“I Feared for My Life”: Law Enforcement’s Appeal to Murderous Empathy

• DOI: 10.1177/2153368717697103
• Date: 01 April 2019
• Author: Martel A. Pipkins
• Published date: 01 April 2019
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article
Race and Justice
2019, Vol. 9(2) 180-196
“I Feared for My Life”:
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DOI: 10.1177/2153368717697103
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Martel A. Pipkins1
Abstract
This article utilizes critical discourse analysis (CDA) to examine discursive strategies
used by police officers for justification and appeals for empathy for the murders of
unarmed civilians, primarily Black civilians, while also reinforcing the implicit bias that
Black individuals are dangerous. These discursive strategies show the emergence of a
master narrative that connects the officers’ discursive strategies for invoking empathy
to avoiding blame. An analytical framework for blame avoidance supplements the
CDA to underline the relationship between the master narrative and blame avoid-
ance. Using high-profile cases in news media, I demonstrate how these narratives take
various forms and work to the benefit of the officer(s) involved.
Keywords
race and corrections, lynching, race and death penalty, race and policing, deadly force,
African/Black Americans, race/ethnicity
Red, white, and blue
Here come the sirens
Only to dance
With the little girls on the corner
There’s a war in the streets
Nobody speaks
And now a boy laying on the ground
—Hell You Talmbout (Mona´e, 2013)
1 Department of Sociology and Social Work, Texas Woman’s University, Denton, TX, USA
Corresponding Author:
Martel A. Pipkins, Department of Sociology and Social Work, Texas Woman’s University, Denton,
TX 76204, USA.
Email: mpipkins1@twu.edu

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As the opening lyrics state, “there’s a war in the streets,” and this war is asymmetrical
and has led to an increasing number of Black and Brown causalities. Black individuals
are 3 times more likely to be killed by the police than their white counterparts.
Criminology Professor Todd Callais (2016), found that 33% of Black people killed by
police were unarmed compared to 18% of white people killed. Although not involving
police officers, since the killing Trayvon Martin, there has been an increase in media
coverage (Guardian 2016) and public discussion on racial disparities in police
enforcement. However, much of this coverage takes either optimistic or passive
approaches and often lack context (Callais, 2016). Furthermore, “riots” tend to drive
media coverage related to these murders, which has the effect of being propolice
(Callais, 2016), and can also be promurder. In this article, utilizing an analytical
framework of blame avoidance, I argue that a shared (master) narrative is formed and
utilized by police officers involved in the shootings of unarmed (and armed) Black
civilians, which works as a strategy to reinforce racially driven fear, avoid blame, and
invoke empathy.
Literature Review
Media, Race, Shootings
Callais (2016) shows that riot coverage accounted for 81% of all coverage of police
killings since the shooting death of Michael Brown. This is critical being that “media
have become popular tour guides for people in their process of learning about social
problems” (Berns, 2004, p. 35) as they rely on it as their main source of information
and sometimes their only resource for reflecting on social problems. Moreover, rep-
resentation in news media “creates an interpretive framework for solutions to the
social problems of crime that favor some social action and/or reaction over others”
(Gillespie, Richards, Givens, & Smith, 2013, p. 227). Thus, if news media presents
riots as the major problem, removed from its motive and rationale, it influences social
(re)action to be geared toward these riots, as opposed to what ignited them in the first
place. Particular frames used in news media tend to highlight “certain kinds of
criminals and their victims, while ignoring or downplaying others, thereby trans-
mitting messages about who matters most in society” (Gillespie et al., 2013, p. 227).
News media is important for understanding the general public sentiment, opinion, and
reactions to social issues and events, especially since they have the capacity to
legitimize particular views while marginalizing others (Gillespie et al., 2013, p. 227).
Media coverage on shooting victims “more intensely covers cases where victims
are indictable” (Callais, 2016). For example, Michael Brown and Sandra Bland, two
African American individuals, were framed as hostile and dangerous and received
higher coverage than Tamir Rice and Walter Scott, a child and a man running away,
respectively. National and online coverage was also low in the shootings involving
then 22-year-old John Crawford, who was shot on sight at a Wal-Mart after police
received false reports that Crawford was waving a gun at customers, along with the
case of Sam DuBose, who police killed and then falsely reported him dragging an

