Police Violence in Black and White

Abstract Drawing on articles from The New York Times and the New York Amsterdam News, this study analyzes reporting on the police killings of ten-year-old Clifford Glover in 1973, and twenty-three-year-old Sean Bell in 2006, in both instances by New York City Police Department (NYPD) 103rd Precinct officers in Jamaica, Queens. Using critical discourse analysis to study the differences in newspaper representations of police killings, this analysis follows Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s classic 1892 study Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases. Wells-Barnett’s framework of Black Press and White Press is applied to this contemporary comparison of news coverage, asking how Black Press and White Press challenge or accept official police accounts of encounters where police kill Black youth and adults, as well as how they engage community members in their account of events leading to fatal police contact. The study historically contextualizes the localized relationship between police violence, media, and protest by focusing on depictions of two separate, publicized police killings and subsequent officer acquittals in the same neighborhood and precinct, thirty-three years apart. Studying the history of policing and rebellion in one neighborhood provides critical insight into representations of localized police violence by Black Press and White Press over time. The findings of this study function together to explain racialized discourse on police, victims, and communities in the wake of historic police violence and officer acquittals.