Of the seventeen dead, nine were Black people killed by the police, the National Guard, or White vigilantes.34 Are these deaths somehow less shocking than those of White people?
Yet—how loudly White people denounce prejudice when it is directed against them, and how quietly they accept it as it continually bears down on people of color. They indignantly point out the contradiction when those who object to prejudice employ it, and all the while adroitly ignore their own complicity in the institutions of White supremacy.
James Baldwin, again in his “Letter from Harlem,” imagines the predicament of a White policeman patrolling the ghetto: “He too believes in good intentions and is astounded and offended when they are not taken for the deed. He has never, himself, done anything for which to be hated.… But,” Baldwin asks, “which of us has?”35
The Basics
We are encouraged to think of acts of police violence more or less in isolation, to consider them as unique, unrelated occurrences. We ask ourselves always, “What went wrong?” and for answers we look to the seconds, minutes, or hours before the incident. Perhaps this leads us to fault the individual officer, perhaps it leads us to excuse him. Such thinking, derived as it is from legal reasoning, does not take us far beyond the case in question. And thus, such inquiries are rarely very illuminating.
The shooting of Oscar Grant, the beating of Rodney King, the arrest of Marquette Frye, the killing of Arthur McDuffie, and any of the less noted atrocities I’ve mentioned here in passing—any of these may be explained in terms of the actions and attitudes of the particular officers at the scene, the events preceding the violence (including the actions of the victims), and the circumstances in which the officers found themselves. Indeed, juries and police administrators have frequently found it possible to excuse police violence with such explanations.
The unrest that followed these incidents, however, cannot be explained in such narrow terms. To understand the rioting, one must consider a whole range of related issues, including the conditions of life in the Black community, the role of the police in relation to that community, and the history and pattern of similar abuses.
If we are to understand the phenomenon of police brutality, we must get beyond particular cases. We can better understand the actions of individual police officers if we understand the institution of which they are a part. That institution, in turn, can best be examined if we have an understanding of its origins, its social function, and its relation to larger systems like capitalism and White supremacy.
Let’s begin with the basics: violence is an inherent part of policing. The police represent the most direct means by which the state imposes its will on the citizenry.36 When persuasion, indoctrination, moral pressure, and incentive measures all fail—there are the police. In the field of social control, police are specialists in violence. They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force. With varying degrees of subtlety, this colors their every action. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent.
Defining Brutality
The study of police brutality faces any number of methodological barriers, not the least of which is the problem of defining it. There is no standard definition, nor is there one way of measuring force and excessive force. As a consequence, different studies produce very different results, and these results are difficult to compare. Kenneth Adams, writing for the National Institute of Justice, notes:
Because there is no standard methodology for measuring use of force, estimates can vary considerably on strictly computational grounds. Different definitions of force and different definitions of police-public interactions will yield different rates.… In particular, broad definitions of use of force, such as those that include grabbing or handcuffing a suspect, will produce higher rates than more conservative definitions.… Broad definitions of police-public “interactions,” such as calls for assistance, which capture variegated requests for assistance, lead to low rates of use of force. Conversely, narrow definitions of police-public interactions, such as arrests, which concentrate squarely on suspects, lead to higher rates of use of force.37
Adams himself outlines multiple definitions for use-of-force violations, focusing on different aspects of the misconduct.
For example, “deadly force” refers to situations in which force is likely to have lethal consequences for the victim. [The victim need not necessarily die.] … [T]he term “excessive force” is used to describe situations in which more force is used than allowable when judged in terms of administrative or professional guidelines or legal standards.… “Illegal” use of force refers to situations in which use of force by police violated a law or statute.… “Improper,” “abusive,” “illegitimate,” and “unnecessary” use of force are terms that describe situations in which an officer’s authority to use force has been mishandled in some general way, the suggestion being that administrative procedure, societal expectations, ordinary concepts of lawfulness, and the principle of last resort have been violated, respectively.38
Adding to the difficulty of comparing one set of figures with another, each of these concepts refers to standards that vary according to the agency, jurisdiction, and community involved. Even within a single agency, agreement on the interpretation of the relevant standards may not be perfect. Bobby Lee Cheatham, a Black cop in Miami, noted the different standards among the police: “To [White officers], police brutality is going up and just hitting on someone with no reason.… To me, it’s when a policeman gets in a situation where he’s too aggressive or uses force when it isn’t needed. Most of the time the policeman creates the situation himself.”39
Even where the facts of a case are agreed upon (which is rare enough), there may yet be intense disagreement about the relevant standards of conduct and their application to the particular circumstances. For example, in October 1997, sheriff’s deputies in Humboldt County, California, swabbed pepper-spray fluid directly into the eyes of non-violent anti-logging demonstrators locked together in an act of civil disobedience. Amnesty International called the tactic “deliberately cruel and tantamount to torture.” A federal judge refused to issue an injunction against the practice, however, claiming that it only caused “transient pain.”40
This case highlights the disparate judgments possible, even given the same facts. A great many people feel about police brutality as Justice Potter Stewart felt about pornography: they can’t define it, but they know it when they see it. Unfortunately, they might not know it when they see it. Many police tactics—the use of pressure points, the fastening of handcuffs too tightly, and the direct application of pepper spray, for example—really don’t look anything like they feel. More to the point, in most cases, nobody sees the brutality at all, except for the cops and their victims. The rest of us have to rely on secondary information, usually taking one side or the other at their word.
Things get even stickier when general patterns of violence are scrutinized, even where no particular encounter rises to the level of official misconduct. As one Justice Department study explains: “Use of excessive force means that police applied too much force in a given incident, while excessive use of force means that police apply force legally in too many incidents.”41 While the former is more likely to grab headlines, it is the latter that makes the largest contribution to the community’s reservoir of grievances against the police. But, since the force in question is within the bounds of policy, the excessive use of force is more difficult to address from the perspective of discipline and administration.
All of this controversy and confusion points to a very simple fact: police brutality is a normative construction. It involves an evaluation, a judgment, and not simply a collection of facts. David Bayley and Harold Mendelsohn explain:
[P]olice brutality is not just a descriptive category. Rather it is a judgment made about the propriety
