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Police Narratives and Accounts for Viral Use of Force Videos

Joel O. Powell (Minnesota State University Moorhead, USA)
Rylan Fitzpatrick (Minnesota State University Moorhead, USA)

Festschrift in Honor of David R. Maines

ISBN: 978-1-83753-487-6, eISBN: 978-1-83753-486-9

ISSN: 0163-2396

Publication date: 13 November 2023

pdf (76 KB) ePub (2.9 MB) Article view Figure view Cited (16) cite article

Abstract

Viral videos of police violence create demands for new police narratives about using force. Public reactions to videos lead spokespeople to provide justifications that support narrative structures of the necessity and inevitability of police violence. Ultimately, video is presented as lacking context and credibility when it is viewed unaccompanied by police explanations.

Keywords

Citation

Powell, J.O. and Fitzpatrick, R. (2023), "Police Narratives and Accounts for Viral Use of Force Videos", Chen, S.-L.S. (Ed.) Festschrift in Honor of David R. Maines (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 57), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 37-44. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0163-239620230000057005

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2024 Joel O. Powell and Rylan Fitzpatrick. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited

On the Netflix documentary, Flint Town, a scene unfolds in the dayroom during morning roll call. About a dozen tough, veteran patrol officers, black and white men and one white woman are greeted by their supervisor: “All right, guys. Hey, have you guys heard about the shooting that happened yesterday in Minnesota?”

“Heard about it.”

“OK. We're gonna watch the video. It's kind of long, but we're gonna watch the whole thing.” He boots up a video of Diamond Reynolds in the unforgettable, viral moments where she speaks immediately after the shooting of Philando Castile. The officers watch, somber, as Reynolds recounts events in a calm but unsteady voice. “Stay with me. We got pulled over for a busted taillight in the back. He's licensed to carry, he was trying to get out his ID his license, his wallet.” She continues to record, her narrative punctuated by Officer Jeronimo Yanez in the car window – screaming orders and arguments while he holds his pistol inches from the unconscious and dying Philando Castile.

The documentary camera pans around the room and settles on officers with their heads down. A couple of them are whispering. The lights come up: “One person at a time, let's keep our comments brief. But ah, Any thoughts anybuddy?”

The first officer ventures tentatively: “I mean, this just happened today?”

“Yesterday.”

“This just goes like any other time, this is one side of what's happened. Months from now we'll find out the full report, so…” The supervisor follows: “It's unfortunate that this lady lost her boyfriend, and you have a four-year-old girl who saw probably her father die… The only thing I can comment on is my experiences, over twenty years, and the way that cop's adrenaline was goin' and the way he was still, and the reason why he was still pointin' that gun at a guy who's not movin' and bleedin' everywhere is 'cause he's scared. That cop is scared. I don't think that officer right now wishes to be in the situation that he's in, 'cause he's gonna be crucified in the news.”

“Justified or not,” agrees the first officer.

The only woman in the room offers “And in the court's mind it's how a reasonable officer would've react. We don't know what happened in that car that's why I'm not gonna comment on the shooting itself” to murmurs of agreement. The supervisor speaks again, commenting on the shooting itself: “To me she says somethin' really key. She mentions that the officer shot when he was bringin' his hands back up. That means his hands were down where they shoudn' a been.”

An older, black officer joins the chorus: “OK, Normally, you know, what, what I do, is I say, ‘keep your hands where I can see ‘em.’ You know, 'cause if you start reachin' I don't know his intent. Ain't nobody here gonna know what the guy's intent is. You know, I mean he could be the nicest guy on Sunday, and today is a bad day.” He chuckles, “You know what I'm sayin'? What are you gonna do!?”

