Theoretical Criminology 2010 Hirschfield 155 82

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Legitimating police violenceNewspaper narratives of deadly force

PAUL J . HIRSCHFIELD AND DANIELLA SIMON

Rutgers University, USA and Independent Scholar

Abstract

Newspaper coverage of police-perpetrated homicides may reflectand promote public and official tolerance for police violence.Interpretive content analysis was performed on 105 news articlesappearing in 23 major daily newspapers between 1997 and 2000that center on incidents of deadly force. Using Thompsons (1990)conceptual framework, patterns of ideological content wereidentified and analyzed. Most articles, subtly drawing upon iconicimages of police professionals and vigilantes, cast victims of policekillings as physical and social threats and situate police actionswithin legitimate institutional roles. Articles appearing after policekilled Amadou Diallo are less likely to demonize both police officersand victims, partially reflecting efforts to frame deadly force andpolice racism as systemic issues.

Key Words

crime news deadly force ideology police accountability police violence

Dominant representations in the news media depict crime as an individualmoral failing, criminals as irredeemably dangerous, victims as innocent, andpolice as honest and heroic public servants (Barak, 1994; Beckett, 1997).Accordingly, attributions of evil and blame in homicide accounts promote sym-pathy for victims and a harsh response to offenders (Peelo, 2006). But the linesbetween victim and offender can be blurry. Who, for example, is the victim andwho, the wrongdoer, when a police officer kills a criminal suspect in the line of

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duty? This article examines the specific manner in which news accounts assignmoral and legal culpability in such cases. We find that newspaper articlesemploy various strategies of symbolic communication to construct images andmobilize meanings that legitimize police violence. However, major events like asensational police killing can shift patterns of symbolic construction in policeviolence news, even if only temporarily.

To cultural criminologists interested in ways the news media dehumanizeor delegitimate particular social groups (Ferrell, 1999) and reinforce injusticeand oppression in the realm of criminal justice (Cohen, 1972/1980; Hallet al., 1978), news coverage of police violence is an interesting case. Themeaning of police violence is often highly contested (Cerulo, 1998; Kaminskiand Jefferis, 1998), requiring news crafters to negotiate between competingnarrative frameworks. Police officials tend to present deadly force as alegitimate and necessary, though unfortunate, procedural response to a gravethreat (Lawrence, 2000). This official frame mirrors the conventional roleassignments and dramatic elements in crime and police fiction (King, 1999).Competing interpretations invert stereotypical roles, casting criminal suspectsas sympathetic victims and the police, as villains. Thus, news accounts ofpolice killings, especially those whose moral valuation is ambiguous, providea critical test of the resilience of dominant cultural images of crime and police.

Modal news constructions may also help explain the lack of accounta-bility for wrongful police killings, a frequent cause of urban unrest(Skolnick and Fyfe, 1993). In the USA, police can legally employ deadlyforce only if they reasonably deem it necessary to protect themselves orothers from serious harm (Davis, 1994). The portion of the 10,724 policekillings declared justifiable by American police agencies between 1976and 2004 that were, in fact, legal is unknowable (Brown and Langan,2001; Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2002, 2005).1 However, evenunder highly dubious circumstances, whether due to juries reluctance toindict or convict police officers or bias and missteps in investigations,criminal charges and harsh administrative sanctions are rare (Skolnickand Fyfe, 1993; Davis, 1994; Human Rights Watch, 1998).2 The wide-spread tendency to give violent police wide latitude has deep cultural andhistorical roots (Lawrence, 2000). Given the news medias role in con-structing public opinion and mediating official responses (Beckett, 1997),mainstream news accounts are a useful site to study the cultural legit-imization of police violence.

We decipher and analyze the ideological content of newspaper accountsof deadly force in the USA from 1997 through 2000. Whereas past researchhas analyzed the selection of themes, frames, and sources in such accounts,or examined audience reaction (Cerulo, 1998; Ross, 2000; Chermak andWeiss, 2005; Chermak et al., 2006), we probe their linguistic and symboliccontent. Applying Thompsons (1990) scheme for discerning ideologicalcontent, we examine how news articles construct deadly force victimsas physical or social threats and frame police actions as a normal and rea-sonable response.


Police violence in American culture

Symbolic interpretation of any text requires consideration of the culturaland historical context of its production (Richardson, 2007). Dominantframes resonate with stereotypes of police and suspects and the scriptedportrayals of their encounters that circulate through the wider culturalspace (Binder, 1993; King, 1999; Rafter, 2006). Three police archetypesthat may link the police depicted in news of police violence to broader cul-tural frames are the professional, the vigilante, and the oppressor.

The first figure is the police professional (e.g. Ed Exley inL.A. Confidential),whose judicious exercise of authority is fettered by myriad rules and regulations(Walker, 1980; Reiner, 1985). This icon traces its roots to the New Deal.The negotiation of a respectable role for the working class in Americandemocracy demanded the rights to due process, which recognizes the free-dom and dignity of the individual in criminal justice (Melossi, 1990).

In contrast to the professional police officer, who deploys deadly forcewithin strict legal parameters, stands the vigilante. A cultural product ofAmerican traditions of self-governance and popular justice (e.g. lynch mobs),the vigilante embraces deadly force as a just response to dangerous criminals(Walker, 1980). Despite vigilantisms historic raison dtre, the gradual expan-sion of central government weakened this tradition. Ideals of popular justicecontinued to resonate with the public, however. Historical commentary sug-gests that police brutality functions as delegated vigilantism against per-ceived social threats (Walker, 1980; Skolnick and Fyfe, 1993).

The vigilante image of law enforcers attained prominence during the1970s and 1980s (e.g. Dirty Harry, Robocop) because of widespread per-ceptions that due process restrictions on police power led to escalatingcrime rates (Reiner, 1985). Though still celebrated in popular media (e.g. TheShield), the vigilante cop must stay between the lines of newspaper accounts.This is because state agencies, who control the initial flow of informationabout most police-related news (Chermak and Weiss, 2005), derive legiti-macy from perceived adherence to established rules and procedures withoutregard to race and social status (Weber, 1964; Tyler, 1990). Police brutalityexposes contradictions between ideals and practice, fueling resistance andunrest (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991; Skolnick and Fyfe, 1993).

The vigilante can never be summoned alone to the front stage of offi-cial discourse. Rather, the images of the professional and the vigilante,like the good cop/bad cop dyads of crime fiction, are often paired. Thevigilante provides a back-up narrative when appeals to reason fail.Narratives of professionalism interfused with contradictory vigilantesubtextual references do not necessarily disquiet readers. The professionalcrime-fighter harboring an inner-vigilante embodies both the conflict-ing poles of human consciousness as well as a parallel tension within thepolice force and society, whereby official espousals of nonviolence con-flict with popular demands for swift justice (Newman, 1993; King, 1999;Rafter, 2006).

