Collective Memory and Police Violence

Mistrust of state institutions, local municipal police, as well as federal authorities, is historically informed. For Black communities that have endured various forms of racial injury, abuse, and discrimination from public and private institutions, contemporary incidents of police misconduct and violence are part of a historical continuum. This local collective reservoir of information is the result of a rich reserve of memory often absent from dominant productions of knowledge and history (Nora Reference Nora1989), but evident among Black people in Black space (Anderson Reference Anderson2014) due to the persistence of Black oral tradition (Brown Reference Brown2016), Black documentation and publication (Wells-Barnett Reference Wells-Barnett1892), and Black political struggle (Gregory Reference Gregory1999; Hunter Reference Hunter2013, Morris Reference Morris1984).

Black space, as understood by Elijah Anderson (Reference Anderson2014) describes those parts of American cities that are relegated to where “the Black people live.” It is understood in opposition to White space, where Black people are not to be found residing, or in relation to the Cosmopolitan Canopy, where these two worlds may collide, momentarily without tension or disruption. The present study considers how police violence is publicly and historically understood, concentrated in Black space or the “Black Belts” of American Cities (Drake and Cayton, Reference Drake and Cayton1945).

Elucidating the impact of police violence on individual neighborhoods and cities starts with revisiting incidents of police violence and collective action in urban Black communities that have received national attention. Riots erupted routinely in urban centers in response to unjust police practices during the mid-twentieth century. The riots in Watts, California, Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit, Michigan are the most notable of the 1960s, each necessitating federal intervention (Parenti Reference Parenti2015) and provoking the landmark Kerner Commission Report which famously declared that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

This article expounds historical research dealing with racialized discourse on urban Black people and police violence and adapts its conceptualization of racialized discourse in press media from Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s (Reference Wells-Barnett1892) classic Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases. In her investigative work, by contrasting the reporting of Black-owned-and-operated newspapers with White ones, she demonstrates that White men’s panic around miscegenation—consensual sexual relations—between White women and Black men was at the core of lynch law, not, as many at the time contended, sexual assault and rape. In fact, in many cases Black men were coerced into sexual activity by White women who threatened their livelihood if they chose not to engage. Whereas Wells-Barnett reports on the role of the “Afro-American Press” in investigating these circumstances surrounding lynch law in the American South, I analyze news reporting on the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century problem of police violence, specifically in New York City, and ask whether similarly racialized depictions of criminality and brutishness are still at play, especially emphasizing the role of Black Press in bringing them to light.

Wells-Barnett (Reference Wells-Barnett1892) refers to “The Malicious and Untruthful White Press” reporting libelous depictions of hypersexual and inherently criminal Black men who must be controlled before their urges engulf them. In using Wells-Barnett’s work as a starting point, I also contribute to research that connects the American era of lynching by mob and contemporary racial disparities in police use of force (King et al., Reference King, Messner and Baller2009).

Following the work of Darnell Hunt (Reference Hunt1997) and Regina Lawrence (Reference Lawrence2000), this article contributes to research on mass media depictions of police violence and collective action in the wake of police officer acquittals following fatal police encounters. Whereas Hunt analyzes racialized audience perceptions of television news during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, I analyze news discourse on urban uprisings in the wake of police killings in one New York City community and police precinct over time. Lawrence (Reference Lawrence2000) demonstrates how frontpage news coverage of police brutality in mainstream publications like The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times are largely defined by police accounts of incidents, though media visibility does allow the socially marginalized to voice dissent.

Cathy Cohen’s (Reference Cohen1999) exploration of reporting in the New York Amsterdam News guides my conceptualization of Black political struggle and boundary making. Cohen’s (Reference Cohen1999) analysis of depictions of Black gay men and Black drug users troubles how intraracial boundaries were maintained during the AIDS epidemic in determining which Black people’s deaths were worthy of coverage. My analysis cuts across these seminal studies, focusing specifically on the depiction of Black victims of police violence and the collective action that follows police killings, asking what different newsrooms deem worthy of coverage.

