A Question of Sacrifice: The Deep Structure of Deaths in Police Custody
| Published date | 01 June 2020 |
| Date | 01 June 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663919874111 |
| Author | Ian Loader |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2020, Vol. 29(3) 401–420
A Question of Sacrifice:
ª The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663919874111
of Deaths in Police Custody
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Ian Loader
University of Oxford, UK
Abstract
Deaths in police custody present a set of enduring and troubling puzzles. Why do
such deaths seldom result in prosecutions or adequate redress? Why are victims’
families so under-resourced and typically met with a conflicted mix of empathy and
hostility? Why do acknowledged problems remain unresolved despite review after
review making the same criticisms and seemingly consensual recommendations?
Why is the state’s failure to fulfil its duty of care towards those it detains met with
public indifference? In this article, I argue that we can shed new light on these
questions if we theorize and investigate police power using the metaphor of
sacrifice. Thinking about police power through this lens enables us to identify and
illuminate a conflict between the liberal rationality that appears to govern responses
to custodial deaths and the illiberal values and affects that constitute what I term the
deep structure of deaths in police custody. By re-examining reports of recent
enquiries into the issue, I outline four recurring elements of this deep structure and
show how they clash with surface liberal rationalities. The systemic reduction of
custodial death requires, I conclude, that we name and contest the quasi-sacred
conception of police authority that holds the police vital to the production of order
and control and its agents to require protection when things ‘go wrong’.
Keywords
Commissions of enquiry, deaths in police custody, liberalism, police power, sacrifice
Corresponding author:
Ian Loader, Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford, St Cross Building, St Cross Road, Oxford OX1 3UL,
UK.
Email: ian.loader@crim.ox.ac.uk
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Social & Legal Studies 29(3)
The democratic illusion works because the majority is unaware or unwilling to be aware of
the conditions imposed on minorities . . . In times of anxieties about security, societies tend
to be tolerant regarding abuses that are viewed as the collateral damage of policies suppo-
sedly intended to protect them.
Fassin (2015: 105, 116)
Introduction: Enduring Troubles, Troubling Puzzles
Every year in England and Wales, people die in police custody. Police stations are sites
of coercive detention. But they are also rule-bound places in which the state has a legal
duty of care towards those who the police detain (see Skinns, 2019). According to
INQUEST, 1077 people died in a police station between 1990 and 2018.1 The numbers
dying per year have fallen over that period, though figures for 2017–2018 from the
Independent Office for Police Conduct reveal the number of deaths rising to a 10-year
high of 23.2 Some of those who die in police stations each year do so as the direct result
of having been restrained by police officers. These are the cases where the highest ethnic
disproportionality is to be found. They are also the cases that tend to come to public
attention. Most often people die of ‘non-natural’ causes having been brought to a police
station for behaviour sparked by mental health trauma or intoxication. Others commit
suicide – though reductions in suicide have been the biggest factor in the drop in deaths
in custody since 1990. Over recent years, however, there has been a rise in the numbers
committing suicide within 48 hours of having been released from police custody. In
2015/2016, 60 such cases were reported.
Tracking the number of deaths in police custody and the circumstances in which they
occur is an important part of what is entailed in establishing the phenomenon. But I want
to identify and investigate another constitutive element of deaths in police custody –
namely, the recurring process of enquiry and inaction that attends such deaths. In January
2015, following their long and fruitless struggles for justice, then Home Secretary
Theresa May met the families of Sean Rigg and Olaseni Lewis, two young Black men
who died in police custody having been restrained by officers, Rigg in 2008 and Lewis in
2010. Having done so, the Home Secretary announced the setting up of an Independent
Review of Deaths and Serious Incidents in Police Custody (IRDSIPC) to be chaired by
Dame Elish Angiolini. The review reported in January 2017 and is replete with detailed
recommendations, 110 of them (IRDSIPC, 2017). But the Report also observed – in a
moment of reflexive angst – that the independent review followed no less than seven
inquiries into failings in police custody held between 2013 and 2015. The Report went
one:
Much of the frustration felt by families can be attributed to the occurrence of the same
failings time after time. This feature is evident from the many reviews, enquiries and reports
looking at these very issues over the years. Despite clear, pragmatic recommendations and
agreement for action from successive governments, the police and other agencies, some of
the worst types of failings have persisted. (IRDSIPC, 2017: 23)
Loader
403
The question is why? Why this repeated cycle of death, review and inaction, and the
attendant sense of enduring crisis and institutional intractability? Why the repeated
police defensiveness and failure to bring anyone to justice? Why are families met with
a contradictory mix of sympathy and recalcitrance? Why is the state’s failure to protect
the lives of those it detains generally met with public indifference?
