When Euphemism Disguises Oppression: On “Police Brutality” and Why We Should Stop Saying It

Greenpeace activists walk a large Black Lives Matter banner down 16th NW toward the White House. Activists on the streets adopted the banner chanting “Make Way For The Flag” as they moved it through the massive crowds to the fence in front of Lafayette Square near the White House. Photo by Greenpeace USA.

Presently inundated with cellphone videos of Black people’s deaths, Black and non-Black people alike have become accustomed to spectacular Black death. During summer 2020, in particular, the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor catalyzed an unprecedented national and international response. They also precipitated a widespread reckoning with the disposability of Black life, both in the United States and globally. As Black people continue to endure the suffering, mourning, and grief with which anti-Black racism confronts them every day, discussions employing the phrase "police brutality" to characterize incidents wherein police engage in excessive use of force have emerged. And thankfully, the circumstances on which these discussions focus have been met with widespread mobilization and direct action against police officers overstepping their bounds.

But police brutality is not a new problem. In fact, it is one that the highest office in the land has attempted to address throughout numerous presidential administrations. For instance, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the Kerner Commission to investigate the causes of the long, hot summer of 1967—comprised of the one hundred and fifty-nine race riots that erupted across the United States that year. The more recent Task Force on 21st Century Policing of the Obama administration, which sought to make recommendations on how policing practices could promote effective crime reduction and build public trust, also illustrates how presidential administrations have undertaken agendas for police reform. Various presidential administrations have, especially over the past 60 years, provided recommendations for reforming the police. However, invariably, these recommended reform measures have neither realized nor mitigated the scale and scope of police power. 

These ineffectual reforms demonstrate that Presidential Commissions and other such undertakings cannot eliminate police brutality through piecemeal changes in police administration, protocols, officer accountability, training, or personnel recruitment. When the police commit wanton acts of violence, they are not transgressing the delineation of their power but are fulfilling it, and further, pushing the boundary in what the state will allow them to do. Yet, it seems that circumstances of police violence have been isolated from the entire historical experience that Black, Native, queer, transgender, and other marginalized people have with policing. One phenomenon that allows such isolation is the use of the term “police brutality.”

The principal issue with the rhetoric of “police brutality” lies in its insistence on making exceptional a long-existent problem in the United States: the problem of policing. Birthed in the south from slave patrols in the 18th and 19th centuries, and in the north from municipal police departments to suppress workers' rights movements, American police emerged to uphold inequalities based on discrete categories of social difference, including class, gender, race, and sexuality. Alex Vitale demonstrates in The End of Policing that “the basic nature of the law and the police, since its earliest origins, is to be a tool for managing inequality and maintaining the status quo.” Policing traces itself back to many political and economic conditions that preserve long-standing racial inequalities. One fact remains consistent: communities considered criminal, delinquent, or deviant have never experienced a respite from the everyday violence that police power entails. As a result, saying “police brutality” is redundant. As agents of state violence, what else but brutality would the police perpetuate?

While the expression is apt to use, given its precise naming of a pressing societal problem, “police brutality” obscures that police violence is neither exceptional nor incidental—it is systemic, state-sanctioned, and occurs daily. Studies using recent data elucidate this reality. A 2019 study led by Frank Edwards of Rutgers University found that police killings are a leading cause of death among men of all races, ages 25 to 29, with a total annual mortality risk of 1.8 deaths per 100,000 people. Moreover, the study found that Black, Latinx, and Indigenous individuals are disproportionately stopped by police and killed in encounters. While this study is relatively new, its conclusions are not.

Despite these statistics, numerous elected officials still advocate bolstering law enforcement budgets, with President Joe Biden urging states and localities to use the $350 billion granted to them in the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package to hire law-enforcement officials. Furthermore, Eric Adams, the former NYPD captain and Democratic nominee in the 2021 New York City mayoral election, made public safety and crime his top issue in his campaign, vehemently proposing that “we NEED the NYPD.” It is precisely because of Biden, Adams, and countless other political figures who continually support the police that the reach of policing continues to expand. 

Furthermore, in a video part of “Breaking Down the Prison Industrial Complex,” a series by Critical Resistance, Professor Dylan Rodriguez points out that “It’s not ‘police brutality’ if the state sanctions the violence. At that point, you move from calling it police brutality to calling it policing.” Following this reasoning, because the state apparatus—which politicians are a vital part of—maintains and contributes resources and funding to police departments, egregious acts of violence by police officers on citizens are not instances of police brutality. They are merely manifestations of police practice.

In this moment of enormous energy and public discussion about the state of policing, those advocating for prison–industrial complex abolition should retire “police brutality” and other euphemistic phrases like it. To indict policing as a death-dealing racket for BIPOC and other marginalized communities who bear the brunt of police violence, abolitionists who wish to eliminate imprisonment, police, and surveillance should also eliminate “police brutality” from their lexicon. It is a seemingly trivial act, but one that will bring us much closer to recognizing that the problem is not police brutality; it's policing itself.

Giselle Williams is an incoming first-year student at Columbia College. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, and her interests include grassroots organizing, state violence, racial capitalism, anti-colonial movements, the prison–industrial complex, and U.S. empire. Giselle tentatively plans to major in African American and African Diaspora Studies.