Racial Violence in ‘Action’
Police Storytelling and Narrativisation in the Inquiry of Jermaine Baker
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8401743 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Carson Cole Arthur (0000-0002-8843-1002, The University of Law, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 65 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 658-672 |
| Publication date | 2025-06-05 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The British Journal of Criminology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-0955 • E-ISSN: 1464-3529 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/bjc/azae070 |
| OpenAlex | W4403382332 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 30 |
Police tell stories not only to make sense of their experiences but also, as this paper argues, they tell stories to establish legal doctrines and support justifications for their decisions. Departing from police ethnography and narrative criminology, adopting a deconstructive and critical Black Studies perspective, this paper reads the narrative W80 (a London Met police firearms officer) provided in the inquiry into the death of Jermaine Baker, a 28-year-old Black man, in 2015, to examine how uncertainty was both conditional and functional in the narrative to sustain the justification of racial violence. W80’s narrative reveals how causality undergirds the law of self-defence he cited and related on. Problematizing the distinction of story and action, this paper analyses W80’s narrative for its thematic of fiction and truth. Attending to this, the paper argues the conditions of uncertainty and open-endedness of W80’s narrative reserved for racial violence to be reasoned and justified as lawful
Action (physics) · Action research · Art · Criminology · Mathematics education · Narrative · Sociology · Storytelling · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology · Rhetoric and Communication Studies · South African History and Culture
The Force of Truth
The functions of the police in modern society
Changing Police Culture
Reproducing Order
Thinking the Event
Black resistance to British policing
The Policing Web
Defensive Killing by Police
Make believe
Falling Before the Pile of Debris
Reimaging ‘the Self’ in Criminology
Ethnography and narrative
A Question of Sacrifice
On Negativity
The Tellability of Police Use-of-force
Unhomeliness—Afterlife and Testimony
Culture as Figurative Action
Observations on the Making of Policemen
Good People and Dirty Work
Riding shotgun - Front-seat research and the socio-material considerations of ethnography on the move
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |