Police Violence in Black and White

Abstract

Drawing on articles from The New York Times and the New York Amsterdam News, this study analyzes reporting on the police killings of ten-year-old Clifford Glover in 1973, and twenty-three-year-old Sean Bell in 2006, in both instances by New York City Police Department (NYPD) 103rd Precinct officers in Jamaica, Queens. Using critical discourse analysis to study the differences in newspaper representations of police killings, this analysis follows Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s classic 1892 study Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases. Wells-Barnett’s framework of Black Press and White Press is applied to this contemporary comparison of news coverage, asking how Black Press and White Press challenge or accept official police accounts of encounters where police kill Black youth and adults, as well as how they engage community members in their account of events leading to fatal police contact. The study historically contextualizes the localized relationship between police violence, media, and protest by focusing on depictions of two separate, publicized police killings and subsequent officer acquittals in the same neighborhood and precinct, thirty-three years apart. Studying the history of policing and rebellion in one neighborhood provides critical insight into representations of localized police violence by Black Press and White Press over time. The findings of this study function together to explain racialized discourse on police, victims, and communities in the wake of historic police violence and officer acquittals.

Unarmed Violence, Police Perspectives, Community Struggle: Black- and White-centric news accounts of Black Protests about Policing in the U.S. 1994-2010

“…Huspek (2004) examines local White and Black coverage of the 1998 police killing of Tyisha Miller in Riverside, California, finding that Black newspapers gave extensive coverage of Black activists and allegations of evidence of racial bias among the police and broader racial conflicts in the community, while the White papers relied on official sources, printed details about the victim's life and state of mind that were irrelevant to how she had been killed while ignoring details about the officers' lives and actions that implied a history of racism, and disparaged the Black activists who were protesting. Roychoudhury (2022) performs a detailed analysis of the "no angel" and "community as disaster" conceptual metaphors in ten front-page New York Times and Amsterdam News articles about two police killings in Jamaica, Queens, New Nork, the 1973 killing of 10year-old Clifford Glover and the 2006 killing of Sean Bell. Relevant to the present project, while both newspapers used the "community as disaster" metaphor-which uses natural disaster language to describe actual or feared community responses in the form of unrest, violence, or disorder-they used it differently.…”

‘I have controlled so much’: Discourse of prison violence

“…Language is ‘a magnificently complex, many-sided phenomenon that is the best way we have to understanding humanness in all its exciting richness and complexity’ (Chafe, 1990: 21). There have been some western studies on the discourse of violence, such as police violence (Coleman, 2018; Roychoudhury, 2022) and violent crime (Coates, 1997; Lea, 2007; McKendy, 2006), in particular violence toward women in intimate relationships (Adjei, 2018; Ferraro, 1996; LeCouteur and Oxlad, 2011). Through analyzing the accounts of the perpetrators, victims or third parties such as news reporters, how they understand violence and the relationship between/among them and the world is revealed.…”