity of this moral order in Rio comprises the police officers’ daily struggles with the ice block and the attempt to dry the ice. It is flanked with the emotional component and the ways in which they perceive their position in society as one that lacks respect, a decent salary and safety. The drying ice experience is felt as humiliating as the officer’s vocation is put in relation to a never-ending spiral of not being able to and still wanting ‘to do at least something’.

This can lead towards acts of violence within a civil police station as officers can use violence to compensate frustration and anger (Garmany, 2014: 1250). Here, the humiliation is channelled through the officers as edgeworkers and their rage-filled beating of children serves as a means to compensate the emotional edge of the drying ice dilemma. Similarly, the Special Forces escape from the dilemma as edgeworkers performing war-like activities that pump adrenaline through their veins, produce pleasure and excitement and create them the possibility to do what they are highly skilled and trained to do. Taking these assertions seriously and pairing them with the statements of the CORE officers indicate that their war-like battle serves a very distinct purpose. It compensates for the daily failure of police officers, and, most importantly, it gives meaning, and grants control where control has been lost. In essence, the war-like activity itself offers the CORE members meaning and entangles them in a fatal vicious circle. This work at the edge, however, encompasses spatial dimensions by producing spaces of secrecy, spaces of exposure and spaces of war. Dramatically, these emotional and spatial dimensions of police work and violence affect black populations more than any other group and racism has both emotional and spatial effects in and for police work (Alves, 2018).

With the theoretical posture of a scalar approach (Glück and Low, 2017), combining sociospatial thought and ethnographic methods, I have been able to start from the bodily experienced emotions of police officers to say something about how the city is produced as a bordered space. The insights gained from these considerations advocate for more research that looks behind the scenes and into the immanence of not only public security rationales, but first and foremost, at police officers themselves. The police are often rightly criticised and held responsible for the violence they commit and the ways in which borders are enacted, enforced and configured within the urban. Very much in the sense of a public anthropology of the police (Fassin, 2013c, 2015; Mutsaers et al., 2015), however, there is a need for engaged scholarship that goes beyond much needed criticism and opens the lens for the police officer’s emotional entanglements, their bodily experiences, and their intrinsic motivations, fears, passions and sufferings. We can only come towards a better understanding of how police shape space and vice versa, if we dive more into the immediacy of what moves police officers themselves. This is even more pressing in Brazil and Rio de Janeiro where far right populists, currently in power, promote more police lethality as the way forward to tackle criminality. Yet, this strategy will push the police and the city even further towards emotional and spatial edges.