The growing relief in the room is palpable as the officers realize no one is departing from comfortable, old scripts. The newly relaxed atmosphere permits a young, white officer to improvise: “Just one other thing to think about is, I mean, her boyfriend just got shot four times by the police and her first reaction is to take out her cell phone and start recording? And she was pretty callous about it.” As the woman officer throws up her hands in agreement, and several officers nod in encouragement, he continues: “And that's probably the worst situation you could be in as anybody, and her first thought is – get your cell phone out and start recording.” From off-camera there is a coda: “Don't change your tactics. Think. There is no shame in your freedom and ability to secure a scene like that” (Anonymous Content, 2018).

Fear and adrenaline. Hostile and dissembling media. The poor character of the people we police and the inevitable necessity of hurting them. These are the bricks and lumber of tales told by American police for a 100 years – framing what Maines (2001, p. 177) sees as meanings that are “tacitly believed and routinely enacted,” and revealing the “already articulated plots” (2001, p. 208) (he will be crucified in the media, the court will react in his favor) that tell the events before they occur. Taking the view from the current vantage point of the age of electronic media brings recent histories into relief: like the George Holliday recording of the Rodney King beating, its hyper-real debut on American television, and the newly framed police narratives that accounted for those brutal moments – we don't know what happened before that recording started – but we know there was a high speed chase, and King was on PCP, and we feared for the safety of our fellow officers, and we followed training and LAPD policy, and this was an isolated incident that makes the overwhelming majority of fine police officers look bad. More immediate events include the explosion of Nokia cellphone cameras, the advent of YouTube, and Facebook's free platforms for everyone. Now the taken-for-granted reality is that there are thousands of videos of police conduct and misconduct, and hundreds of millions of potential audience members for them. This joining of cheap surveillance equipment with globally available stages creates the moment for a paradigm shift in how police account for dispensing violence. It creates “new contexts of believability” (2001, p. 198) as police narratives no longer stand alone as measures of truth. The cultural artifact of the viral video demands that police stories about using force incorporate explanations for what the public now sees routinely (See also Alpert & Noble, 2009; Goldstein, 2018; Lau, 2020; Liu & Nir, 2021; Moran, 2018).

The kinds of remarks we heard at Flint's roll call became relevant to us in our efforts to generate data from videos of police violence in other projects (Powell, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2022). As we examined news stories linked to viral videos – we saw patterns in the narratives police offer to explain force and violence. Now we are developing data that connect viral videos (where there is widespread agreement about police error or malice) with news sites and other venues that seek police accountability. To date, we have examined stories and commentary surrounding over 150 videos of regional or national significance. We look where police spokespeople, chiefs, union presidents, and rank and file officers have constructed artifacts of organizational impression management. Online news and social media are obvious repositories. Press conferences and longer interviews provide more elaborated stories. And as condensed and filtered as police accounts are in such outlets, there are hints at the blueprints for more detailed narrative structures. These narrative structures are built to manage the meanings of force and violence.

At this moment in US culture, the video is our primary reference to claims of truth. Our frame is “pictures or it didn't happen.” But the video is a foundation – necessary, but not sufficient – to establish facts. In the Jeronimo Yanez trial, after the jury saw dash-cam video of the shooting of Philando Castile, heard expert testimony that Yanez used excessive force and that his partner on the other side of the car never drew a firearm, one juror explained that the things the jury could not see on the video made the prosecution's case problematic:

It just came down to us not being able to see what was going on in the car. Some of us were saying that there was some recklessness there, but that didn't stick because we didn't know what escalated the situation: was he really seeing a gun? We felt [Yanez] was an honest guy … and in the end, we had to go on his word, and that's what it came down to.

(Weber, 2017)

Almost 30 years before, the prosecutor in the case against Rodney King's police assailants learned when video is a cornerstone, the whole edifice is tumbled by strikes against the adjoining walls of what is, and what is not, recorded. Expert defense witnesses chipped away, frame-by-frame, at the concrete assumptions of video as representation of truth. They showed the Simi Valley jury that video requires interpretations of meanings we once thought were plain (See Cohen et al., 1992). Those experts drew up the plans for frameworks of expertize and authority – for a generation of police to tell us “You can believe what you see, but you can't understand it until you have the official explanations.”

