‘It’s not OK to shoot and kill Americans’: families’ perceptions of police use of lethal force in the United States

ABSTRACT

This article examines the police use of lethal force against American citizens from the perspective of families affected by these deaths. It is based on qualitative research undertaken with family members who lost loved ones after police contact in the United States. The article examines how organizational practices and cultures are perceived to enable the use of lethal force, and how multiple narratives are employed to legitimize its use in the aftermath of a citizen’s death. It considers how procedural justice might provide a framework that enables an understanding of how these deaths are perceived by sections of US society. Key findings are that families believe police uses lethal force with relative impunity due to an aggressive mindset and a lack of effective regulation. The article further finds that symbolic legitimation strategies reward officers for using lethal force, and denigrate the deceased enabling these deaths to be classified as justified.

KEYWORDS:

• Police use of lethal force
• procedural justice
• militarization
• legitimacy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Michael Brown was shot dead by officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson (MI) in 2014 sparking widespread disorder. The incident is seen to be the catalyst to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and an increased focus on police-related deaths (Dunham and Petersen 2017).

2. Financial settlements are commonly used in the aftermath of these deaths. As the result of bringing civil cases, families receive payments in return for signing non-disclosure agreements which prevent them from talking about aspects of the case which the PD or DA would rather not make public (see, for example, Gaines and Kappeler 2011; Marcus 2016; Zimring 2017).

3. Officers in training academies received a median of 60 h of training on firearms, 51 h on self-defense, and 8 h on mediation skills/conflict management (Reaves 2009).

4. Rushin (2017) notes that consent decrees have been used by the DoJ as a way of enabling federal intervention into local policing in the US since 1994. He further notes (2017, 68) that such decrees give federal authorities the power to ‘define what constitutes legitimate policing’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the US–UK Fulbright Commission [Elon University Teaching and Research Award 2016-1];