Municipal Law Enforcement and Its Transmissions

The arrival of police radio inaugurated a vast and punitive new media ecology. Between the 1920s and the 1950s the installation and implementation of police radio systems – now ubiquitous and utterly naturalised – in towns and cities across the USA restructured the practice of policing and the experience of being policed. These processes radically revised the social, psycho-geographic and spatiotemporal relations unfolding amid the new medium’s localised atmospheres of broadcast, reception and swift weaponised response. Image makers working in a range of media, including painters and news photographers, operated within this atmosphere. Positing police radio as a vital and violent representational infrastructure, this article tracks its technological reordering of municipal space as tactical policed space, both as this space was given to appear in Municipal Law Enforcement, a large oil painting created circa 1950 by Kansas City police officer Charles M. ‘Pat’ Murray for his department, and as this painting was reproduced, and its signal thereby amplified photographically, both locally and nationally by daily newspapers.