5 - Training Police Accusers

Summary

Frequently serving as accusers, or as facilitators for other accusers, Northwest Mounted Police officers were coached on how and when to delimit social disorder. The fifth Chapter highlights examples of their training to perform as accusers (or to facilitate other accusers) around theatres that categorized criminal acts and actors. Here officers were instructed in both ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ governance (as per Bentham), with lessons derived from paramilitary and police science disciplines. Recruits learned how to follow commands to deploy violence, and how to use discretion in efforts to prevent dissent. With inspiration from the Royal Irish Constabulary, police officers also learned how to become criminal accusers by habit. That training, with its colonial biases clear, is detectable from a paradigmatic example of police responses to the first death of a Northwest Mounted constable in 1882. Located within a settler assumptive universe supporting dispossessing visions of social order, one glimpses how police training in this case focused accusations on Indigenous persons.