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Race and Justice 9(2)
officer with his car (Callais, 2016). Although state-sanctioned killings of people of
color is not new in the slightest, the media attention to the onslaught of slayings by
police have assisted in the increase in public discussion on its use of brute force and
militarization as well as smaller discussions on the morality of police, questioning if
there is such thing as a “good cop.” This media framework is due, in large part, to the
changing social relations in news media as it increasingly comes from those outside
the news conglomerates and professional reporters (Curran, 2005).
Shortly after Martin’s death and the not guilty verdict of his killer, George Zimmer-
man, the Black Lives Matter Movement emerged, further enhancing and amplifying
discussions of racialized police brutality. Simultaneously, police brutality and mur-
ders of young Black men and women have remained ongoing with many captured on
video from bystanders and nearby surveillance that activists and community members
worked diligently to obtain. Though, not all were so visible. There were others that
were not captured and hidden in the back of police wagons like in the case of Freddie
Gray. Though this is not to say that police always attempt to avoid these murders being
captured on video, the slaying of Michael Brown resembled a public execution or
psychological terrorism (or “vicarious trauma” Downs, 2016) as law enforcement left
his dead body lying in the street for hours.
The Master Narrative
In this recurrence of police killings of Black people and its public presence, law
enforcement began to form a master narrative (Muldoon, Taylor, & Norma, 2015) of
fear. Muldoon, Taylor, and Norma (2015, p. 6) describe master narratives as a
“narrative that conveys a common felt experience.” The interpretations of the master
narratives are not necessarily those of individual police involved in these killings, “nor
reflective simply of their psychological reactions, but rather sociological con-
ceptualizations” developed using abductive processes. The most salient single nar-
rative in these cases is “I feared for my life,” however, other narratives and accounts
are not as direct and may use other language. For example, Darren Wilson, the officer
acquitted in the killing of Michael Brown, described his vision of Brown as a “demon”
(Davidson, 2014, p. 1). Jurors in this case empathized with Wilson’s “persistence of
fear” (Davidson, 2014, p. 1) and thus declined to indict him. While Wilson does not
necessarily use the word fear, he invokes perceptions of being afraid by describing
Brown as demonic—constituted by and constitutive of this master narrative of fearing
for one’s life. At the sociological level, a master narrative is then understood in the
broader social context—linked to various spheres in society—becoming a social
product in which “fundamental aspects of life and the social structure are revealed to
us in an indirect manner” (Ruiz, 2009, p. 11).
In making these connections, we have to examine not only police rhetoric but also
how this discourse is (re)created in other spheres. In the political sphere, for example,
Hillary Clinton, in her description of (Black) youth involved in crimes stated: “[t]hey
are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called
‘superpredators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up

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that way, but first we have to bring them to heel” (Mackey & Jilani, 2016). Here, she
reinforces the idea that Black individuals are more dangerous and violent in three
different ways. First, although she is referring to minors she attempts to remove the
public from perceiving them as such. Then, she uses the term “superpredators,” which
invokes the idea that their so-called ruthless behavior is innate or natural—animal-
like—which is why they must first be restrained and controlled before trying to figure
out the cause of their so-called bestial nature. Finally, she asserts that they lack moral
aptitude, which further shapes the idea that they are dangerous and animal-like. This
discourse becomes all the more problematic given that young Black people are more
often the victims of these police shootings.
While the master narrative works to reveal a theme that runs across the accounts of
law enforcement, it also allows for an examination of its use and what it does. At the
sociological level, discourse does more than say things, but it also does things. I argue
here that the master narratives used by these officers works as a strategy to reinforce
racialized fear, avoid blame, and invoke empathy. Hansson (2015) developed a
framework for analyzing the discursive strategies...