Hirschfield and SimonLegitimating police violence 157



Operational alliances and the symbolic fusion of the professional and thevigilante are only possible because they both confront dangerous criminals.The third pertinent police image, by contrast, depicts violent police as agentsof repression and redeems their victims. Forged in the Civil Rights Era(Reiner, 1985) and conjured by major episodes of police violence, the oppres-sor is particularly salient in the collective memory of African-Americans, whorecall him obstructing, literally and figuratively, marches toward freedom.Peaceful protest and accusations of racism following contemporary deadlyforce incidents can help cue a civil rights news frame (Lawrence, 2000).

Police violence in the news

Cultural resonance is but one factor shaping the structure and content ofnews. The relational activity of news sponsors and routines of news pro-duction are also important (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989) and often pro-mote exculpatory accounts of police violence. Following organizationalroutines, editors initially assign police stories to reporters covering the localcrime beat. Early studies depict the subversion of crime/police reporting bypolice organizational sponsorship (Chibnall, 1977; Fishman, 1980; Ericsonet al., 1989). To ensure rapid access to pertinent and sensitive information,police reporters often foster close ties to police officials. Collegiality withand privileged access to police may foster identification with police valuesand obligations to carry out public relations functions on behalf of the police(Barak, 1994; Ericson, 1995; Lawrence, 2000; Chermak and Weiss, 2005).

Even crime-beat reporters eager to expose police malfeasance face profes-sional norms and constraints that foster exculpatory accounts. Conventionsdictate that they, in pursuit of efficiency, defer to official definitions of crimeevents (Lawrence, 2000). Obtaining and verifying accounts from eyewit-nesses and non-officials is often nearly impossible for reporters pressed toproduce a next-day account of the incident. This norm is also aligned withbounded notions of journalistic neutrality, whereby officially verifiableclaims are considered more authoritative than claims from non-officials(Ericson, 1998). Journalistic imperatives like immediacy, titillation, and con-ventionalism also align news accounts with audience thinking and morality(Cerulo, 1998: 95), imbuing police with professionalism and crime-fightingimagery (Chibnall, 1977; Ericson, 1995; Lawrence, 2000).

Occasionally, deadly force stories outgrow the organizational and thematicconfines of the normal violence frame (Cerulo, 1998). Whereas most inci-dents of police violence garner limited coverage, the involvement of cityleaders, outside agencies, and local and national activists resituate events asfoci of local political controversy (Lawrence, 2000; Ross, 2000). This invitesunofficial and critical interpretations of focal incidents as well as local inci-dents that occur amid the controversy (Ross, 2000). These voices andrelated images may activate a civil rights frame, recasting violent police inantagonistic roles.



Whereas local controversial incidents affect the frames that are subsequentlyavailable and desirable at the local level, the question of whether nation-ally publicized, controversial police killings affect news accounts of localpolice homicides remains unexplored. When police violence is in the publicspotlight, nuanced, critical stories on that topic may increase. The presentstudy directly examines such reframing effects by comparing coverageof mainly local incidents of deadly force before and after the killing ofAmadou Diallo.

Diallo, shot 19 times (of 41 rounds fired) by four NYC police officers on4 February 1999, is a prime candidate for reframing effects. Detectives inthe elite Street Crimes Unit killed Diallo, an unarmed African immigrantwith no criminal record, after they purportedly mistook his wallet for agun. The killing and the officers eventual acquittal triggered numerousmass protests, and Diallo became a national symbol of the dangerous mixof racial profiling and hyper-aggressive policing. Over the next six months,Diallo was mentioned in 1032 articles printed in the 28 major daily news-papers (USA) covered in Lexis-Nexis. The severe police overreaction toDiallo thrust the incident out of the vigilante and professional frames.NewYorkTimes polls revealed sharp multi-ethnic increases in the share of NewYorkers who believed that the NYPD use excessive force (Weitzer, 2002).Perhaps the Diallo incident overlaid a civil rights frame onto the mostlywhite audiences image of normal police violence, reducing news-framersuse of vigilante and due process imagery.

Assessing temporal variation in semiotic patterns (i.e. before and after theDiallo incident) provides an important test of the importance of shiftingcultural and ideological currents in shaping news accounts. Stable patternsin news coverage of police killings following Diallos death would supportcounter-arguments that news accounts are reflections of objective circum-stances of police shootings or of journalistic conventions for reporting onviolence more generally, rather than ideologically conditioned symbolicconstructions.

Interpreting and analyzing ideology

The present analysis illuminates how news coverage can, however unintention-ally, legitimize instances of deadly force. Legitimation is achieved throughthe cultivation of shared valuations of objects, phenomena, actions, andactors in everyday life (Thompson, 1990; Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991;Richardson, 2007). An inquiry into the legitimizing function of deadlyforce accounts, therefore, must analyze the possible meanings these accountsmobilize. The richest semiotic interpretations analyze the interplay amongtexts content, structure, and context, the processes of production andtransmission, and their reception and appropriation (Thompson, 1990; Wodakand Meyer, 2001). Because the production and reception of police violencenews are explored elsewhere (Cerulo, 1998; Chermak and Weiss, 2005), we



focus primarily on the content of newspaper accounts of deadly force, probinghow the meanings mobilized by these symbolic forms nourish and sustainthe exercise of power (Thompson, 1990: 292).

Few studies of police violence news focus on content. Lawrence (2000)uses quantitative content analysis (QCA) to depict the structural, topical,and factual elements of a decade of police violence stories in two majornewspapers. Lawrence focuses on whether articles define use of force as asystemic or an individualized problem and the causes and consequences ofalternate frames. Typical news accounts privilege official depictions ofpolice violence as a normal, authorized response to dangerous behavior.QCA, however, inevitably glosses over the subtleties, intricacies, and con-tingencies of meaning that flow from the richly variegated contexts and for-mats of media communication (Richardson, 2007).

Critical discourse analysis (CDA), by contrast, interprets possible mani-fest and latent meanings of individual texts in relation to patterns oftextual features and the socio-cultural and institutional context of their pro-duction and consumption (Wodak and Meyer, 2001; Richardson, 2007).Adopting an approach faintly resembling CDA, Scraton and Chadwick(1986) discuss the coverage accorded a handful of deaths in police custodyin England. They describe how the news media, taking their cues from offi-cial reports, portray the victims of police homicide as violent, reckless, orotherwise culpable. Case studies, however, are merely illustrative. No priorstudies strike a balance between the rigorous interrogation of ideologicalcontent within particular news accounts of police violence and the docu-mentation of semiotic patterns across an accumulated body of news repre-sentations (and spatial or temporal variation therein). The present studypursues this balance, subjecting to QCA semiotic patterns discerned throughlimited CDA.

Method

Next, we introduce our mixed quantitative/qualitative approach to docu-menting how newspapers mobilize images and meanings of police violence.The images of the professional, vigilante, and civil rights oppressors helpform the cultural backdrop against which we interpret the symbolic contentof news coverage. We focus on depictions of the victims and perpetrators ofpolice homicide, whose character and actions are critical to the perceivedlegitimacy of police killings. Deemphasizing objective features of articleslike keywords and structure, we focus on the mechanics of symbolic con-struction (Thompson, 1990).

