Police Criminality
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Grant: Research Recruits Program (RRP)
Kevin Stone
CoPIs:
Liliana Carredo
College:
College of Liberal Arts
Major:
Commmunication
Faculty Research Advisor(s):
Joshua Guitar
Abstract:
While scholars and journalists alike have interrogated a wide array of topics surrounding violent police misconduct, attention to the rhetorical framing of the people in the stories remains deficient. Our argument here is not to insinuate that we should be apathetic about questionable citizen behaviors, but rather that very few, if any, actions should warrant immediate public execution. . As critical rhetorical scholars, we are particularly interested in the meaning-making and meaning-sustaining processes that inform social injustice. In this specific study, we are intensely interested in the character frames that saturate news discourses of police violence. Most notably, we center our attention upon the term “suspect” as a narrative rhetorical construct. As such, we aggregated and reviewed recent news reports on police violence. We narrowed our focus to juxtapose the rhetorical framing of police who committed violent action with the victims of that violence. Through our review, we found that despite the potential criminality of their actions, police are almost never framed as suspects. Conversely, civilians, even when innocent or not proven guilty in a court of law, are regularly framed as suspects. We find, though, that despite its definitional characteristics of unproven guilt, the term “suspect” nevertheless denotes criminality, which not only convicts the civilians in question, it covertly indemnifies police for their violent behavior. We contend that these revelations illuminate the authoritarian structures rooted in our discursive norms which allow police violence to persist.