Bandes on Video, Popular Culture, and Police Excessive Force: The Elusive Narrative of Over-Policing @BandesSusan

Susan A. Bandes, DePaul University College of Law, is publishing Video, Popular Culture, and Police Excessive Force: The Elusive Narrative of Over-Policing in volume 2018 of the University of Chicago Legal Forum. Here is the abstract.

Allegations of police brutality are generally credibility contests between the officer and the accuser, and thus their resolution hinges on pre-existing assumptions about what stories are credible. There is a dominant story about policing, reinforced by the courts, the media, and popular culture, and it powerfully shapes the way police conduct is viewed and evaluated. The story is generally told from the police perspective, not that of the suspect. It assumes the good faith of police, but often questions the motives or credibility of suspects. It views police officers as individual, autonomous agents and ignores structural forces and constraints. It views policing as an exercise in crime-fighting and peace-keeping, rather than a means of social control. The story is so deeply ingrained in both culture and law that it is hard to imagine what sorts of evidence could challenge or disrupt it. For this symposium on the tenth anniversary of the last episode of The Wire, I consider the question: did The Wire disrupt the conventional narrative about police brutality? And the larger question: what would it take to do so? I begin by examining the promise and limits of raw video footage as a counter-narrative. Video evidence has helped galvanize public outrage, but at the same time the failures of video evidence to persuade legal decision makers have been striking. It appears that the dominant narrative is so powerful it makes jurors disbelieve their own eyes. I then turn to The Wire, and to the question of media’s potential to bridge the vast divide between police-saturated neighborhoods and the broader public view of police-civilian interactions. Though I do not revise my previous assessment that The Wire was “the greatest television series ever made,” I argue that The Wire, for all its immersive attention to West Baltimore, did not really capture the experience of living in a police-occupied neighborhood in which one’s every innocuous move can lead to a confrontation—even a fatal confrontation—with police. The Wire was strong on the problem of under-policing, but it didn’t do justice to the problem of over-policing, or the experience of living with it. I conclude with thoughts about the role of data analytics, media, and storytelling in bridging these experiential divides.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.