RT Article
T1 A legal shot?: Police Gun Violence and Individual Accountability in Miami
JF The British journal of criminology
VO 62
IS 6
SP 1470
OP 1484
A1 Jeursen, Thijs
LA English
YR 2022
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1838882685
AB In light of police violence and injustice, criminologists tend to focus on masculine and violent police cultures, the lack of democratic oversight and on social processes of dehumanization. Yet much less attention, however, is given to the objects commonly used in violent and lethal police encounters: guns. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with police officers in Miami, I suggest that police officers tend to re-contextualize police gun violence in terms of individual liability and legal culpability—as a question of what constitutes a legal shot. While a legal framing might protect police officers from prosecution, the legal shot first and foremost enables state institutions to explain police brutality as "incidents": as unintentional and exceptional outcomes of an otherwise warranted form of policing. Recognizing how the legal shot attunes our attention to individual misconduct and legal solutions to systemic and racialized police violence, I suggest, is an important step in exploring the possibilities to disarm the police, and to organize around the question of how to imagine and push for a more inclusive form of public safety.
K1 Policing
K1 Violence
K1 Legality
K1 Guns
K1 Miami
DO 10.1093/bjc/azab105