In this article, I address these recurring features of the phenomenon of deaths in police
custody by teasing out the values and affects at stake in contests about custodial deaths.3
My argument is that we can shed clearer light on such deaths, and their agitations and
ramifications, if we theorize and investigate police power using the metaphor of sacri-
fice. Doing so, I argue, enables us to identify and illuminate the conflict between a liberal
rationality that pervades the surface of responses to deaths in custody and a deep struc-
ture of illiberal affects that treat custodial death in sacrificial terms as ‘the wasteful loss
of human life for a supposed gain in some public good’ (Zachhuber, 2013: 2). In the
following section, I outline the theoretical resources that can help us to ‘see’ police and
criminal justice in these revised terms as sites of sacrifice. I then seek to elucidate what is
at stake in contests over police custody via a rereading of the report of the Independent
Review and other recent inquiries into deaths in police custody. This reconsideration
brings into view an illiberal and undemocratic cultural mentality that holds the police to
be vital to protecting majorities from marginal populations and its agents to require
protection when the control of such population exceeds legal limits or otherwise ‘goes
wrong’. The systemic reduction of the ensuing collateral damage requires, I conclude,
that we name and contest the alluring fantasy of police as constitutive of liberal capitalist
social order and ‘mak[e] oneself vulnerable’ to the ‘new political possibilities’ (Lebron,
2016: 158) that flow from an insistence that all those who come into contact with police
remain democratic citizens.
Theorizing Policing Cultures: Questions of Sacrifice
Sacrifice can only be phenomenologically comprehended if one is prepared to suspend
one’s own sense of rational disbelief and journey, in actuality or else in imagination,
towards the place where sacrifice reaches. (Mayblin and Course, 2013: 314)
In modern liberal democracies, it is common to think of police organizations as large,
rule-bound and accountable state bureaucracies. Policing is an instrumentally rational
world of visions, strategies, priorities and budgets. Police forces have been afforded a
range of coercive powers – to surveille, stop, search and detain individuals and to seize
their data and property – which are utilized to prevent and detect crime and maintain
order. They are supplied with an array of technologies – truncheons, radios, phones,
computers, cars, helicopters and so on – to facilitate the pursuit of these goals. Modern
police forces claim a monopoly over the use of legitimate violence – something that
stands as both a guarantor of the security of citizens and an every-present threat to their
liberty. Police power is hence restrained by law; hemmed in with rights protections and
governed by mechanisms of oversight, accountability and redress. Policing, on this view,
is a site of calculation, a world of mundane law enforcement and order management.
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Social & Legal Studies 29(3)
But modern police institutions are not just ‘made’, they are also ‘imagined’ (Unger,
1987). They are not just sites of calculation, but also of representation (cf. Sparks, 2003).
They produce not only material but also symbolic effects. Policing is a cultural institu-
tion – a site for the production of meaning and myth. It is an institution onto and through
which people project various hopes and aspirations, fears and fantasies, about the social
world. Policing is a site of affective identification that is inescapably entangled with
questions of life and death, order and chaos, security and vulnerability, morality and
immorality, honour and dishonour, belonging and exclusion and the boundary between
‘us’ and ‘them’. Policing is an institution shaped by, and shaping, mentalities and
sensibilities towards the social – a place for the formation,...
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