This article also extends the essential work of Michael Huspek (Reference Huspek2004). His study explores local White Press and Black Press reporting on the 1998 police killing of nineteen-year-old Tyisha Miller, a young Black woman, while she was unconscious in her car in Riverside, California. Huspek’s theoretically guided empirical analysis of press practices confirms that oppositional views in press replicate the worldviews of their readerships. He argues, as did Wells-Barnett, that White Press distort truth and reality by often erasing the role of race in their reporting altogether and by presuming an unbiased and objective treatment of criminality and police action. He advocates, as did Wells-Barnett, for the significance of Black Press as a means of gaining a more complete understanding of the truth of racial violence instead of, as critics suggest, thinking of non-mainstream, ethnically specific news media as biased or niche and incomparable to the journalistic rigor of White Press. I conduct a similar study to Huspek (Reference Huspek2004), but of police killings of a boy and young man in two different eras in the same community, allowing for historic comparison across time.

In the time following police shootings of unarmed individuals, press media play a pivotal role in discursively setting the tone and providing information on what happened: who was killed, where were they killed, and why were they killed? Consequently, these questions probe the public to consider whether death was a preventable outcome, and whether use of lethal force was at all necessary or justified. Thus, the discourse around victims and perpetrators of police killings informs collective consciousness and memory about police power and the allowable treatment of people by authorized state agents.

Newspapers play an important role in the process of emotion management in the wake of police violence by regulating discourse. According to Michael Schwalbe and colleagues (Reference Schwalbe, Godwin, Golden, Schrock, Thompson and Wolkomir2000), emotional subjectivity can be conditioned in ways that reproduce inequality. This means that news depictions of police killings of unarmed Black children and adults, as well as collective protests in the wake of officer acquittals, could reproduce inequality by conditioning emotional control by those enraged by the actions of officers, judges, juries, and other state actors by encouraging sympathy for officers in their actions during fatal encounters.

This article conceptualizes collective memory as mutually constitutive: the broader national collective memory of events involving police violence and urban uprisings and the local neighborhood memory, in this case of Jamaica, Queens, New York, are simultaneously informed by news coverage from journalists both in local, demographically targeted papers and nationally published mainstream newspapers. Central to this study’s framework is more fully understanding the relationship between the news and collective memory and forthcoming research from the author will more fully capture collective memory of police violence and protest through oral histories with long term neighborhood residents.

Contemporary Police Violence

When police use lethal force and kill both young and adult civilians, people rely on various sources of news to learn about what unfolded during the fatal encounter (Hunt Reference Hunt1997; Lawrence Reference Lawrence2000; Zimring Reference Zimring2017). From the reason for initial contact to escalation of violence and eventual use of force to kill, readers may come across varied and differential accounts of the actions of officers and victims, based on their news source. News media provide crucial information about the events leading up to police officers’ use of deadly force, as well as vital facts—or fictions—about the victims and officers involved. The way these events are described bear meaning for how the public interprets where and why police use lethal force, and for what laws, policies, and practices are at stake.

A landmark example of this phenomenon is how the filmed and highly publicized killing of forty-three-year-old Eric Garner by NYPD 120^th Precinct officer Daniel Pantaleo on Staten Island in 2014 led to statewide and national dialogue about the justifiability of police use of chokeholds, despite a state grand jury’s decision not to indict Pantaleo that same year. Another example of police use of lethal force leading to widespread calls for reform is the highly publicized police killing of twenty-six-year-old Breonna Taylor by Louisville Municipal Police Department plainclothes officers in 2020, which sparked national debate about discontinuing no-knock raids and other military-style tactics or otherwise defunding municipal police altogether. This is again following a grand jury decision not to charge officers involved in the death of Breonna Taylor.

Two contemporary instances of news reporting around the victims of high-profile police killings illuminate the tenuous relationship between Black people and the “White Press” following police killings.

The first surrounds the phrase ‘no angel’ as it is used by New York Times writers to describe Michael Brown, the eighteen-year-old who was gunned down by police in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, spurring protests and collective political action nationwide, largely under the banner of #BlackLivesMatter. The New York Times published a controversial profile on Michael Brown who was shot to death by Darren Wilson, a White police officer, in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014. In it, the author writes “Michael Brown, 18, due to be buried on Monday, was no angel, with public records and interviews with friends and family revealing both problems and promise in his young life” (Eligon Reference Eligon2014). I mention this profile because it informs my first finding: the prevalence of ‘no angel’ discourse in describing Black victims of police shootings.

