Christina Aushana

Preliminary abstract: A rise in televisual images of police misconduct and police violence replayed on broadcast television and re-shared on social media websites has brought police training under scrutiny by both academics and practitioners. This dissertation fieldwork proposal is a turn toward an interdisciplinary engagement with police training in a time of ever-increasing speculation and critique concerning such spectacles of police violence. In response to calls from both community activists and social science researchers to make policing answerable to growing concerns about police violence and use of lethal force, police departments are turning to the use of virtual training simulators in an effort to better train their officers. Therefore, virtual training simulations for police officers are becoming a more ubiquitous technology in contemporary police academy classrooms. Utilizing an experimental design that melds collaborative community research with performance and theater strategies, this project will consider how training simulations and police praxis more broadly can be understood by developing an immersive virtual training scenario program that is scripted from the lived experienced of communities of color across some of San Diego’s most policed neighborhoods, including City Heights and El Cajon in San Diego County, California.