To be sure, the present portrait of over 100 articles inevitably forfeitsmuch intricacy and subtlety. But what our hybridized approach to discourseanalysis lacks in complexity, it makes up for in scope; and, we hope, viceversa. We adopt CDAs core assumption that the range of meanings of news



text depends on contextual, referential, grammatical, and syntactical aspects(Thompson, 1990). Thus, in assessing whether words impute positive ornegative characteristics or motives to police and victims, we strove toembed those words in the context of the article and the (mass-mediated)background of the incident. We analyze far fewer linguistic concepts anddevices than typical CDAs (Meyer, 2001) but pursue more holistic andsituated interpretations than large-scale QCA permits.

Thompsons (1990) strategies of symbolic construction is our analyticalframework, because it specifies measurable ways in which symbolic formssustain relationships of domination, including violence under the color ofauthority. A pre-test on a separate, smaller sample of deadly force articlespared Thompsons schema down to five especially relevant linguistic andsymbolic techniques, corresponding to Thompsons five modes of ideology.In a grounded theoretical fashion (Meyer, 2001), we derived two additionalstrategiesobjectification and anonymity/invisibilityalong with sevencorresponding counter-strategies that challenge police killings. All strategiesare defined in the next section.

Sampling

Whereas prior research samples are restricted to a few newspapers (Lawrence,2000), we selected articles from a national major papers database. Sampling105 articles permits interpretive analysis of some depth, without undercut-ting all claim to national relevance. We obtained articles using LexisNexis

by entering 22 search terms (e.g. police kill!) associated with deadly force.Our target sample can roughly be described as 50 articles from the twoyears both preceding and following the Diallo incident. Our sampling frameencompasses four years in order to uncover durable ideological currents.The pre-Diallo sampling pool (n = 2525) includes articles from 1 January1997 to 3 February 1999 and the post-Diallo pool includes 4 February1999 to 31 December 2000 (n = 3797). The size discrepancy is due to theprodigious national and international coverage the Diallo case generated.

Within each pool, we randomly assigned identification numbers (id) andscreened articles in order of id. The first 50 eligible news articles wereselected from each sub-sample. Eligible articles appear in a domestic paper,recount a specific incident of deadly force3 that leaves open the possibility,however remote, of excessive force. Contrary circumstances (e.g. victim shotpolice first), observed relatively rarely, may obviate legitimization strategies.Five extra articles not about Diallo were randomly selected from the sam-pling pool to replace the five Diallo articles for the pre- and post-Diallocomparisons (described later). The 105 sampled articles represent 23 majordaily domestic newspapers and 86 separate incidents of deadly force. Fiveincidents were the foci of three or more articles. Sampled newspapers,shown in the Appendix, serve large mainstream audiences in 20 metropol-itan areas in 18 states.4


Coding

We coded only portions that bear on the legal and moral justification of theshooting or help construct an image of the key actors. We characterizedeach relevant claim as supportive or critical of the police version of eventsand as from an official or non-official source. After selecting and coding asubset of articles, coding criteria were refined and articles accordinglyrecodeda process requiring several iterations. We stress that coded textualelements are not inherently ideological. After all, it is the function that suchelements serve in the moment of their use that is of interest (Richardson,2007: 38). Thus, we flexibly embed our analysis of these strategies and theirideological implications within the texts. We next describe the ideologicalstrategies and counter-strategies (parenthetically delineated) we derivedfrom Thompson (1990) and corresponding coding criteria.

Rationalization (repudiation)

Thompson (1990: 61) defines rationalization as a chain of reasoning whichdefends or justifies a set of social relations. Rationalization is evidenced inarticles that give primacy to explanations which make police actions appearlogical and accordant with professionalism and legally permissible deadlyforce. We label arguments that question the rationality or legality of policeaction as repudiation.

Expurgation of victim (police)

Thompson (1990) defines expurgation of the other as the symbolic con-struction of a scapegoat that must be resisted or purged. Articles that por-tray deadly force victims or perpetrators as evil, strange, or threateningmanifest expurgation (Scraton and Chadwick, 1986). Police officers andofficials allegedly call upon such images when concocting cover stories forpolice homicides (Hunt and Manning, 1991; Waegel, 1984; Chevigny,1995). A particular type of expurgation, reference to prior criminal history,merits special designation, because it is a core feature of cop vigilante nar-ratives but marginal to self-defense justifications. (Police shooters are rarelyaware of victims criminal pasts.) Alleged crimes that led to fatal policeencounters were also coded separately but not always as expurgation. Pre-encounter crimes are generally an indispensable narrative element, and theirmere disclosure may not qualify as expurgation. By contrast, any claimsthat could vilify police officers were coded as expurgation of the police.

Inclusion of police (victim)

Exemplifying symbolization of unity (Thompson, 1990), inclusive sym-bols bind the police (or victims) with the wider community and promote



audience identification with the subject. Any language that praises orhumanizes the subjects by associating them with positive roles or laudablepersonal qualities qualifies as inclusion.

Euphemization (dysphemization)

Euphemisms substitute a term that elicits a positive valuation for a rela-tively unpleasant term (Thompson, 1990: 62). Dysphemisms do the opposite.These linguistic devices were coded only with respect to words depictinglethal police actions. For example, deadly force underlines the essentialnormality and legality of police violence and minimizes its gravity. Pejorativeterms like murder and brutality are recorded as dysphemisms.

Passivization (activation)

Syntactical structure can also mobilize particular images of the acts andactors depicted in a deadly force narrative. For instance, passive construc-tions can deprive actors of agency (Richardson, 2007). Stating, the suspectwas killed obscures both the actor and the action. A form of reification, itconstructs a historical state of affairs as if it were permanent, natural, out-side of time (Thompson, 1990: 439). Situating the suspect before killeddisplaces agency onto the victim, whose incrimination is essential to bothdue process and vigilante narratives.

Conversely, unfolding shootings with active constructions may help sym-bolically criminalize police by imputing agency to them. Activation is notalways incriminating, however. Calling attention to the actor can unfoldevents through the actors eyes which, depending on other contextual infor-mation, may cast police as protagonists (Cerulo, 1998). We coded only thegrammatical construction of police actions immediately preceding andincluding lethal violence and victims actions that allegedly provoked it.

Objectification (subjectification)

Objectification denotes any text that transforms socially constituted claimsabout police killings into apparent facts. Newspaper stories, by design,obscure the social exchanges, belief structures, and political/organizationalconsiderations that generate and shape them (Fishman, 1980; Smith, 1984).They also tend to reify the socially conditioned results of official inquiriesand investigations, which reflect police and partnering organizationsshared meanings and goals (Ericson, 1995; Lawrence, 2000). News accountscan obscure the fuzzy, contested nature of interpreted reality though the useof verbs like indicated, found, and reported and through burying ordepersonalizing sources. Objectification can reinforce other ideologicalstrategies; for example, by validating text that rationalizes a shooting orexpurgates a victim.



Conversely, we code language that marks possible facts as subjectiveclaims as subjectification. Both rationalizing and repudiative claims may bedevalued by personalizing them (especially disparagingly) and restrictingthem to what claimants can see from their vantage points (Smith, 1984).Journalists demarcate subjective claims with quotation marks or words thatpersonalize their sources or stress their subjectivity (e.g. alleges, contends).

