Two processes of dehumanization: an in-depth study of racial biases in real-life officer-involved shootings of black citizens

ABSTRACT

Officer-involved shootings (OIS) of people of color concern fundamental societal issues, including race, violence, and policing. While scholars have gathered extensive insights on contextual circumstances of OIS, the unfolding of encounters still remains a black box, and research is still debating whether racialized biases actually matter for shootings. To study this question, this article discusses findings from an in-depth analysis of real-life OIS as they unfold. It triangulates video footage with document data to analyze the role of racial biases and situational interaction in shootings. It compares police shootings of black and white citizens, as well as a police-citizen encounter that did not end in a shooting. Findings suggest two intertwined processes of dehumanization contribute to the shootings of black citizens, one operating on the cultural and one on the situational level. The article contributes to research on race and racism, violence, police use of lethal force, and sociological theory.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• police
• violence
• symbolic racism
• situational interaction
• video data analysis

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank Elijah Anderson for hosting me during my one-year research stay at Yale University, during which I conducted this research, for our many fascinating exchanges about sociological research, the sociology of race and racism, and for his feedback on this project and article. I would like to thank the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for funding my research stay at Yale. I thank the anonymous reviewers for their truly constructive comments. Further, I would like to thank (in alphabetical order) Randall Collins, Nicolas Legewie, Demar Lewis, Melanie Lorek, Julia Rodriguez, and Kalfani Turè for their helpful feedback. I also thank the participants of Elijah Anderson’s “Workshop in Urban Ethnography” at Yale University and the participants of the Panel “Racism and Resistance” at the 2020 Eastern Sociological Society Annual Meeting in Philadelphia for their comments. This article was partially supported by Open Access funds of the University of Erfurt.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Declarations

Funding: Fritz Thyssen Foundation (Travel Grant for research stay at Yale University)

Conflicts of interest/Competing interests: Not applicable.

Availability of data and material: All data and material are available online.

Code availability: Not applicable.

Notes

1 I use the term “citizen” here, as it is commonly used in OIS literature. While not all people interacting with police may hold citizenship, alternative terms either also implicitly refer to immigration status (“resident”) or rely strongly on the police perspective (“suspect”, “civilian”).

2 Name changed throughout this article for privacy reasons (see Appendix B).

3 Data suggests all involved officers but one (the officer who shot Philando) were Caucasian. All officers but one were male-presenting. The female officer made the call on the Turner case, but was subsequently much less involved in the arrest than her male colleagues. Thus, more research needs to assess whether cognitive schema also apply across officer race, as well as officer and victim gender.

4 Officers in three of the four shootings faced prior disciplinary issues (see Associated Press 2017; Dupuy 2017; Wu 2019). Data did not indicate previous openly racist comments or behaviors by officers involved in the here-discussed cases.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation: [Travel Grant for research stay at Yale University].