Our work is guided by ideas descending from Mills' (1940) vocabulary of motives through Scott and Lyman's (1968) categories of excuses and justifications (See also Scully & Marolla, 1984). But when we think of institutional accountability, we attend to Couch (1989) on authoritarian forms of social relation, and Maines (1993) on the elements of modern narratives. These perspectives help us understand how an authoritarian agency, in tension with democratic institutions, re-presents itself during periods of public outcry.

Scott and Lyman characterize accounts as sensible explanations for untoward behavior that deflect or deny responsibility. They describe excuses as offered when there is a common sense understanding that a behavior is untoward (Police officers have shot suspects who were already restrained. See Ellis et al., 2021; Lemos & Simonson, 2022) but there are understandable explanations that reduce or deny culpability (Police officers have argued they mistook their firearms for tasers). In contrast, justifications are vocabularies intended to assert the rightness of an act. Justifications imply that anyone in a given situation would act in similar fashion, or understand actions to be reasonable (as in shooting a suspect who pointed a gun at police).

In accounting for viral video of police violence, spokespeople seldom offer excuses. Excuses imply some culpability, and can erode an asymmetrical accountability (Couch, 1989, p. 166) that police have come to expect from their routine casting as well-trained experts. On the other hand, justifications buttress grander narratives of superior knowledge, training, expertize, insight, and morality. If the video-viewing public knew all of the things the police know, then the public would understand that what they are seeing is necessary and right. This assumption was codified in Graham v. Connor (1989) when the court ruled that the propriety of force rests on what a police officer knows at the time of an incident. Justifications are thus accounts that are patched-in to narratives of specialized knowledge while at the same time acknowledging that a police officer can't know everything that might be relevant to a decision to use force. So, confronted with seemingly objective evidence in video, police justifications become increasingly subjective: The concerns of personal and public safety, I feared for my life, I thought he was going for my gun; A reliance upon deference to authority – the suspect failed to comply; An elaborate victim-blaming – the suspect was in control, chose not to comply, so training was activated – as neutral as the swing of a wrecking ball; Accounts from the frame of special expertise – bystander videos may look awful, but these force techniques look a lot worse than they are – and craft lore; a suspect with a knife will get to you before you draw your weapon – if he yells “I can't breathe” well, if he can talk he can breathe.

Accounts such as these are laid into particular stories. They are compelling, and lodge in public consciousness by providing at least these elements: a selection of events that build the referents of a story; a plot that furnishes the meanings of the relations among events; and a timeline along which events are sequenced, and through which causation is implied (Maines, 2001, p. 177). This third element of time and causation is especially amenable to the management of meaning. As activists and victims show videos of malevolent police violence, the police have ready a sensible vocabulary on the temporal limitations of video: We don't know what happened before the recording, so we don't know the causes of the violence. This assertion walls off one past – if it's not on the video it's not real – and erects the new supposition that unrecorded events would make the police violence sensible and right. In the frame of police authority, this implies an objective past (Maines et al., 1983) that must have occurred before what is now evident on video. However, this is not a past reconstructed with evidence, but one fabricated in imagination. And it is a selective imagination. A few moments of video that do not exist are more reliable, valid, and valuable than what we see. This narrative extends the actual record of events into an imaginary space; a space that is constricted by the implication that a little more video will justify whatever police violence we are witnessing now. The wing left unfinished in this narrative structure is the one that would house the many things that have bearing on all encounters between police and citizens: Qualified immunity, the reluctance of police to testify against their fellows, career biographies full of excessive force complaints, the pro-police bias of judges, prosecutors, and juries, a long history of racial disparity in how and where policing takes place, and maybe, this officer is nice enough on Sunday, but today was a bad day.

