From State Warfare to State Welfare: Family Values in Leonard Freed's Police Work (1980)

This article examines Leonard Freed's 1980 Police Work, a photobook that documents the activities of the New York City Police Department from 1973 to 1979. It contextualizes the photobook within this liminal decade after the fullness of the civil rights movement and before the rise of austerity politics. The photobook, I argue, produces a visual repertoire of policing that resolves the crisis of legitimacy faced by the NYPD during this decade, remaking the meaning of the police in the public imaginary from an agent of state warfare into an institution of state welfare. Far from simply creating photographs of policing as community care, Police Work engages in a process by which police violence is visually recoded as police benevolence. The visual politics of the family are central to this process by which we are made not to see police brutality, even when it is placed vividly on display. Ultimately, I show how, even as the camera moves between public and private, Police Work produces an ideology of separate spheres in which the expansion of policing can find its rationalization. Ultimately, this article reveals Police Work as a site through which to examine the intimate, yet often disavowed, entanglements between the domestic and the carceral.