The second involves a decision of the family of Eric Garner, the father who was asphyxiated by police in the Staten Island borough of New York City, spurring similar protests around the city and country. The family of Eric Garner, following the death of Eric Garner’s outspoken activist daughter, Erica, publicly proclaimed that they would not speak to White reporters about anything pertaining to their family’s loss. This decision sparked outrage from many, as they felt it was unfair to single out White journalists in this way (Harriot Reference Michael2018).

Both of these contemporary instances point to criticism of journalism conducted by “White Press” reporters on Black victims of police violence—as well as their families and communities—and the tense relationship between Black families and communities and the mainstream press, especially following police killings of unarmed Black people.

Perceived (il)legitimacy of, and consequent ramifications for, law enforcement officials when they use deadly force depends greatly on one’s sources of news media (Hall Reference Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke and Roberts1978; Huspek Reference Huspek2004; Stone and Socia, Reference Stone and Socia2017). News reporting on the officers and victims involved in police killings impacts how the role of local law enforcement officials and police power is understood and imagined, both in its current state and its potential future.

Existing research suggests that news consumption directly impacts perceived police legitimacy. The relationship between engagement with contemporary forms of media, such as online—internet and social media—modes of obtaining news and attitudes toward police are explored in depth by Jonathan Intravia and colleagues (Reference Intravia, Thompson and Pickett2020). They find that consuming “negative” police stories on the internet is associated with perceiving the police as less legitimate. Jane F. Gauthier and Lisa M. Graziano (Reference Gauthier and Graziano2018) find that consumption of Internet news is related to negative attitudes about police and exposure to “negative” news about police impacts perceptions, but only if the coverage is seen as fair. The present study adds to this literature by examining how Black and mainstream press report differently on localized police killings over time and how this impacts perceptions of police.

Current research finds that police officers perceive ‘hostile’ media coverage of policing as negatively impacting civilian attitudes towards police, causing a fear that allegations of misconduct could be a potential consequence (Nix and Pickett, Reference Nix and Pickett2017). Further, research finds that police organizations exploit their relationship with news media to maintain legitimacy in the face of public criticism (Chermak and Weiss, Reference Chermak and Weiss2005). The implications of this relationship between the police and press media require further analysis, with an emphasis on differential and contested coverage of police accounts, especially from mainstream and ethnically targeted news outlets.

Policing in New York City

This research extends urban and public health research on the determinants of policing behaviors and “justifiable” homicides (Gilbert and Ray, Reference Gilbert and Ray2015) as well as the role of race in state and city policing more broadly (Vargas and McHarris, Reference Vargas and McHarris2017). This article adds a specific example of police violence in one neighborhood over time and the pervasiveness of “racial threat” in determining what is a “justifiable” police killing. Similarly, this article also expands upon recent research on police violence and Black crime reporting (Desmond et al., Reference Desmond, Papachristos and Kirk2016) by historically analyzing the communal reception of police following killings of unarmed civilians and officer acquittals. Additionally, the larger context of “ghettoization” as the vehicle for policing Black lives, as theorized by John R. Logan and Dierdre Oakley (Reference Logan and Oakley2017), provides background on policing urban Black communities, which I expand upon with this research study. Further, Geoff Ward (Reference Ward2018) contextualizes the pivotal role of White supremacy as basis for policing practices throughout U.S. history and the centrality of racial social control to policing since its conception as a means of selective law enforcement. These histories, he argues, are living, and must receive this treatment in research.

At the heart of New York City’s policing strategy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century lies the “Broken Windows” theory of neighborhood disorder and policing. The Broken Windows theory asserts that any form or sign of neighborhood disorder leads to further disorder and crime and the ultimate degradation of a community (Wilson and Wilson, Reference Wilson and Wilson1982). This means that one broken window will ultimately lead to the decline of an entire building because one window left unfixed shows a lack of care about the building’s physical condition. This philosophy, with roots in social psychology, is extended to punish low-level crimes or quality-of-life behaviors, like loitering, vagrancy, graffiti, and jumping turnstiles. Former Police Commissioner Bill Bratton supported a policy of severe punishments for quality-of-life crimes in early 1990s New York City when the metropolis was “plagued” with criminal activity. This mode of policing was credited with contributing to the city’s large drop in violent crime over the past three decades. In April 2015, Bratton, who was once again commissioner under Mayor Bill de Blasio, wrote that he stands by broken windows even when considering charges that the strategy has racially disparate impacts on arrests and incarceration (Kelling and Bratton, Reference Kelling and Bratton2015).

