‘The border is calling’: cross-border crime, police militarisation and benevolent policing in the visual-discursive framing of border police recruitment adverts

Scholars from Border Criminology have focused increasingly not just on how the systems that police global (im)mobility are constructed but also who is tasked with policing the border. There has, similarly, been some academic focus on the significance of police recruitment adverts in projecting discourses about policing both to potential recruits and in the broader strategic (re)imagining of the police role through the dual framing of both community orientated objectives and more militarised forms of policing. However, this has not been expanded to materials and campaigns aimed at recruiting border policing personnel. This paper addresses this gap by analysing recruitment materials for border policing roles in the UK, USA, EU and Canada. Drawing on visual criminology and multi-modal discourse analysis, I argue that recruitment adverts frame border police agents as heroic crime-fighters and guardians of the nation, while appealing to a more benevolent form of border policing as a humanitarian practice of saving vulnerable migrants and facilitating legitimate travel. Border policing is presented as law enforcement career that enacts nationalistic sentiments of protection and pride. Extending the ‘thin blue line’ metaphor, border policing is represented as protecting the ‘first blue line’ - where policing the border is literally and symbolically presented as a battleground between the nation and the ‘other’ through visual representations emphasise militarisation and crime-fighting activities such as patrolling borderlands, searching at ports of entry and making arrests.