NCJ Number
179343
Journal
New York University Law Review Volume: 74 Issue: 1 Dated: April 1999 Pages: 18-122
Date Published
April 1999
Length
105 pages
Annotation
Despite periodic public outcries, it remains notoriously difficult to prosecute police brutality, and the author attributes much of this difficulty to the overwhelming power of the stories mainstream American culture tells about encounters leading to police violence.
Abstract
In particular, the author describes the racial dimension of police brutality cases and demonstrates how this dimension and other authority narratives have been used to defeat counter-narratives related by victims and their representatives. He focuses on the limited but important role of fictional counter-stories in challenging the epistemological apparatus by which police brutality is supported. To illustrate this point, he offers a fictionalized narration of the events leading up to one of the most significant police brutality prosecutions of this century, Screws v. United States. Using the story of Screws as a starting point, the author moves on to two broader discussions: (1) compares the Screws account with dominant narratives of the case, adopted either explicitly or implicitly by almost all the legal and jurisprudential actors who participated in the case; and (2) examines theoretical justifications offered by his colleagues for the use of storytelling in legal writing, highlighting ways in which his narrative illustrates the possibilities for such storytelling and identifying several additional benefits not emphasized in the existing literature. The author concludes with a discussion of another famous police brutality case, the Rodney King beating case, Koon v. United States. In the discussion of Koon, the author demonstrates the persistence of prevailing cultural narratives of police brutality cases, in part by drawing attention to similarities in the ways in which both the Screws and Koon cases were portrayed by the government and perceived by the public. In the end, through both argument and demonstration, the author makes a strong case for the importance of literary fiction as a tool for challenging the core of dominant beliefs about race, crime, and social hierarchy implicit in reigning authority narratives. 395 footnotes