Bill Bratton argues that higher punishments for lower levels of crime are preventative measures and ultimately decrease the number of individuals incarcerated over time. However, many argue that these policies disproportionately affect young Black and Latinx residents and ultimately give them criminal records that lead to further disenfranchisement in education and career opportunities. Through the enactment of more vague loitering and vagrancy laws, higher levels of discretion are now placed in the hands of police officers over determining legal or criminal gatherings in public space. It is in this vagueness of “broken windows”, order-maintenance statutes that racist notions of criminality are legitimized, and Black citizens become subject to widespread police harassment (Roberts Reference Roberts1999). This, Dorothy Roberts argues, is what leads to the subconscious or overt racism affecting decisions over whom to arrest, fine, or verbally warn.

Understanding the vagueness of order-maintenance policing and its implications for racial bias are essential to my research. At present, Native Americans and African Americans are killed by police in the United States at the highest rates, and though the American fact of police violence in minority communities has become recognized in national dialogue, there is much work to be done by social science researchers to study police stops as a primary site of American and global racial formations (Roychoudhury Reference Roychoudhury and Hunter2018). Extending the work of Michael Omi and Howard Winant (Reference Omi and Winant1994), understanding policing and other forms of governmental surveillance as a primary site of racial formation and boundary-making help us to better understand subjectivity and collective consciousness in the current era of virtually unlimited and expanding police power. Brittany N. Fox-Williams (Reference Fox-Williams2018) documents the extent to which “on track” Black youth and young women in New York avoid, manage, and symbolically resist encounters with police. Furthermore, Victor Ray (Reference Ray2019) theorizes that organizations are inherently racialized, and my study contributes to furthering understandings about the racial dynamic of police institutions, as well as mass media, both historically and contemporarily.

Ahistorical representations of police violence present police killings as an issue unique to the contemporary moment. Situating collective resistance to police power requires tracing specific histories of advocacy for reform and justice in the face of suppression. This article addresses the case of one such historic, communal struggle. It is difficult to enumerate the violence endured by urban communities of color at the hands of law enforcement over the past century but one of the most exhaustive documents attempting to do so was presented to the United Nations by its authors William Patterson and Paul Robeson in Reference Patterson1951. The petition, titled “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People” was presented as proof that the racism of the United States Government and its agencies was a crime punishable under the UN Genocide Convention. The petitioners included several prominent African Americans including foundational sociologist William Edward Burghardt Du Bois.

The crimes outlined in this petition included, among many examples of systematic injustice, extensive evidence of police violence including killings as well as beatings, framings, and unjustified arrests that continue unchecked by government authorities. They write of the challenge of enumerating state violence against Black Americans: “The vast majority of such crimes are never recorded. This widespread failure to record crimes against the Negro people is in itself an index to genocide” (Patterson Reference Patterson1951, p. 57). Their evidence was incidents of police violence from 1945 to 1951. Significant to this study, they list in their petition that on November 1, 1949, Mrs. Lena Fausset of Jamaica, New York, was beaten by policewoman Mary Shanley when she inadvertently bumped into the policewoman on the street. Mrs. Fausset, they write, was assaulted by officer Shanley in the 103rd Precinct (Patterson Reference Patterson1951, p. 113).

Study Setting

In considering police violence in Jamaica, Queens, it is important to understand the community itself. The Jamaica section of the borough of Queens is one of the largest historically Black communities in all of New York City. A heterogeneous community consisting of both massive public housing projects as well as middle class areas of mostly Black homeowners, the community spans class categories. Home to populations of Latinx, West Indian, West African, as well as South Asian diaspora immigrants—both from the subcontinent and the Caribbean—the neighborhood is ethnically heterogeneous as well. Located in Southeast Queens at the boundary between New York City and neighboring Nassau County on Long Island, Jamaica is one of the region’s main transit hubs for the Long Island Railroad, Metropolitan Transit Authority, and John F. Kennedy International Airport (Brown Reference Brown2005; Hauser Reference Hauser1980).

