Category: research updates

Reasonable Officer visits Montreal

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As mentioned in our last blog post, the Reasonable Officer project is expanded. With an exciting new grant, the ORA, we are now collaborating with scholars in Germany, France, and Wales to explore the use of visual media in police oversight and training.

We recently connected with the team who received the first ORA in Canada, with the Canadian team led by Marc Alain in Laval. They are also investigating police and police oversight, looking at public perceptions and knowledge about oversight bodies. We were delighted to find that our research interests are quite aligned, while our methods and focus were different enough to be complementary. We look forward to further collaborations and exchanges with them in the future.

After much fruitful informal discussion, Patrick gave a talk for the Centre international de criminologie comparée. We are very pleased to be able to share this talk here. After opening remarks in French, the talk is in English.

Publication News

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Earlier this month, Theoretical Criminology published an article by our project’s principal investigator Dr. Patrick Watson on the Michael Slager murder trial. Patrick’s article looks at how video from the incident was used to examine Slager’s intent. It’s important to note that, while video can be very convincing evidence, in police trials it’s incumbent on the prosecution to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused officer didn’t make an honest mistake when using lethal force. The article looks at how that work was done.

This article is situated in ongoing discussions about the influx of images of police violence. To date, much scholarship has centred on Foucauldian notions of knowledge-power and sousveillance. Alternatively, I attend to how video evidence produces understanding of police violence in court through a case study of the murder trial of Officer Michael Slager who shot and killed Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina. While audio and video direct evidence of the moments leading up to Slager’s decision to shoot was presented, cross-examination focused more explicitly on post-shooting conduct as circumstantial evidence. This approach highlights an issue for video evidence, that what is to be settled at trial may not be directly re-presented in video. Gurwitsch’s notion of Gestalt and Garfinkel’s adaptation thereof are proposed as an alternative means of interrogating video evidence.

Gestalt contexture and contested motives: Understanding video evidence in the murder trial of Officer Michael Slager by Patrick G Watson