Racial Violence in ‘Action’: Police Storytelling and Narrativisation in the Inquiry of Jermaine Baker
Arthur, Carson Cole (2025) Racial Violence in ‘Action’: Police Storytelling and Narrativisation in the Inquiry of Jermaine Baker. The British Journal of Criminology, 65 (3). pp. 658-672. ISSN 1464-3529
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Abstract
Police tell stories not only to make sense of their experiences but also, as this paper argues, they tell stories to establish legal doctrines and support justifications for their decisions. Departing from police ethnography and narrative criminology, adopting a deconstructive and critical Black Studies perspective, this paper reads the narrative W80 (a London Met police firearms officer) provided in the inquiry into the death of Jermaine Baker, a 28-year-old Black man, in 2015, to examine how uncertainty was both conditional and functional in the narrative to sustain the justification of racial violence. W80’s narrative reveals how causality undergirds the law of self-defence he cited and related on. Problematizing the distinction of story and action, this paper analyses W80’s narrative for its thematic of fiction and truth. Attending to this, the paper argues the conditions of uncertainty and open-endedness of W80’s narrative reserved for racial violence to be reasoned and justified as lawful.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Additional Information: | This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in 'The British Journal of Criminology' following peer review. The version of record [Carson Cole Arthur, Racial Violence in ‘Action’: Police Storytelling and Narrativisation in the Inquiry of Jermaine Baker, The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 65, Issue 3, May 2025, Pages 658–672] is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azae070. |
| Keywords: | deaths in police custody, racial violence, narrative, deconstruction, police ethnography, blackness |
| Divisions: | Sciences > Criminology |
| Depositing User: | James Bisset |
| Date Deposited: | 12 Oct 2026 08:54 |
| Last Modified: | 14 Oct 2026 01:42 |
| URI: | https://ulaw.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/77 |
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