Chapter 5: Affective Influences on Decision-Making in Policing

This chapter examines and discusses how decision-making in policing is a dynamic or moving phenomenon. These ebbs and flows of such decision-making motility also seem affectively charged regarding how decision-making can be a felt experience. Through a combination of personal–professional anecdotes, phenomenologically inspired case studies and a review of relevant scholarship from several academic and professional fields, this chapter weaves a pedagogical narrative using several examples. Prominent themes that emerged while researching and writing this chapter include feeling felt, (mis)attunement, experiences of (dis)trust and the need to rebalance pedagogies and practices predicated on gnostic knowledge with more pathic ways of knowing.