Racial Violence in ‘Action’: Police Storytelling and Narrativisation in the Inquiry of Jermaine Baker

Carson Cole Arthur

The British Journal of Criminology, 2025, vol. 65, issue 3, 658-672

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: deaths in police custody; racial violence; narrative; deconstruction; police ethnography; blackness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/bjc/azae070 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:crimin:v:65:y:2025:i:3:p:658-672.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The British Journal of Criminology is currently edited by Eamonn Carrabine

More articles in The British Journal of Criminology from Centre for Crime and Justice Studies Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().