This contribution analyzes continuity and change in the representations of Sinti and Roma used by the police in German-speaking countries over several centuries. Drawing on iconographic studies of visual antiziganism, it examines images produced by the police as an expression of a state securitization practice. Whereas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the threat of punishment and the exercise of state power was visualized as a spectacle directly within the image itself, this changed in the nineteenth century with the emergence of photography as a police technology. Between 1850 and 1937, a development can be traced from photographic experimentation to internationally standardized photographs of (suspected) criminals. This contribution concludes that the previously open threat of punishment against Sinti and Roma persisted in the more subtle form of criminalization and the threat of social exclusion that this entailed. It further shows that the state institutions used the images to portray themselves as powerful and strong, initially directly through displays of state power within the image itself and later through the exercise of the power to define how the images were framed.