Anonymity and invisibility (naming and imaging)

Pursuant to administrative rules, police often withhold the names andidentifying characteristics of officers involved in civilian deaths(Lawrence, 2000). Such omissions may have ideological implications, ifnot intent. Journalists who cannot identify officers are generally pre-vented from probing their character and background. Because mostpeople have positive images of police (Sourcebook, 2006), readers maytypically associate faceless officers with a timeless and benevolent socialrole. Whether articles name officers or include evaluative personal char-acteristics is noted.

We recorded basic features of each article including topic (incident,investigatory/adjudicatory proceedings, civil litigation, protest activities, orother), section, length in words, news source (staff writer or wire service),and timing (pre- or post-Diallo). To bolster coding reliability, 10 initial articleswere coded by both authors and differences reconciled. At least a dozenadditional articles were partially or fully double-coded on an ad hoc basis,because of inevitable ambiguities and multiplicities of meaning.

Findings

Table 1 describes the topics, newspaper locations, scope, and average length.A slight majority (56.2 percent) were next-day incident reports. Investigationscomprised the second largest portion, followed by protests and civil litigation.Incident reports were relatively short, averaging 396 words versus 504 wordsamong articles covering other topics. Investigations and protests generatedthe lengthiest stories. Gunfire caused all deaths but two.

Symbolic strategies

Whereas 95.2 percent of articles included any of the six pro-strategies thatdirectly legitimate police violence (rationalization, euphemization, activa-tion or expurgation of victim, and passivization or inclusion of officer),only 59 percent of the accounts include counter-strategies that undermineits legitimacy. Correspondingly, 92.4 percent of articles included at least onetype of claim (95 percent from official sources) that supports the legitimacyof the shooting, compared to 50.5 percent which included claims that




challenged its legitimacy (77 percent from non-officials). Official sourcespredominate in 78 percent of the articles. Patterns of the use of various sym-bolic strategies are detailed in Table 2.

Rationalization

We find that 69.5 percent of articles lend prominence and credibility toaccounts that provide legal justifications of lethal actions. These accounts,almost always from officials, commonly highlight direct threats posed byvictims and officers reasonable responses to them. Appeals to legalism andprofessionalism are transparent in the following citation of a States Attorneysexculpatory ruling about the death of a man police shot twice in the back.Police alleged that the victim gained control of an officers gun and, whilelying facedown, pointed the weapon up and behind him at the officers:

(T)he evidence clearly shows that Officer Houston and Sgt. Brevi reasonablybelieved that it was necessary to shoot Mills in order to prevent their ownimminent death or great bodily harm to themselves and to others, that theyhad nowhere to retreat in order to avoid the attack, and that they had nosafe alternative to shooting Mills, the report said.

(St. Petersburg Times, 23 January 1997, p. 1B)

Table 1 Description of the full sample of newspaper articles

Article characteristic Percent Mean length

Article topicIncident 56.2 396.3 (231.2)Investigation & adjudicatory proceedings 23.8 555.1 (366.3)Civil lawsuits & litigation 3.8 429.8 (304.6)Protest activity 12.4 500.0 (317.7)Other 3.8 275.8 (118.9)

SectionFront page 11.4 860.9 (334.7)Later in paper 88.6 389.8 (229.8)

Year1997 25.7 402.3 (286.1)1998 19.0 380.9 (192.2)1999 29.5 459.6 (266.2)2000 25.7 513.2 (352.4)

ScopeLocal 82.9 443.2 (277.2)National 17.1 445.7 (329.1)Total 100.0 443.7 (285.0)

Notes: N = 105. Length is measured as the mean number of words. Numbers in parentheses arestandard deviations.



This prominent, extended quotation situates police actions within the legalparameters governing deadly force. Although this long article (658 words)notes that the shooting drew an angry crowd of more than 100 people, it(and its five predecessors in this newspaper) lends no space to accounts ques-tioning how someone lying on his belly pointed a gun upward at police.Rather, the article implies that opposition to the shooting is based only onemotions and an incomplete understanding of the facts:

Residents of the area accepted Coes decision with calm Wednesday, butMills family still cant understand why the officers had to kill him. Imso mad I dont know what in the world to do, his mother, EvealeneGuillen, said.

Reinforcing the impression that the officers had no other choice and thatopposition is irrational and unfocused, the article quotes two upstanding com-munity residents who both purportedly believe that the police are telling thetruth. Repudiative accounts were available, however. The following quotationfrom an eye-witness appeared on the same day in the Tampa Tribune: Onefriend said Fleita began hitting Mills, knocked him down and shot him whenMills tried to get up (23 January 1997, p. 6). Neutralizing any residual basisfor opposition, all contextual and background information (e.g. bottles thrownat riot-helmeted police) fits a crime narrative. Any racial dynamics underpin-ning the shooting or its aftermath are unexplored.

Table 2 Symbolic strategies in full sample

Pro-strategies Percent Counter-strategies Percent

Individual strategies Individual strategiesRationalization 69.5 Repudiation 34.3Expurgation (victim) 61.9 Expurgation (officer) 16.2Inclusion (officer) 16.2 Inclusion (victim) 26.7Anonymity of officer 61.9 Naming & imaging officer 38.1Euphemization 45.7 Dysphemization 7.6Multi-strategy patterns Multi-strategy patterns

Violent officer actiona Violent officer actiona

Passive/reactive dominant 72.5 Active dominant 22.5Victim provocative actiona Victim provocative actiona

Active dominant 97.8 Passive/reactive dominant 2.2Aggregate results Aggregate resultsMean number of pro-strategies 3.46 Mean number of 1.10

(1.47) counter-strategies (1.15)

Notes: N = 105. Numbers in parentheses are standard deviations.a The share of articles in which passive/reactive voicing of police violence predominates andthose in which active voicing predominates do not add to 100 percent, due to the 5 percent ofarticles that feature both constructions equally. Patterns in the grammatical voicing of violentpolice officers exclude three stories that lack verbs to describe homicidal police actions.Likewise, patterns in the voicing of victims actions allegedly provoking their deaths excludethe 15 stories that use no verbs to depict such actions.



Repudiative claims are present in only 34.3 percent of sampled articles.Whereas both rationalizing and repudiative claims first appear, on average,in paragraph five, civilian eyewitness claims (86 percent critical; 14 articles),on average, appear in paragraph nine.

Objectification

Typical framing patterns, shown in Table 3, bolster the cogency of rationaliz-ing claims. Objectification is generally reserved for official claims about deadlyforce. Whereas 59.8 percent of official claims are framed objectively, only1.2 percent of non-official claims are framed as such (20.5 percent of officialclaims, which often used neutral words like said, are classified as neither).The preceding rationalization example, though enclosed by quotation marks,was coded as objectified, because an ostensibly unbiased source (the report)is cited rather than its human author, an elected State Attorney who, like allcriminal prosecutors, depends on police cooperation to do his job effectively.Furthermore, the citation is an afterthought appended to a complex sentence.

