Speaking as a matter of fact : racial violence, accountability, and the inquests of Black people who have died in England/Wales police custody

Arthur, Carson Cole (2024) Speaking as a matter of fact : racial violence, accountability, and the inquests of Black people who have died in England/Wales police custody. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This thesis rejects the conventional view among some criminologists that the police are not held to account when there is a death in custody due to the empirical logic that undergirds such a perspective. Instead, taking a deconstructive and Black Studies approach, I argue that the accounts the police provide at inquests sustain violence and, in particular, justify the death of black people. This proposition is based on a reconceptualisation of account-giving and accountability. Following Jacques Derrida’s writings on testimony, I accentuate the narrative aspects of account-giving while associating accountability with a structure of knowledge that is designed for the police as an ethical framework guiding decision-making and standard operating procedures. Historically and to this day, black people are disproportionately killed in England and Wales police custody, yet this violence is not limited to the event of their death or killing but continues and extends in the Coroner’s Court with the representation of their death or killing as a social event. Drawing from Denise Ferreira da Silva’s concept of ‘social event’ (2017) (where a black person is already always dead and their death is categorised as a social phenomenon rather a political ethical crisis), I reveal the social factors that composed police narratives in four inquests of black men killed by police in London during the early 2000s. Through a deconstructive reading, I analyse the court transcripts of police account-giving and, instead of simply identifying ‘negative’ representations of black people, I go further than other criminological studies (Pemberton 2008; Scraton and Chadwick 1986; 1987; Williams et al. 2023) by examining the metaphysical conditions that allow for account-giving. This thesis departs from narrative criminology (Fleetwood et al. 2019; McGregor 2021) in that it considers not merely the product of a narrative but the very operation and production of a narrative. Following Black Studies scholarship that defines anti-black violence as a metaphysical violence (Ferreira da Silva 2017; Jackson 2020; Warren 2018), I explore the narrative voice and self-reflexivity that is part of account-giving, and thus do not limit my analysis merely to the content of a narrative of black social death. I contend that account-giving functions for the police as a mode of rationalising anti-black violence within their narratives of decision-making. And yet, the event of a death and its representation are inseparable. It is precisely this ambiguity between event and representation, between truth and fiction, that opens a space for anti-blackness to write its narrative. The materials I analyse are court transcripts. While reading the transcripts is a primary component of my research, this reading is not simply an interpretative exercise. Following a deconstructive approach, I consider reading and writing as constitutive of one another. Thus, I attend to how a police officer reads, that is to say, how they understand their account-giving, and how they express this understanding in terms of cognition, e.g., perception and memory. I do not offer an interpretation of what an officer communicated or meant in the Coroner’s Court, but rather reveal the operation of interpretation within the giving of an account.

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