Community Board 12, shown in Figure 1, which makes up the geographic area patrolled by the New York Police Department’s 103^rd and 113^th Precincts, is made up of the neighborhoods of Jamaica, South Jamaica, Hollis, St. Albans, Rochdale, and Springfield Gardens. The New York Police Department’s 103rd Precinct is located on Jamaica Avenue, the center of the community’s busy commercial district. Southeast and Southwest Queens, nestled between the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn to the west and Long Island to the east, are comprised of numerous other neighborhoods: Rosedale, Cambria Heights, Laurelton, Queens Village, Ozone Park, South Ozone Park, Woodside, and Richmond Hill.

Fig. 1. Map of Community Board 12 patrolled by NYPD 103^rd and 113^th Precinct officers. Significant landmarks indicated. Courtesy of New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) Community Mapping Assistance Project.

The community and the two police killings central to this study make for rich comparison. In both killings, there are commonalities beyond just their occurrence in the same neighborhood and the same precinct. First, officers in both instances were dressed in plain clothes, a practice developed by officers to maintain anonymity while conducting investigations. In 2020, the NYPD disbanded its “anti-crime” plainclothes units, because “the plainclothes units were part of an outdated policing model that too often seemed to pit officers against the communities they served, and…were involved in a disproportionate number of civilian complaints and fatal shootings by the police” according to commissioner Dermot Shea (Watkins Reference Watkins2020). Second, in both the 1973 and 2006 police killings, the claim of a gun being present at the scene was significant to officer testimonies about what occurred. Officers in both instances claimed to either see a gun or hear that someone threatened to get a gun to settle an argument, even though in both cases neither claim was sustained, and no guns were found. Policework and police power in the Jamaica, Queens community, and throughout New York City more broadly, came into question during the fallout of both the deaths of Clifford Glover and Sean Bell.

The intervening period between the killings of Clifford Glover and Sean Bell saw significant demographic, social, and economic shifts within southeast Queens communities. Specifically, after the killing of Clifford Glover in 1973, the late 1970s and 1980s saw both the rise of ethnic minority immigrant groups in the area and simultaneous concern around rising drug crime and ensuing violence. The 103^rd Precinct was split into the 103^rd and 113^th Precincts in 1973. Today, the area policed by the 103^rd and 113^th NYPD Precincts is organized as Queens Community Board 12, formally referred to as the neighborhoods of Jamaica and Hollis. The population of Queens Community Board 12 is 61% Black (non-Hispanic) and 43% foreign-born. There are also significant Hispanic (17%) and Asian (11%) populations of any race.

This characteristic of the area allows for further study of an important aspect of policing and police violence: the experiences of those who are Black and foreign-born or Black ethnics. Though the present study does not specifically answer the question of how non-Black ethnic minority groups are treated by police and how this shapes subsequent attitudes toward police and racial identity, the historic study of this neighborhood furthers understandings of the impact of policing and police violence on multiethnic, multicultural Black and immigrant communities in the United States.

Around the time of Clifford Glover’s death, Southeast Queens was 90% Black and Hispanic (Hauser Reference Hauser1980). In 1973, New York City’s 103^rd Precinct reported the third most felonies in the entire city, including 45% more murders than the city-wide precinct average and 167% more rapes. Only 22.6% of the reported felonies were solved. On April 2, 1973, twenty-six days before Clifford Glover was killed, a police captain named Glanvin Alveranga, the son of Jamaican immigrants, was named Commanding Officer of the 103^rd Precinct, making him the first Black precinct commander in the history of Queens. At the time, Black cops made up less than 8% of the NYPD, despite Black people making up over 20% of the city’s population. The 103^rd Precinct, which patrolled the largest Black section of Queens only employed thirteen Black police at the time, out of 413 total officers (Hauser Reference Hauser1980).

Any discussion of police-community relations in Jamaica, Queens in the intervening period between 1973 and 2006 is incomplete without discussion of the killing of twenty-two-year-old 103^rd Precinct officer Edward Byrne in 1988. The rookie cop was guarding the house of a witness in a drug case when he was killed by men hired to carry out the assassination, making this event a national symbol of urban drug crime. Swift and punitive carceral action was mobilized through deployment of the nation’s first Tactical Narcotics Teams (T.N.T.), tasked with arresting street-level dealers en masse and deployed in Jamaica, Queens following the killing of Edward Byrne. The wave of drug arrests that followed made the community of Jamaica, Queens exemplary of the “War on Drugs.” Then-president George H.W. Bush even displayed Byrne’s badge 14072 in the White House, using the moment to advocate for aggressive and targeted policing. Forthcoming research from the author addresses these events comprehensively.