Subjectification

Opposing patterns apply with respect to the framing of non-official claims aboutdeadly force. Half of contradictory claims, compared to only 21.1 percentof supportive claims are subjectified (39.3 percent of contradictory claimsare coded as neither). Two excerpts distinguish the typical, personalizedpresentation of contradictory claimsin this case from a witnessand thetypical matter-of-fact tone of official claims:

Table 3 The subjective and objective framing of claims from various sources

Total Percent Percent PercentType of claim/source claims objectified subjectified neither

Source typeOfficial 458 59.8 19.7 20.5Non-official 161 1.2 57.8 41.0

Claim typeSupportive 436 58.7 21.1 20.2Contradictory 183 10.9 49.7 39.3

Source/claim subtypesOfficial supportive 416 61.5 20.0 18.5Official contradictory 42 42.9 16.7 40.5Non-official supportive 20 0.0 45.0 55.0Non-official contradictory 141 1.4 59.6 39.0

Notes: N = 619. Chi-square test results show that all non-overlapping groups exhibit statisticallysignificant differences in the portions of objectified and subjectified claims (p < .001).


Another of Millers cousins said she witnessed the incident. (Tyisha) nevermoved, said Anthonete Joiner, 18. She was reclined on her seat.

(Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 30 December 1998, p. A4)

An unarmed car burglar was accidentally killed by police yesterday during astruggle on an upper East Side street, police said.

(New York Daily News, 19 August 1999, p. 8)

The first excerpt recounts the death of Tyisha Miller, who was reportedlyunconscious in her car with a gun in her lap when police fired 27 shots ather. Though repudiative claims predominate, they are marked as subjective.In this excerpt, the eyewitness is personalized twice (another of Millerscousins and Anthonete Joiner, 18)and further subjectified with quota-tion marks. In the second example, by contrast, the anonymous officialsource is an afterthought. Quotation marks and actors and claimantsnames are all absent.

Expurgation of victims

We separately enumerated the accentuation or dramatization of crimes thatled to the police encounter, other information that taints victims, and unre-lated criminal history. Overall, 26 percent manifested expurgation throughdescriptions of pre-encounter crimes or criminal history, 19 percent throughderogating the victim as a person, and 17.1 percent through both means(62 percent total).

Most articles (56.2 percent) mention crimes committed by the victimsleading up to their police encounter, generally in the first paragraph (40 percent)or headline (32.4 percent). Although 35 percent of these comments werenot coded as expurgation, early references to the crime leading to thepolice encounter are an entry point for the reader. Against this context,police actions more often appear legally justified (Cerulo, 1998). Mentionsof criminal history (24.8 percent) are less innocuous, often introducing avigilante subtext. As shown by the following excerpt from the New YorkDaily News article above, noting a victims criminal background and thedearth of effective legal responses (and gratuitous reference to a box cut-ter and a putatively violent drug) fits better with vigilante than due processnarratives:

The person [who] was shot has 21 convictions or arrests and hes only30 years old, Giuliani said. He had on him a box cutter, a crack pipe andstolen property. It appears as if the police officers were justified in whatthey did.

(New York Daily News, 19 August 1999, p. 8)

This shooting of a man who, like Diallo, was unarmed and had noknown history of violence, occurred during persistent public outcry overthe Diallo case. Except for brief mention of ballistic evidence supporting



the official accidental shooting narrative, the rest of the article (intentionallyor not) constructs a foil for Diallo. The victims prior criminal history is thearticles central theme. Even a quotation from the victims mother forwardsthe vigilante subtext: Hell never steal from someones car again.

Over a third of the articles construct victims as demonized others in alter-nate ways such as referring to the victims martial-arts attacking positionor actions like lunged or menaced. Expurgation can also be achieved merelyby associating victims with deviant social contexts, for example, by describingthe location of a shooting as a hub of drug activity or a magnet for menlooking for anonymous homosexual encounters. Five articles use code wordswith negative racial connotations (e.g. gang member).

Expurgation of police

Relatively speaking, the expurgation of officers is rare, mild, and indirect.Sixteen percent of articles include text which likely arouses suspicion ofpolice actions. Only five mention prior violent incidents involving the offi-cers, and none describe abortive inquiries. Police personnel files are notreadily accessible. However, whereas third parties are occasionally quotedto reveal victims drug or mental health problems, no articles use hearsayevidence (e.g. civilians or ex-girlfriends who claim negative encounters withthe police shooter) to divulge accused officers violent reputations or per-sonal troubles. Besides mentions of prior complaints, expurgation is usuallyin the form of subjectified yet impersonal accusations leveled at officers byactivists or Victims families (e.g. body was riddled with bullets frompeople we pay to protect us).

Inclusion of victims

Positive language to describe the victim (e.g. father, good worker) occursin 26.7 percent of articles. Whereas expurgation describes victims by theirfatal flaws, inclusion elicits empathy (Peelo, 2006), such as for WilliamWhitfield, an unarmed, young man killed by an officer (later revealed tohave fired his weapon more frequently than any other NYC police officer)who followed him into a store (apparently in response to nearby gunfire).Despite being a next-day report, the article includes positive portrayals ofWhitfield from at least four friends and relatives: The dead mans grand-mother, Willie Mae Whitefield, also of Williamsburg, described him as ayoung man with a heart of gold who helped everyone, loved basketballand only had minor brushes with the law (NewYorkDailyNews, 26 December1997, p. 8).

This unusual investigative effort not only reflects the heart-wrenchingstoryline (an innocent killed while trying to arrange Christmas dinner forhimself, his girlfriend, and young children) but, perhaps, also the fact thatthe notorious police sodomization of Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant,




occurred in an adjacent neighborhood only four months earlier and wasstill a regular news topic. As exemplified above, the symbolic inclusion ofvictims is manifested primarily within subjectified, non-official claims.

Inclusion of police

Against expectations, the inclusion of police is exactly as infrequent as theirexpurgation. Only 16.2 percent of articles attach positive imagery or affec-tionate labels (15-year-veteran, and 18 commendations) to police.Whereas victims are subjectively humanized through positive personal qual-ities, police are lauded objectively, largely in terms of professional roles.

Anonymity and invisibility

More commonly, articles construct positive police images by default, leavingofficers characteristics to readers imaginations. Most articles (61.9 percent),especially initial incident reports, leave police perpetrators nameless. Only12 state that the names of the officers were withheld or unknown. Victimsanonymity is more rare (16.2 percent) and clearly explained. Most officersare also faceless. Only 26.7 percent of officers, compared to 73.3 of victims,were described in expurgatory or inclusive terms.

Euphemization

Nearly half of all articles (45.7 percent) employed euphemisms for lethalpolice actions. Fatally shot or some variant of this phrasing (e.g. fatallywounded) were the most common palliatives. Euphemisms, as below, mayhelp frame a homicidal act as a deviation from legitimate procedures ratherthan as violence: Prosecutors are trying to determine if the officer overre-acted when she fired at Haggerty, sources said (Chicago Sun Times, 9 June1999, p. A1). Describing the officer as possibly overreacting when she firedat the victim (whose mobile phone she allegedly mistook for a gun) insteadof using verbs like killed or shot her dead minimizes the gravity and will-fulness of the officers actions.

