1 - Introducing Visual Criminology

Summary

Introduction

On the afternoon of 25 May 2020, police in Minneapolis, Minnesota approached George Floyd, an unarmed 46- year- old Black man, following a tip that Floyd had attempted to pass a counterfeit $20 note to a store clerk. During the interaction, a white cop, Derek Chauvin, detained George Floyd on the pavement with his knees on Floyd’s neck and back as a physically passive Floyd struggled to breath. For nearly nine minutes, Chauvin— with the assistance of three other cops— remained on top of George Floyd, ultimately killing him. The murder was captured, like so many are now, by the mobile phone cameras of bystanders, and by the next day the footage had circulated internationally. Almost immediately, global protests against police violence began, focusing largely on George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, a Black woman murdered in her home by police, two weeks prior to Floyd, in my own hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. At the time of this writing, almost six months later, those protests continue in every major American city and around the world, and George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are the tragic symbols, their names hoarsely shouted and spray painted, their faces appearing on placards and signs and shirts and murals.

The image of Chauvin with his knee on the neck of a dying George Floyd, it seems to me, is the essential criminological image of the contemporary moment. I do not reproduce it here, not because it is too shocking— American police murdering an unarmed Black man should not, by now, come as a shock to anyone— but because it is too familiar. We know what it looks like when police murder. We know the familiar aesthetic qualities of the bodycam and the furtively filmed bystander cell phone video, just as we know all too well the carefully choreographed performance of outrage and reform that inevitably follows each murder. We do not need to see it here, again. As we shall see, the visual criminology that gives this book life is not simply a criminology of images, and so I have no interest in following it towards an exhaustive analysis of the composition of the already iconic image of Floyd’s killing.