Handling video of [police] violence

The proliferation of video evidence has opened new opportunities to scrutinize police use-of-force incidents, including for observational and interactionist researchers. While these opportunities are exciting, it is necessary, in our view, to reflect on the lens through which these analyses occur. We examine how Harold Garfinkel’s notions of unique adequacy and accounts can be applied to video data from use-of-force incidents. To demonstrate, we analyze a video of a violent arrest that occurred in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, as well as transcripts of a subsequent civil action against the arresting officer, claiming damages for excessive force not in the arrest as a whole but for one specific action within the arrest – a punch to the back of the head of the plaintiff. We argue it may be politically advantageous to employ theoretical frames to a video analysis that are not germane to police practice itself (i.e. “procedural justice” or sociology of emotions) but that doing so also deviates from developing an understanding of the lived experiences of those depicted in the scene or the situated practices of making sense of those scenes as a course of adjudicative work. We take it that these would be the objective of a truly interactionist sociology.