Whereas euphemisms were often relayed in the journalists own voice,only two journalists chose dysphemisms to describe police killings. Ofthe remaining nine dysphemisms, eight were attributed to non-officialsources.5 Examples include police execution and believes her son wasmurdered.

Passivization of the police

Passivization furthers the transfer of blame from police to victims but in anunanticipated manner. In only 20.6 percent of articles, the passive voicing



of police actions leading up to and including killing surpasses active voicing,and active voicing predominates in 64.7 percent. However, active voicinggenerally fails to impute primary agency to the police. Active voicing helpscast some police as protagonists. One article adopting a hero cop frameactively voices the response of Shawn Saunders, a Denver police officercredited with saving a suicidal man the previous yearwhen he encoun-tered two men fighting in a parking lot:

The man on top had an object in his hand and was jabbing it at the man onthe bottom. Saunders, holding a can of Mace, tried to break up the fight. Theman on top jumped to his feet and jumped at the officer, still holding theobject in his hand. Saunders dropped his Mace, pulled his gun and shotBowyer once in the chest Bowyer was clutching a can of mace

(Rocky Mountain News, 4 May 1998, p. 4A)

There is little doubt that the actively voiced series of actions in the fourthsentence imputes agency to the officer. However, when situated in thebroader context of the article, it becomes clear that this statement does notincriminate the officer. Rather, centering on the officer and his actions castshim as the protagonist and unfolds the story from his point of view. Thispurpose is achieved not only through active voicing and inclusive imagerybut also through describing the victims weapon through the officers eyes, asan unknown object, rather than objectively as a (non-lethal) can of mace.

Another reason that active voicing, as in the above example, does littleto delegitimize shootings is that lethal police acts are generally depicted asa direct reaction to a threat. Of the articles relying more on the activevoice, 65.2 percent are better described as mostly reactive. A prototypicalexample is, When he turned and pointed a gun at them, the officersopened fire.

Grouping passive and reactive voicing alters the basic pattern. Of the 102articles that use verbs to describe police actions, 72.5 percent rely primarilyon passive/reactive voice, and only 22.5 percent describe the police prima-rily as acting upon victims (5 percent do both equally).

Activation of the victim

In sharp contrast, articles overwhelmingly activate victims. Nearly 98 percentdescribe victims actions allegedly provoking their deaths in the active voice,and 2.2 percent rely primarily on the reactive voice. We uncovered no instancesin which activation casts victims as protagonists.

Interactions among strategies

The observed symbolic techniques interact in complex ways, alternatelyreinforcing, counterbalancing, and overlapping each other. Understandingthe role and success of these strategies in legitimating or de-legitimatingrequires more consideration of patterns that span multiple strategies.



Although 59 percent of articles evidence at least one counter-strategy(mean = 1.10), they are often overwhelmed by pro-strategies (mean = 3.46).Over half of the articles employ four or more distinct pro-strategies. Thisexcerpt illustrates how multiple symbolic strategies reinforce, magnify, ormoderate each others impact:

The officers chased the man into a nearby office park, where he turned andlunged at one of the officers, who shot the man once in the upper body. Aftera struggle, the suspect was tackled by both officers. As they were taking himinto custody, he collapsed and died, police said.

(Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 12 December 1997, p. H6)

Although the first words direct attention and agency to the police officers,this is offset by the grammatical activation of the victim. Grammatical pas-sivization of the officers (was tackled) furthers the transfer of agency tothe victim. The act of shooting the victim is reactive, and the victim is theonly person given agency in his death (he collapsed and died). Moreover,his death is temporally and spatially dissociated from the shooting.

Before this excerpt, the piece relays the police claim that a woman yelledthat the man had a knife. This article never verifies the existence of thewoman or the knife (nor do any subsequent articles). Yet this tenuous claimgrounds the rationalization of the killing, the victims lunging at officers. Asubjectified knife claim may raise questions as to if, how, and why the vic-tim lunged, casting doubt on the shootings justification.

Readers are provided little basis to question the police version, because itis divorced from the social actors and interactions that produced it. Somepolice claims are not labeled as such, and police and investigators are theonly cited sources. Moreover, the victims lunging at an officerthe mostcritical element of the due process narrativeemanates solely from thejournalists authoritative voice. Shoring up this tenuous legal justification,back-up vigilante imagery enters the scene. Helping to neutralize the deathof this essentialized villainous other, the piece relays investigators claimsthat the would-be auto thief exhibited erratic and violent behavior andpossessed suspected crack cocaine.

Before and after Diallo

Next, we examine whether the framing and construction of deadly forceshifted in the aftermath of Diallos death. The five Diallo articles werereplaced with five randomly selected articles from the sampling pool.During the pre-Diallo period, sampled articles, following crime reportingconventions, rarely reported victims race. Only three of the 50 pre-Dialloarticles did so and two stated ethnicity (Latino). In three separate articles,mentions of civil rights marches and lawsuits likely encouraged readers toimpute these characteristics and may have evoked the image of the policeoppressor. But, civil rights images and themes were generally overriddenby official narratives that rationalized shootings and expurgated and



activated victims. Among the 11 pre-Diallo articles containing civil rightsimagery or narratives (including the five race-explicit articles), nineincluded rationalization and five expurgated victims. They averaged 3.82pro-strategiestypical for this period.

As news related to the Diallo incident, which often centered on massiveprotests and inquired whether police are too quick to shoot black men, pro-liferated nationwide, this pattern changed. The racial dynamics and ramifi-cations of police shootings, itself, became a legitimate news frame and itcolored the lens through which reporters (and possibly audiences) viewedsubsequent shootings, particularly those that evoked Diallo (e.g. unarmedblack man, non-black police officers). Race or ethnicity was explicitlystated in 12 of 50 post-Diallo articles (plus the Diallo articles). The follow-ing opening lines of articles printed only five days and two weeks, respec-tively, after focal killings, illustrate how race emerged from obscurity afterthe Diallo tragedy:

Governor John G. Rowland has ordered the investigation into the fatalshooting of a black teenager by a white city police officer taken out of thehands of Hartford Police.

(Boston Globe, 18 April 1999, p. D8)

The Morris County Prosecutor, said yesterday that he would ask a grandjury to consider whether race played a role in the police shooting death of ablack driver

(New York Times, 16 June 1999, p. B6)

Post-Diallo news stories more often pursued a race angle, in part, due tochanging patterns of newsworthy events. Police killings fell from 369 in1998 to 308 and 309 in 1999 and 2000, respectively, before climbing backto 378 in 2001 (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2002). Incidents thatoccurred during the firestorm over Diallo may have generated more news-worthy reactions from political and investigative officials and non-officials.Accordingly, the share of post-Diallo news articles that centered on the inci-dent itself declined from 68 percent of the pre-Diallo sample to 50 percentpost-Diallo. Likewise, follow-up stories focused on ensuing investigations,trials, and protests jumped from 22 percent pre- to 42 post-Diallo.

