Policing Potential Violence

Abstract

A series of Supreme Court decisions in the past 40 years transformed the legal standard for police use of force, centering officers’ assessments of a suspect’s potential for violence. Using the oral arguments from three landmark SCOTUS cases, I trace the development of a legal discourse of potential violence. Using Judith Butler and Robert Gooding-Williams’ frame of a “racial field of vision,” this paper juxtaposes the colorblind legal narrative of potential violence with cultural narratives of race that mark Black masculinity with the signifiers of threat and criminality. I argue that the intersection of legal and cultural narratives of potential violence is an important site for understanding the disproportionate use of police violence against Black men and boys.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Seth Mydans, “The Police Verdict: Los Angeles Policemen Acquitted in Taped Beating,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/30/us/the-police-verdict-losangeles-policemen-acquitted-in-taped-beating.html (accessed April 30, 1992).

2 Robert W. Balch, “The Police Personality: Fact or Fiction?” The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 63, no. 1 (1972): 106–119; Carroll Seron, Joseph Pereira and Jean Kovath, “Judging Police Misconduct: ‘Street-level’ versus Professional Policing,” Law & Society Review, 38, no. 4 (2004): 665–710.

3 Jennifer L. Eberhardt et al., “Seeing Black: Race, Crime, and Visual Processing,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, no. 6 (2004): 876–893; Justin Nix et al., “A Bird’s Eye View of Civilians Killed by Police in 2015: Further Evidence of Implicit Bias,” Criminology & Public Policy 16, no 1 (2017): 309–340; Yara Mekawi and Konrad Bresin, “Is the Evidence from Racial Bias Shooting Task Studies a Smoking Gun? Results from a meta-analysis,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 61 (2015): 120–130.

4 “Retreat: The Supreme Court and the New Police,” Harvard Law Review 122, no. 6 (2009): 1706–1727; Rachel A. Harmon, “The Problem of Policing,” Michigan Law Review 110, no. 5 (2012): 761–817; Nirej Sekhon, “Purpose, Policing, and the Fourth Amendment,” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 107, no. 1 (2017): 65–130.

5 Robert Cover, Narrative, Violence, and the Law: The Essays of Robert Cover, ed. Martha Minow, Michael Ryan, and Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 10.

6 Judith Butler, “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” in Reading Rodney King: Reading Urban Uprising ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (New York: Routledge, 1993).

7 Kim Lonsway and Michelle Wood, “Men, Women, and Police Excessive Force: A Tale of Two Genders,” National Center for Women & Policing (2002). Throughout this paper I use exclusively masculine pronouns to refer to officers. This is primarily because all of the officers in the specific cases I mention are men, and secondarily because studies have shown that male officers face accusations of excessive force or brutality at a 23:1 ratio of female officers. Police violence is not exclusive to men– as perpetrators nor as victims – but though this paper does not analyze questions of gender, it is, ultimately, focused only on the masculine manifestations of police violence.

8 Devon W. Carbado, “(E)racing the Fourth Amendment,” Michigan Law Review 100, no. 5 (2002): 968. Carbado uses this language of the Supreme Court “reifying and obfuscating” race.

9 Osagie K. Obasogie and Zachary Newman, “Constitutional Interpretation without Judges,” Virginia Law Review 105, no. 2 (2019): 425–448; Carbado, “(E)racing the Fourth Amendment,” Michigan Law Review; Geoffrey P. Alpert and William C. Smith, “How Reasonable is the Reasonable Man?: Police and Excessive Force,” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 85, no. 2 (1994): 481–501.

10 Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985): 32. In her dissent in Tennessee v. Garner, Justice O’Connor writes that “the Court’s opinion sweeps broadly to adopt an entirely new standard for the constitutionality of the use of deadly force to apprehend fleeing felons.”

11 Abraham N. Tennanbaum, “The Influence of the ‘Garner’ Decision on Police Use of Deadly Force,” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 85, no. 1 (1994): 241; Thomas Y. Davies, “The Supreme Court Giveth and the Supreme Court Taketh Away: The Century of Fourth Amendment ‘Search and Seizure’ Doctrine,” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 100, no. 3 (2010): 933–1042; Jesus Alonso, “How Police Culture Affects the Way Police Departments View and Utilize Deadly Force Policies Under the Fourth Amendment,” Arizona Law Review 60 (2018): 987–1012.

12 Jeffrey A. Fagan and Alexis D. Campbell, “Race and Reasonableness in Police Killings,” Boston Law Review 100 (2020): 951–1016; Abraham N. Tennanbaum, “The Influence of the ‘Garner’ Decision on Police Use of Deadly Force.” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 85, no. 1 (1994): 241; Cynthia Lee, “Reasonableness with Teeth: The Future of Fourth Amendment Reasonableness Analysis,” Mississippi Law Journal 81 (2012): 1–51; Sherry F. Colb, “The Qualitative Dimension of Fourth Amendment ‘Reasonableness’,” Columbia Law Review 98, no. 7 (1998): 1642–1725.

13 Devon W. Carbado, “(E)racing the Fourth Amendment,” Michigan Law Review 100, no. 5 (2002): 968.

14 Tennessee v. Garner, 471 US 1 (1985), Oral Argument, Oyez, www.oyez.org/cases/1984/83-1035: 19–20.

15 Tennessee v. Garner, 471 US 1 (1985): 20–21.

16 Tennessee v. Garner, Oral Argument: 17

17 Tennessee v. Garner, Oral Argument: 28–29.

18 Ibid., 29.

19 Ibid., 24.

20 Tennessee v. Garner, 20.

21 Graham v. Connor, 490 US 386 (1989), Oral Argument, Oyez, www.oyez.org/cases/1988/87-6571: 8.

22 Graham v. Connor, Oral Argument: 26–28.

23 Ibid., 13.

24 Ibid., 17.

25 Graham v. Connor, Oral Argument: 46.

26 Ibid.

27 Scott v. Harris, 550 US 372 (2007), Oral Argument, Oyez, www.oyez.org/cases/2006/05-1631: 44.

28 Scott v. Harris, Oral Argument: 53.

29 Caren Myers Morrison, “Body Camera Obscura: The Semiotics of Police Video,” Georgia State University College of Law, 2016.

30 Scott v. Harris, 550 US 372 (2007): 378.

31 Scott v. Harris, Oral Argument: 31.

32 Ibid., 40.

33 Scott v. Harris: 390.

34 Butler, “Endangered/Endangering,”17.

35 Kimberlé Crenshaw and Gary Peller, “Reel Time/ Real Justice,” in Gooding-Williams, Reading Rodney King, 62.

36 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 91.

37 Robert Gooding-Williams, “Look, A Negro!,” in Gooding-Williams, Reading Rodney King, 166.

38 Patricia J. Williams, “The Rules of the Game,” in Gooding-Williams, Reading Rodney King, 52.

39 Franklin E. Zimring, When Police Kill (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017).

40 Paul Butler, Chokehold: Policing Black Men (New York: The New Press, 2017),

41 L. Song Richardson and Phillip Atiba Goff, “Implicit Racial Bias in Public Defender Triage,” The Yale Law Journal 122, no. 8 (2013): 2628.

42 Charles R. Epp, Steven Maynard-Moody, and Donald Haider-Markel, Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014).

43 See Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, eds, Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (New York: SUNY Press, 2007).

44 Mydans, “The Police Verdict”.

45 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Isaac Balbus, The Dialectics of Legal Repression: Black Rebels Before the American Criminal Courts (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1977).