Visual Studies of Police Violence

In this paper, Watson, Meehan, Lynch, Nave, and Dennis discuss their investigations of how video evidence is used in criminal trials for police officers charged in on-duty shootings. Although still ongoing, their study has already yielded several lessons worth sharing. The authors consider how making sense of the violence seen on video is no simple task. They conclude that to understand videos of police violence they needed to turn to courts of law rather than directly analysing videos of police violence. In this sense, their research led to an investigation of investigations