Topical shifts, reflective of objective historical developments or not,reshape the overall symbolic construction of deadly force. When lethalpolice actions are actual or potential foci of political controversy, othersources besides police press releases are needed to craft the news. Accordingly,as Table 4 shows, three strategies to legitimize police shootingsrationalization,expurgation of victims, and passivization/reactivation of policesignificantlydeclined in the two years post-Diallo. The mean number of pro-police strate-gies also fell significantly during the post-Diallo period, especially during thefirst six months.6

Perhaps a more theoretically compelling question, however, is whetherthe Diallo incident changed how articles on a particular topic constructed



police killings. We find partial and preliminary evidence of two generalchanges. First, even initial incident reporters apparently took a more cau-tious, balanced tone. During the pre-Diallo period, despite statistical con-trols for article topic, articles are 80, 85, and 90 percent more likely toexhibit expurgation of victims, passivization/reactivation of police, andrationalization, respectively. However, these effects do not attain statisticalsignificance (p < .25), and it is possible that objective circumstances trig-gering deadly force also changed after Diallos death. Whether Dialloweighed more on the minds of police and civilians encountering each otheror on journalists encountering news of deadly force cannot be settled here.Second, after the Diallo shooting, different ideological strategies to under-mine the legitimacy of police killings emerge. Among the 13 post-Diallostories coded as evoking civil rights imagery only 46 percent includerationalization compared to 82 percent pre-Diallo (see earlier).Unexpectedly, one counter-strategy, expurgation of police officers, also

Table 4 Patterns of symbolic strategies in deadly force news before and after theDiallo shooting

Symbolic strategies Pre-Diallo (N = 50) Post-Diallo (N = 50)

Individual strategiesRationalization 78.0 62.0*Repudiation 32.0 34.0Expurgation (victim) 74.0 56.0*Expurgation (officer) 24.0 8.0**Inclusion (victim) 24.0 28.0Inclusion (officer) 14.0 20.0Anonymity of the officer 58.0 66.0Euphemization 50.0 46.0Dysphemization 6.0 6.0

Multi-strategy patternViolent officer actiona

Passive/reactive dominant 81.6 66.7*Active dominant 16.3 25.0

Total strategiesMean number of pro-strategies 3.86 3.26**

(1.1) (1.6)Mean number of counter-strategies 1.04 1.06

(1.2) (0.9)Mean length 413.78 476.98

(267.87) (289.9)

Notes: Numbers in parentheses are standard deviations.a Patterns in the grammatical voicing of violent police officers exclude three stories that lackverbs to describe homicidal police actions.*p < .10; **p < .05 (chi-square tests and two-tailed tests).



declines dramatically. Whereas 24 percent of pre-Diallo articles includesome text that, however mildly and indirectly, maligns individual officers,only 8 percent of post-Diallo stories do so, despite the greater salience ofcritical actors. Accordantly, the Boston Globe article above (701 words)waits until the last paragraph to note the two prior complaints for draw-ing his weapon against the officer, who shot an unarmed teenager in theback. This shift reflects an effort on the part of activists and, perhaps,some journalists to frame police and their victims, not as individuals, butas the archetypal white city police officer or black teenager. Within aprofessional police frame, such depersonalization shifts agency to victimsand helps impute rationality to police officers. Within a civil rights frame,however, the dearth of language demonizing individual police officersunderscores the pointoften echoed in quotations from activiststhatparticular police and their actions are merely symptoms of the larger, sys-temic problem of police racism.

Summary and discussion

Mainstream newspapers, in respect of reformist ideals (Lawrence, 2000),periodically document and problematize the inability or unwillingness ofpolice and judicial agencies to hold police accountable for killing civilians(Jackson, 1998; Hartocollis, 2006; Roe et al., 2007). Absent from theseinvestigations is discussion of how these same newspapers often normalize,obscure, and rationalize police violence. This article, consistent with Lawrence(2000) and Scraton and Chadwick (1986), documents that newspaperaccounts of deadly force typically lend primacy and authority to officialversions of events neatly circumscribed by laws governing deadly force.This is not due merely to the relative infrequency and inaccessibility of con-travening unofficial accounts. When counter-claims appear in crime incidentarticles, they are generally subjectified or otherwise devalued. The relianceupon official sources translates into a majority of news accounts thatrationalize and normalize police violence by associating it with the per-formance of a legitimate institutional role. This professional image is real-ized, in part, through the virtual absence of any information on personalproblems or features of police organizations that dispose some police offi-cers toward violence (Skolnick and Fyfe, 1993). Faceless officers lack themoral subjectivity of individual actors yet possess the immanent authorityof the Law itself. Readers may project any number of attributes onto theseamorphous figures. To some, faceless officers conjure masked vigilantes(e.g. Batman), symbolizing the hidden, vengeful will of society in general(Newman, 1993). In another frame, they may appear as agents of racial andclass oppression.

The victims of police homicide are generally not presented in the samesympathetic manner as are most murder victims (Peelo, 2006). The use of



crime frames raises the specter of the predatory criminal, a vilified andracialized media icon (Hall et al., 1978; Barak, 1994). Patterns of expurga-tion and reactive/passive and active constructions suggest that news storiesgenerally present police killings as the logical consequences of victims law-less or troubled behavior.

Critical assumptions and their implications for analysis

Scientific standards of evidence and proof are appropriately applied only toour analyses of the unambiguous properties of texts like identification byname and race. However, the findings that emerge from hermeneuticprocesses fall short of social scientific standards of validity (Meyer, 2001).The meaning of text and their constituent elements is relative to the intentand spatio-temporal context of the communicator, the structure of the textand medium, the structural position and subjective dispositions of theintended audience and interpreter, and other dimensions of production,content, and reception (Thompson, 1990). Reflexive analysis of how someof these contingencies guided, distorted, or limited our analysis of the legit-imation of deadly force is in order.

Our interpretations hinge on some grounded assumptions about thenewsmaking process. We assume that the images and perspectives affordedthe greatest primacy have as much to do with the narrative and political cuesavailable to journalists as with objective facts or even standard news prac-tices (Lawrence, 2000: 133). Though journalists are better positioned tolearn the objective facts of a particular case, we are better situated to judgehow well the balance of ideas and images within and across news accountsaccord with logic and scientifically grounded constructions of reality. Thus,our generalizations regarding the exaggerated, imbalanced focus on thecriminality and marginality of the victims of deadly force presume thatmost suspected criminals, as humans, are fluid blends of contradictorypropensities (Matza, 1964). Likewise, the prominence in news accounts ofrational, professional police-perpetrators conflicts with evidence that policeviolence is often employed for ambiguous or expressive reasons and may bea form of social and political repression (Skolnick and Fyfe, 1993; Chevigny,1995; Jacobs and O Brien, 1998).

