“You Don’t Need a Rocket Scientist to Figure Out What Could Happen”: Reasoning Practices in Police Use of Force Trials

Trials involving police as defendants are rare but are significant events that give insight into police violence and its adjudication. This article explores the reasoning practices through which court actors navigate the disjunctive accounts created by competing claims of “what happened” in a police...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Law & social inquiry 2024-11, Vol.49 (4), p.1-27
Main Authors: Nave, Carmen, Meehan, Albert J., Dennis, Ann Marie
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accountability
Acquittals & mistrials
Attorneys
Body cameras
Convictions
Courts
Credibility
Criticism
Deadly force
Defendants
Elaboration
Ethnomethodology
Evidence
Experts
Juries
Murders & murder attempts
Police
Police brutality
Police shootings
Shooting
Testimony
Trials
Violence
Witnesses
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Summary:Trials involving police as defendants are rare but are significant events that give insight into police violence and its adjudication. This article explores the reasoning practices through which court actors navigate the disjunctive accounts created by competing claims of “what happened” in a police shooting. The data is drawn from trial testimony of officers and “use of force experts” in police deadly force cases in the United States. We focus on use of force experts who use a veneer of science and police logic to assert particular visions of officer “reasonableness.” We suggest that the systems of reasoning that lawyers and witnesses use in these cases create accounts of police violence that conflict with mundane reasoning and challenge credibility. We show that the proliferation of different reasoning practices and the elaboration of a “police logic” serve to insulate officers from criticism and accountability—albeit, not always successfully.
ISSN:0897-6546
1747-4469
1545-696X
DOI:10.1017/lsi.2024.19