Reasonable Officer at the ASA Meetings

Several of our researchers are presenting at the American Sociological Association Meetings in August. The titles and abstracts are here:

Our project is well represented at this year’s American Sociological Association meetings, and not just by one of our project leads, Jay Meehan, being the co-chair of the Ethnomethodology and Conversational Analysis section. The meetings will be conducted virtually, and the talks will be about 20-minutes long with some time for questions. We’ll do our best to record our talks and post them on this blog site later in the month. The session Reframing Policing: Contested Motives and Legal Fictions features four project team members and takes place Sunday August 8th, 4:15-5:40pm Eastern Daylight Savings Time (Toronto).

Andre Buscariolli (UCSB)

Barking Up the Right Tree. The Ethnomethods of Big Data Policing

With the advent of big data, police officers can retrieve large amounts of information from law enforcement databases, significantly expanding their capacity to infer suspicion; they are no longer restricted by firsthand observations’ limitations (Ferguson 2014). On the one hand, the advent of big data allows police officers to infer suspicion from afar. On the other, reducing data into mathematical models erases the context in which data was generated (boyd and Crawford 2012; Kitchin 2014; Lake 2017) – restricting what sort of information police officers can obtain from them. Then, how do police officers manage to identify criminal appearances from massive datasets? In a classic ethnographic study, Bittner argues that: “It is commonly known that the police are expert in finding people and that they have developed an exquisite technology involving special facilities and procedures of sleuthing. It is less well appreciated that all this technology builds upon those socially structured features of everyday life that render persons findable in the first place” (Bittner 1967:706 emphasis added). This article brings Bittner’s scholarship into conversation with critical data studies. More specifically, it draws from ethnomethodology to analyze a CompStat meeting where law enforcement personnel explain how they have used big data to arrest a house burglar. Their accounts demonstrate how making sense of this technology mobilizes ethnographically grounded area knowledge to reconstruct the context in which data was generated. Therefore, the use of big data does not conclusively “prove,” in the way that many might assume, that the suspect was the perpetrator. Instead, there has to be interpretive work done to bring potentially equivocal pieces of big data evidence into line with what the officers are assuming about the suspect. Therefore, although framed as a revolution (Ferguson 2017), big data policing builds upon more traditional policing forms.

Michael Lynch (Cornell)

Loopy expertise: The role of expert witnesses in police excessive force trials

The proposed paper presents preliminary remarks based on an ongoing project on trials of police officers in the United States and Canada who were charged with excessive use of force during arrests and other violent, often fatal, encounters with civilians. The project investigates documentary materials, including: video evidence from police body cams, lay witness cell phones, and other cameras at the scene of the action; written documents collected and produced during official investigations of excessive force charges; and videos and court transcripts of trials. The present paper focuses on trial testimony by designated expert witnesses on police use of force, and builds off of Charles Goodwin’s analysis of expert testimony at the Rodney King police trial in Los Angeles. That case (and many others in recent years) brings into stark relief the difference between professional analysis of video evidence and popular ‘common sense’ reactions to such evidence when it is disseminated through the media. Expert evidence does not necessarily prevail in trials of police officers, and many other issues are involved in these cases, but it is an important source of leverage for respecifying scenes of action portrayed on video. Of particular interest for the present paper is how expert analysts respecify social actions documented on video by ascribing reasonable or unreasonable intentions to the police officers and others depicted in the scene. The paper does not propose to second-guess these expert analyses by reference to a professional sociological analysis, but instead aims to open up questions about the relationship between lay and professional analysis (a relationship in which ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts are hopelessly embedded).

Carmen Nave (WLU)

Reasonable Belief: Legal Fictions and the Reframing of Officers and Victim/Suspects

Criminal trials of officers charged with excessive force ostensibly turn on a few key legal concepts. Two of these are the instruction that officers’ actions must be evaluated by what they knew and “reasonably believed” at the time they used force; and that the actions must be judged according to what a “reasonable officer” in the same circumstance with the same training and experience as the accused officer would do. In this paper, I evaluate the ways in which officer and victim actions are framed to argue that rather than proving “reasonableness,” trial defence lawyers are engaged in efforts to elide the “exigent heteronomy” (Martin 2018, 136) that is apparent in fatal police encounters, wherein victims’ presumed autonomy and equality under the law could not protect their lives. Presenting a case study of Phillip Brailsford’s trial for shooting a kneeling, crying Daniel Shaver in a hotel hallway in Mesa Arizona, I analyze court transcripts to show that “reason” is established through various moves that recast victims as suspicious, and officers as subject to their training, the scenario, and their superior officers.

Patrick G. Watson (WLU)

Gestalt Contexture and Contested Motives: Understanding Video Evidence in the Murder Trial of Officer Michael Slager

This paper finds itself in an ongoing discussion of how to understand the influx of (moving) images of police violence. Discussion of video evidence to date has largely centered on Foucauldian notions of knowledge-power and sousveillance (Mathiesen, 1997; Moore & Singh, 2018; Sandhu & Haggerty, 2017; Stalcup & Hahn, 2016). This paper focuses on a matter that is highlighted within these studies but remains uncommented on: how video evidence is used to produce understanding of police violence in court. It does so 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-incident conduct as circumstantial evidence. This prosecutorial decision highlights an important issue for our understanding of video evidence, that what is to be settled at trial may not be directly represented in video. Gurwitsch’s (1964) notion of Gestalt and Garfinkel’s (1967; 2002; Forthcoming) adaptation thereof are proposed as an alternate means of interrogating video evidence beyond the Foucauldian Power-Knowledge dialectic.

Also…

In addition to these talks, project co-investigator Waverly Duck will be a panelist on the book forum The Sociology of W. E. B. DuBois: Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line on August 10th. He has also organized the session Urban Issues: Interrogating Neighborhood History, Politics, and Networks on August 9th which is presided by co-investigator Jason Turowetz. Project co-investigator Kevin Whitehead is presiding over the session Systemic Racism and Inequality as Embedded Social Interaction on August 8th.

Please feel free to contact the project team (ReasonableOfficer@wlu.ca) if you are interested in any further details.