Our analytical strategy may offer additional evidence of an indetermi-nate relationship between news constructions and objective reality. Wefind that the framing of police killings changed after the Diallo incident.Likely due to a decline in police killings coupled with heightened interestand activism in response to police killings, fewer stories centered on theincident itself. These accounts were longer, more prominent, and moreoften located within wider topical and cultural frames, and, thus, were lesslikely to relay the official version unchecked and to taint victims. WithDiallos image forged in the public consciousness, an expanded range ofnarrative possibilities included antagonistic, careless, or racist police officers



and innocent victims. Although declines in pro-police strategies withinparticular narrative templates (incidents, trials, etc.) are not statisticallysignificant, the expurgation of police declines dramatically. Rather thanabsolving officers involved in controversial shootings, this appears to facil-itate their association with the oppressor icon. However, within articlesthat do not evoke civil rights themes, it could serve to dissociate officersfrom those involved in more controversial incidents.

Another feature of communications that conditions their interpretationis the socially structured context in, for, and about which it was produced.While the examples provided are consciously attentive to context, discus-sions of broader interpreted patterns are set against an overly uniformcultural, political, and organizational backdrop. That said, our analyticaltasks of abstraction and generalization derive legitimacy from the factthat the basic elements of sampled crime incident narratives appear tofollow standard, predictable discourse patterns (Halmari and stman,2001) across space and time. Within a conceptualization of news asmeaning in the service of power (Thompson, 1990: 292), the standard-ized depiction of police and victims within news narratives on deadlyforce appears to supplant individual identities, personal histories, andsubjectivities with those of abstract stereotypes or archetypes infused withideological meaning.

To be sure, a non-trivial share of articles individualize, humanize, andcontextualize police, victims, and their deadly encounters. However, thesearticles had a decidedly different frame, tone, and apparent ideologicalfunction. Generally centered on protest activity or civil lawsuits, they pro-vided a platform for victims family members, civic leaders, and activists todecry instances or patterns of excessive force. Though clearly outnumberedby crime incident articles, critical articles may deserve more weight. Likegood dramatic narratives, serialized, in-depth news stories and associatededitorials and photographs draw readers into these incidents and succeed-ing events. Faithful followers of critical coverage, when reading about sub-sequent deaths at police hands and when judging police in other contexts,may reference these deviant cases.

Suggestions for further research

This article documents general patterns of ideological content. Futureresearch should examine systematic sources of variation in ideologicalpatterns (e.g. race of victim, the political leanings of newspapers andconstituencies). The methods developed here for analysis of newspapertexts can also be adapted for analysis of other types of legitimized vio-lence and of televised official violence, including fictional narratives.Likewise, investigating the secondary mediation of deadly force coverageby the audience (Thompson, 1990) is an essential next step in examiningthe legitimizing function of news coverage of police killings. Most Americans



distrust the news media (Sourcebook, 2006), and a sizable minority distruststhe police (Weitzer, 2002). A critical test of whether the symbolic strategiesexamined here legitimize or disparage deadly force is whether their presence,prominence, sequence and configurative elements expectedly influence readersmoral valuations (Cerulo, 1998). Whether the characteristics of individualreaders, especially race (Kaminski and Jefferis, 1998; Weizter and Tuch, 2004),modify these effects should also be examined. A final test of ideologicalimportance is whether variation in media construction of deadly force inci-dents predicts official responses.

Understanding the prominence of particular images and frames in crime-related news, political/legislative discourse, and in the wider culturerequires interrogating the semiotic or socio-linguistic patterns in newsaccounts and assessing their impact. We hope our article provides a tem-plate for the measurement of patterns of ideological content on a scale thatis large enough to explain variation in public and official responses to crimeand violence but small enough to keep varying dimensions and shades ofsymbolic significance within view.

Appendix: Sampled newspssapers, their locations, and articlefrequency

Newspaper name Location Frequency

Atlanta Journal and Constitution Atlanta, Georgia 9Boston Globe Boston, Massachusetts 3Boston Herald Boston, Massachusetts 1Chicago Sun Times Chicago, Illinois 6Columbus Dispatch Columbus, Ohio 2Daily News New York, New York 10Denver Post Denver, Colorado 6Houston Chronicle Houston, Texas 4Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Milwaukee, Wisconsin 3New York Times New York, New York 14Omaha World Herald Omaha, Nebraska 5Oregonian Portland, Oregon 2Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 4Rocky Mountain News Denver, Colorado 6San Diego Union-Tribune San Diego, California 2San Francisco Chronicle San Francisco, California 1Seattle Times Seattle, Washington 2St. Louis Post-Dispatch St. Louis, Missouri 8St. Petersburg Times St. Petersburg, Florida 3Star Tribune Minneapolis, Minnesota 1Tampa Tribune Tampa, Florida 3Times-Picayune New Orleans, Louisiana 1Washington Post The District of Columbia 9Total 105


Notes

We are grateful to Karen Cerulo, Daina Harvey, Jan Reinhart, MichaelWelch, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback and to JosephHirschfield, John Lang, Robin Simon, and Pierre Tannous for editorialassistance.

1. The cited reports aggregate justifiable homicides of felons, defined as any-one who, when killed, was involved (or thought to be involved) in a violentfelony (Brown and Langan, 2001: 3). For reasons that will become obvious,we reject the felon label.

2. One investigation revealed that, among 185 police brutality lawsuitsbetween 1986 and 1991, more defendants were promoted (9.2 percent) thandisciplined (4.3 percent), despite the $92 million in damages these lawsuitsexacted (cited in Vaughn et al., 2001).

3. There were two exceptions. One treated two cousins killed in a single inci-dent as a unit. The other detailed two unrelated but similar incidents andcovered them homologously.

4. Recent research characterizes, during time periods that overlap heavily orcompletely with our study period, the political leanings of the editorialboards of 13 sampled newspapers (which provide 65 percent of the articlesin our research sample). Eight leaned toward Democratic candidates or lib-eral positions, three gravitated in a rightward direction, and two toward thepolitical center (Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2006; Ho and Quinn, 2008). Tensampled newspapers are the only large daily newspaper serving their metro-politan community, and eight have a single competitor. All of them assignreporters to cover crime and police on a daily basis.

5. Two dysphemisms were also coded as expurgation of the police. Variants ofthe word slain were used six times but not coded as dysphemisms.

6. Multivariate regression models (not shown) affirm that once shifts in arti-cles topics are taken into account declines in these three pro-strategies areno longer statistically significant. The drop in the portion of crime incidentarticles explains the significant effect of the Diallo incident on expurgationof victims and passivization/reactivation, while rendering its negative effecton the number of pro-strategies only marginally significant (p = .095).Likewise, the rise in the share of articles centered on investigations or trials(often of controversial killings) is the most important explanation of thedecline in rationalization.

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PAUL J. HIRSCHFIELD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers Universityin New Brunswick, NJ. His scholarship focuses on the causes and consequencesof criminalization, especially in the realm of inner-city schools and neighbor-hoods. His current projects focus on the impact of proactive policing on childrensmoral attitudes and delinquent behavior and on the extent and impact of thereintegration of school-aged offenders into New York City public schools.

DANIELLA SIMON received her BA in Sociology from Rutgers University. She hassince been working as a Board Certified Assistant Behavior Analyst, providingearly intensive behavioral interventions to young children with developmentaldisabilities.


Documents

Theoretical Criminology 2010 Hirschfield 155 82