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Adding Insult to Injury: The Justification Frame in Official Narratives of Officer-Involved Killings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2022

Traci Burch Open the ORCID record for Traci Burch [Opens in a new window]
Traci Burch*
Affiliation:
American Bar Foundation, Chicago, IL 60611, USA Department of Political Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA
*
E-mail: t-burch@northwestern.edu
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Abstract

This article identifies the justification frame as a common narrative used by public officials to justify the use of lethal force by police. Officials deploy the justification frame to obfuscate the use of force or claim that victims posed a threat to officers in order to justify civilian deaths. I examine initial statements given in the aftermath of officer-involved deaths in 2016, focusing on incidents where an on-duty officer used force against victims who did not pose a threat when they were killed. I find that elements of the justification frame appear frequently in the explanations issued after these incidents. Statements about Black decedents are more likely to deploy the justification frame.

Keywords

Police use of forceRace and policing
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , November 2022 , pp. 359 - 384
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association

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