Critical Discourse Analysis

The analysis for this research draws on newspaper coverage of two police killings of unarmed Black individuals that occurred in the same neighborhood and police jurisdiction thirty-three years apart. Patrolman Thomas Shea of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) 103^rd Precinct shot and killed ten-year-old Clifford Glover in 1973, and a team of NYPD 103^rd Precinct officers shot and killed twenty-three-year-old Sean Bell in 2006. I use two different newspapers to analyze the narratives constructed by Black and White press media in the wake of the aforementioned officer-involved shootings. I examine coverage in The New York Times, a daily, internationally renowned, mainstream publication with the slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” and the New York Amsterdam News, the oldest Black weekly publication in New York City with the slogan “The New Black View.”

These two newspaper sources were selected based on their widespread readership and influence as press media. The New York Times is the second most circulated newspaper in the United States and the New York Amsterdam News is consistently among the top five most circulated African American newspapers in the United States, though their circulation has been steadily declining (Vogt Reference Vogt, Mitchell and Holcomb2016). Previous studies have analyzed police violence using “mainstream” news sources while others have analyzed police violence comparing “mainstream” and Black news sources. This unique comparison across time within the same geographic and jurisdictional location allows for in-depth analysis of the discourse around Black individuals killed by police over time, with specific attention to the communities in which they reside.

Systematic analysis of discourse surrounding police killings of unarmed Black people entails engagement with the social theories of Michel Foucault (Reference Foucault1980), who argued that discursive practice reveals the (oppressive) social relations that are constituted in everyday social interaction. Foucault’s argument that discourse informs social relations underscores George Lakoff’s (Reference Lakoff1987) conceptual metaphor theory: metaphors provide a framework that people use to make sense of behavior, relations, objects, and people, to the point that people forget that semantic associations they created with metaphors are not natural, but conventional correspondences between one semantic domain and another.Footnote ²

The narratives about police officers, victims of police violence, and Black people in cities construct and constitute the social structures of these relations themselves. The enactment of discursive practices reaffirms ideological practices and stances (Santa Ana et al., Reference Santa Ana, Trevino, Bailey, Bodossian and de Necochea2007). To analyze newspaper data, which includes articles from both The New York Times and the New York Amsterdam News following the events of April 28, 1973, and November 25, 2006, I use the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson, Reference Lakoff and Johnson1980; Santa Ana Reference Santa Ana2002) approach to critical discourse analysis. This approach entails line-by-line analysis of news articles, done by hand, focusing on the context (full line), token (phrase), target (subject), and source (descriptor) of each event, person, or process written about. In the case of this study, coverage revolves around the people involved in these two police killings, the trials that follow, the community at large especially during protests, and commentary on the judicial and policing processes involved. These make up the targets for which there are several sources, guiding the organization of the conceptual metaphors that arise and make up the findings of this study. See Table 2 for a sample of this coding process.

I selected and analyzed front-page articles that appeared in the issues that were published directly after the shootings and acquittals in both instances from both newspapers, totaling ten articles. All the articles are frontpage headlines and were released around the same dates, adjusted for the fact that one newspaper is daily and the other is weekly. In my representation of the data, I have added italics for emphasis on significant target phrases. Each post-killing and post-acquittal headline from both newspapers in 1973 and 2006 is listed in Table 1. Analytical attention is paid to each description and depiction of victims, officers, community residents, and politicians, both Black and otherwise.

Table 1. Data Sources: Front-page headlines from New York Amsterdam News and The New York Times, 1973-1974 and 2006-2008, post-killing and post-acquittal articles

Table 2. Sample of critical discourse analysis conducted by hand. The article analyzed is titled “Blacks Seething Over Slaying of Boy, Ten” from New York Amsterdam News, May 5, 1973.

‘No Angel’ Discourse

The Conceptual Metaphor community as disaster

The Loss of Memory

Central to this project’s conceptualization of memory is the theoretical framework of colonial aphasia. Writing about disabled, or deadened, racial histories in France, Ann Laura Stoler (Reference Stoler2011) coined the phrase to better describe and define what often is referred to as “forgotten history” or “collective amnesia.” Describing the active process of making colonial legacies unavailable, she writes:

Enabling racial histories that have been disabled requires looking into the documented representation of those histories themselves. Specifically, the ways that police violence operates in Black communities and is depicted and reported reveals the ways they are thought of and then acted upon through policy.

