Law Enforcement–Perpetrated Homicides. Tom Barker

use of deadly force by LEOs. Homicides in the necessary act of self-defense to protect oneself from death or serious bodily injury or death may be deemed justified or excusable depending on the circumstances. Any police homicide that is not excusable or justified is a criminal homicide—manslaughter or murder. The killing of a human with malice aforethought—intent—is the most serious type of criminal homicide and is prosecuted as murder. Although LEOs homicides are rare events; their rarity provides little comfort or solace to the victims and their survivors. There are other terms used that need explication.

      Policework Occupation

      Policework—one word—is an occupation performed by paid public LEOs at all levels of government. These paid public employees have general or limited arrest powers, depending on state and federal statutes, and case law. The workers—LEOs—in the policework occupation perform one or more of the public safety services of traffic, patrol, investigation, and detention/custody. These public officials have the power to detain, arrest, search, and use deadly force—the ultimate force granted by any society. The LEO definition includes publicly paid LEOs in local, county, state, federal, and special district agencies such as campus police agencies, park police, Indian police, and airport police. Detention/custody officials in lockups and jails are included; however, private security personnel are not (Barker, 2019, see Barker, Hunter & Rush, 1994 for an earlier definition).

      Unequal Power Relationship

      Police-citizen contacts—individually and in groups—are touchstone examples of unequal power settings between parties. LEOs have the legal authority to force compliance with their legal duties. Detention and correctional officers are granted the legal authority to use force in self-defense and the enforcement of rules, regulations, and laws against those remanded into their custody (Bittner, 1990). The legal use of force in these settings includes a wide range of force techniques and can result in police abuse of power.

      Police violence against citizens, especially minority and marginalized groups without political power, is a perennial problem in a society with a formal system of social control based on public LEOs. This is especially true for paid public police forces based on the 1829 London Metropolitan Model and democratic policing. The United States exacerbated the police violence problem with the establishment of an alphabet soup creation of law enforcement agencies at all levels of government—ABC, ATF, BART, DEA, DIA, DART, FBI, ICE, IRS, ISDP, MARTA, TSA, USMP, USSS, ad infinitum (Barker, 2020). The legal use of force by these agencies includes a wide range of force techniques from verbal commands to the use of deadly force in individual or collective protest settings. The most severe use of deadly force is police homicides.

      LEO-Perpetrated Homicides

      LEOs-Perpetrated Homicides are deaths resulting from acts or omissions by LEOs acting in or related to their official position. Police-perpetrated homicides result from law enforcement actions-direct or proximate—and range from accidents to murder. In defining police-caused homicides, a modified version of law enforcement homicides suggested by Barber and her colleagues was used (Barber, 2016). The Barber study used three criteria in their definition. The first criterion was the manner of death that they defined as homicide, not suicide, accident, or natural. Their criterion was modified to include accidental LEO homicides that are the result of reckless or negligent acts regardless of intent. There is a long history of these accidental homicides in U.S. law enforcement activities. The modified definition included suicide by a cop where a person wishing to die provokes a cop into killing them. Murder-suicides were included when a LEO murders a domestic partner and then commits suicide. Their second criterion was that the suspect must be a LEO in some level of government—local, state, tribal, special district, or federal. This definition includes correction officers because correction officers like all LEOs are sworn public officers with authority to use lethal force. Last, Barber and her colleagues said police homicides had to occur in the line of duty. That is not true in LEO police homicide cases such as murders committed by LEOs for personal reasons while using their police position to facilitate or conceal their criminal acts. Therefore, police homicides occur on- and off-duty.

      

      Historical empirical evidence reveals that a disproportionate number of police homicides result from police interactions with members and groups labeled the dangerous classes by the political or economic elite. The current debate over police homicides suggests that the majority to the victims are minority and marginalized victims of the dangerous classes. This is not the whole story. However, America’s history provides evidence that members of the dangerous classes have been singular and multiple victims of police violence, including homicide, during protests and demonstrations. The definition of who is or is not a member of the dangerous classes is constantly in flux.

      The Dangerous Classes

      Public police work evolved in England from a need by the political and economic elites to control the lives of the dangerous classes—the poor and the disorderly working class who migrated to the crowded cities because of the disruptions resulting from the Industrial Revolution. The Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 created the modern occupation of policing, but the poor and working class thought the New Police as public order police would enforce a moral code that would destroy or disrupt their recreations and lifestyles (Rawlings, 2002).

      Their fears were accurate. The newly created paid public police occupation was a means for the “elite” to constrain the activities of the dangerous/marginalized classes in England because “Crime, illegitimacy, idleness, irreligion, poaching, dancing, drinking, the playing of games and so forth were believed to be linked” (Rawlings, 2002). The proactive policing model of the time is what is known as “quality of life” policing today. That is arrests for petty offenses in the streets (drunkenness, gaming, and other social-order offenses), and other acts that are not inherently evil. The new policework occupation was transported to the United States, where the dangerous classes were defined by race and ethnicity through the actions of the politically and economic elite.

      America’s Dangerous Classes in Brief

      The treatment of the dangerous classes in American history have had tragic civil rights results on the disenfranchised and marginalized groups and stimulated what some consider the current racial based police agencies and a biased American criminal and civil justice system (Williams & Murphy, 1990, Davis, 2017, Slaughter-Johnson, April 13, 2019). The American dangerous class groups at various points in our history have included indigenous populations (American Indians), slaves (African, American Indians), and a variety of ethnic and nonwhite racial groups ranging from the Irish, Italians, Chinese, African Americans, Mexicans, to today’s illegal immigrants.

      Following the bloody removal of the American Indians from their lands, blacks were labeled the dangerous class during slavery when the large slave population at the bottom of America’s caste system threatened the elite white minority (Reichel, 2013). However, other racial and ethnic groups were viewed as dangerous. The first federal law excluding immigrants based on race was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion law that barred Chinese immigrants—the despised Mongolians and this country’s first illegal immigrants—from becoming U.S. citizens (Campbell, 2014). Mexicans in the Southwest, particularly the border states of Texas, California, New Mexico, and Arizona, became the dangerous class when the United States seized half of Mexico following the 1848 U.S. Mexican War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Juan Crow laws—Jim Crow in the Southern states—in the Southwestern states prohibited Latinos and American Indians designated as non-whites from participating without restrictions in the public sphere (Campbell, 2014). American Indians residing in Arizona would not have the right to vote until 1948.

      Radicalized miners, steelworkers, and other industrial workers joined the dangerous classes when they challenged the elite owner/worker status quo and had the temerity to join unions. The possibility of members of the dangerous classes combining and engaging in strikes and insurrections in the manufacturing districts was recognized in the early 1800s (Silver, October 7, 1965). For example, the second mission of the 1829 London Metropolitan Police Force against the dangerous classes was to suppress political agitation in the form of mobs and riots—social protest (Silver, October 7, 1965). The key to this control of the dangerous classes is the legal use of deadly force.

      Police Legal Use of Deadly