ABSTRACT
Addressing a lingering outcome of 2020’s unprecedented global rebellions against anti-Black police violence, the stubborn adherence to the term ‘police brutality’, is long overdue. Police reform organizations, elected officials, academics, media, celebrities, community leaders, surviving loved ones, and influencers continue to use this phrase when describing the physically vicious and often deadly actions of law enforcement. Many believe that atrocious police behaviours are violations of criminal or civil rights law as well as transgressions against the policies governing police and sheriff’s departments. While the phrase is constantly invoked when describing and criticizing the actions of law enforcement officers who have presumably abrogated the protocols and policies of the policing state, it is almost always the case that the acts in question are formally or effectively sanctioned by both institutional policy and (criminal) law. ‘Brutality’ implies an exception to the rule, a corruption of state power that besmirches an otherwise sound (or at least salvageable) institution of social order. What if such beliefs are misled or fraudulent? In what follows, I demystify the terms of police brutality for the sake of encouraging a more rigorous, supple conceptualization of the complexity and scope of police terror. The latter concept suggests a departure from reformist frameworks that vest fraudulent hope in the possibility that police power can be separated from its foundations in anti-Blackness as well as various forms of racial-colonial violence (including and especially in the African context).