Perhaps the most remarkable finding of this research arises not from a narrative presence around police violence in Black communities as with ‘no angel’ discourse and the conceptual metaphor community as disaster, but instead from a discursive absence. The data that I intended to compare across time was discourse around policing in one neighborhood. Controlling for geographic context and jurisdictional precinct allowed me to compare, across time, discourse on collective action in the wake of police killings and officer acquittals. Thus, the case of Jamaica, Queens, where the killings of Clifford Glover in 1973, and Sean Bell in 2006, by NYPD 103^rd Precinct officers occurred, provides insight into the historic relationship between police violence, protest, and press media coverage.

Despite this historic comparison, I found no mention of the death of Clifford Glover, or the aftermath of Officer Shea’s acquittal, in reporting from The New York Times or the New York Amsterdam News in 2006 or 2008. While my search through the digital archives of both publications using ProQuest has not been exhaustive, it does capture front-page reporting in the immediate wake of both killings and acquittals. I have also searched through the pages of far more articles and op-ed pieces from several news publications than those I’ve utilized for this project and have found no mention of Clifford Glover in any articles written about Sean Bell.

In both eras, and in both publications, there is mention of other Black victims of police violence and a chocolate cities linked fate between Black people who have died, or who could die, at the hands of police:

Though there is significant work done by reports from both publications to link the killings of Clifford Glover and Sean Bell, as well as the officer acquittals in both cases, to other police shootings occurring contemporarily, there is a continuity missing. Especially in the last quote from the Times, there is mention of the Amadou Diallo verdict and how this reflects poorly on the New York Police Department, evoking the potential for “no peace.”

There is no mention, however, in any of the articles studied, that when Sean Bell is killed, and the police involved are acquitted, that this was not the first time that a police killing of a young, unarmed Black person sparked uprisings and protests in this neighborhood, challenging the actions of 103^rd Precinct officers. This historic continuity would better illuminate how communities respond when feeling failed by their judicial system and local government. It may also shed light on what has been done, and advocated for, in the past and what remains unchanged. The reporting of each paper informs how collective action is retrieved, imagined, and understood by the public, specifically in the wake of police killings. How people remember the past shapes how they respond to repeated violence over decades and across generations. Capturing collective memory from longtime residents, while they are still in the neighborhood, is crucial to understanding the role of intergenerational resistance to perpetual police violence in urban Black communities. This, I believe, was a missed opportunity by both papers in reporting on police violence, Black and White.

The mourning and memorialization of victims of police violence require their own study. The street where Sean Bell was killed by NYPD officers has since been renamed Sean Bell Way. I argue that because his name is etched into the built environment of this community, his life cannot be forgotten, and that Jamaica, Queens will forever be associated with the memory of Sean Bell. There is no such memorial for Clifford Glover, however. There was once a plan to dedicate the lot where he was killed to the memory of Clifford Glover by creating a safe place for kids to play. The New York Amsterdam News reported under the headline “Queens Elks Dedicate Glover Boy Death Lot”:

Currently, there is no dedication to Clifford Glover in the built environment of the city. This, I argue, is part and parcel of why the death of Clifford Glover has been erased from collective memory, the public archive, and the written record. It is for this reason that the murder of Clifford Glover was not invoked when officers from the same precinct killed Sean Bell in the same neighborhood thirty-three years later.

Harkening back to Stoler’s (Reference Stoler2011) theory of colonial aphasia and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s (Reference Trouillot2015) notion of historical “silences”, the collective memory of the death of Clifford Glover, killed by 103^rd Precinct officers in Jamaica, Queens, was not lost passively to the doldrums of time, but erased actively through absenting the boy’s life in telling the story of New York City children in the late twentieth century. The fact that Glover’s memory is not evoked when Sean Bell is killed in the same neighborhood, thirty-three years later, by either major news source, signals that, because there was no memorial to honor Glover’s memory, there was no public and living monument to what had occurred and then recurred. This is not the case when Bell is killed by police because his life is publicly memorialized, forever altering the spatial organization and collective memory of police violence and communal grief in Jamaica, Queens.