Dismantling video for its failure to reveal causes makes room for an imaginary past that could justify police violence. However, video is also likely to provide justifications that demolish pasts that interrogate the necessity for police violence. The shooting of Amir Locke (Jimenez et al., 2022) in Minneapolis shows how police spokespeople can create a new focal point in a narrative structure to justify even a mistaken shooting. Locke was startled awake when Minneapolis police, acting on information from St. Paul, entered the room where he was sleeping and began shouting commands. He reached for a pistol that he possessed legally and was shot dead. Of the things that the public knows – he was the wrong man, not named on the warrant, the St. Paul Police had applied for a knock and announce warrant, but the Minneapolis SWAT team rejected it in favor of a surprise entry, less than 15 seconds elapsed between police entry and Locke's death – only that last 15 seconds is part of the video record. The Minneapolis Police released 15 seconds of video: the official, body-worn camera video, the yardstick of video reality – in the common-sense time frame of from moment-of-entry to shots-fired. And in those horrific images, Amir Locke is holding a pistol. In the refurbished video narrative provided by police, everything relevant is contained in that 15 seconds. A gun is in the hand of a civilian. And whatever the genesis of the situation, whatever Locke's legal status, character, biography, vulnerability, innocence – the only sensible response was for the police to open fire. Now there is no need to know what happened before the video recording started. The video is incontrovertible evidence of a man-with-a-gun. In keeping with a common police narrative, the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis opined that “Hanneman was ‘faced with a deadly threat and he had to make a split-decision decision’ to protect himself and others.” Here the convergence of the narrative is on the “split-second decision” rather than the extensive history of questionable police work that created the necessity for it. Hennepin County and the Minnesota Attorney General both declined to prosecute Officer Mark Hanneman for the shooting of Amir Locke.

Coda

In June of 2017, Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted of manslaughter charges in the shooting of Philando Castile. Yanez testified that Castile ignored his orders to stop reaching, and was in fact gripping a pistol when Yanez shot him in self-defense. He cried on the stand and told jurors, “I thought I was going to die.” At the conclusion of the trial, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension released video of Diamond Reynolds handcuffed in the back of a squad car, stricken, wailing, cursing – her four-year-old daughter hanging on her neck and imploring Mommy to calm down so she would not get shot, too. This video, unavailable at the time the Flint officers were candidly critiquing her behavior, should be seen in the context of Reynolds' explanation for why she was recording in such a fraught moment. “I know that the people are not protected against the police,” (Smith, 2017) said Reynolds, expressing a recent but common “racialized narrative” (Maines, 1999) that it is more difficult for the police to murder black people if an encounter is being recorded.

Recent events in Minnesota indicate that historically reliable police narratives are not as sturdy as they once were. In April of 2019, Officer Mohammed Noor was convicted of third degree murder in the shooting of Justine Diamond, after testifying that he feared for the life of his partner. In April of 2021, Officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder and manslaughter after kneeling on the neck of George Floyd. His defense argued that a hostile crowd distracted Chauvin, and that George Floyd more likely died from drug overdose than from asphyxiation. Twenty-six-year veteran, and president of the union, Kim Potter, was convicted of first-and second-degree manslaughter after shooting Daunte Wright, despite the jury seeing video of her anguish after the shooting, and after seeing convincing evidence that she mistook her firearm for a taser. Ironically, Potter's considerable experience as a police officer undermined her account that the shooting was an honest mistake.

Some of these results are encouraging to an activist public seeking accountability. However, when facing an overwhelmingly explicit video record, especially in the close confines of court proceedings, police can be expected to concede some culpability, while casting events as isolated, infrequent, and not in keeping. Then an investigation is ongoing, an officer is fired, misconduct is denounced, complicity is denied. But police violence happens every day in the United States. Recordings of minor and serious misconduct are uploaded everyday as well. While there is no doubt that institutional efforts to reduce police violence continue in good faith, such efforts will be accompanied by a continuing refinement of narrative architecture and more sophisticated strategies for managing meaning.

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