The dark footprint of state violence: A synthetic approach to the American crime decline
| Author | Paul Deppen,Esther Scheibler,Lori Sexton,Aaron Roussell,Marisa Omori |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480620984233 |
| Published date | 01 May 2022 |
| Date | 01 May 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480620984233
Theoretical Criminology
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480620984233
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The dark footprint of state
violence: A synthetic approach
to the American crime decline
Aaron Roussell
Portland State University, USA
Lori Sexton
University of Missouri Kansas City, USA
Paul Deppen, III
Portland State University, USA
Marisa Omori
University of Missouri – St. Louis, USA
Esther Scheibler
University of Cincinnati, USA
Abstract
This project combines the conversation on the national crime rate with emerging
discussions on the violence that the state perpetrates against civilians. To measure US
lethal violence holistically, we reconceptualize the traditional definitional boundaries
of violence to erase arbitrary distinctions between state- and civilian-caused crime
and violence. Discussions of the “crime decline” focus specifically on civilian crime,
positioning civilians as the sole danger to the health, wealth, and safety of individuals.
Violence committed by the state—from police homicide to deaths in custody to in-
prison sexual assault—is not found in the traditionally reported crime rate. These
Corresponding author:
Aaron Roussell, Sociology Department, Portland State University, PO Box 751, Portland, OR 97207-0751,
USA.
Email: roussell@pdx.edu
984233TCR0010.1177/1362480620984233Theoretical CriminologyRoussell et al.
research-article2021
Article
2022, Vol. 26(2) 326–346
absences belie real dangers posed to individuals which are historical and contemporary,
nonnegligible, and possibly rising. We present Uniform Crime Report data side-by-side
with data on police killings, deaths in custody, and executions from sources such as Fatal
Encounters, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the Center for Disease Control to
produce a robust discussion of deaths produced through the criminal legal system. We
ground this empirical analysis in a broader conceptual framework that situates state
violence squarely within the realm of US crime, and explore the implications of this
more holistic view of crime for future analyses.
Keywords
crime control, crimes of the state, crime trends, critical criminology, definitions of
crime, homicide, police and policing, police homicide, state violence, violent crime
Introduction
Mainstream criminology relies for disciplinary coherence on a number of assumptions.
In criminological theory, bright lines separate criminals from non-criminals, conformers
from nonconformers, and law abiders from legal transgressors. Methodologically, vio-
lence recorded by official statistics provides information about crime and crime trends.
Violence which escapes—or which is misclassified by—these counts is acknowledged
but typically assumed to be missing nonsystematically. These assumptions structure
criminology’s canon and motivate its core concerns. Consider, for instance, the appar-
ently simple criminological truth that crime dropped precipitously in the 1990s, return-
ing to the relatively low levels of the 1970s and prior. Combined with evidence of soaring
incarceration rates and the proliferation of law enforcement personnel and infrastructure,
the Great American Crime Decline provided scholars with a rich body of empirical data
and a clear disciplinary thrust: the examination and furtherance of crime prevention by
state action. Consumers of such research are guided to the unavoidable conclusions that
the state has succeeded in making US society quite safe and it is getting safer.
Here, we argue that the crime decline (and thus social safety) has not only been
mismeasured, but more importantly, misconceptualized. Criminology’s myopic focus on
civilian crime and violence obscures actions by the state and results in a substantial
underestimation of the prevalence of violence. The state is a major purveyor of violence
and has a violent footprint larger than the collective civilian violence of most US states
and territories. This underestimation is systematic, beginning with criminological defini-
tions and measurement of crime, and largely invisible.
The illusion that public safety is synonymous with the official civilian crime rate may
be showing some cracks under the Trump administration. In 2018 journalists uncovered a
massive ring of kidnappers, traffickers, and torturers. Organized, armed groups kidnapped
nearly 2000 families, coercively holding parents and separating them from their children,
perhaps permanently. Some kidnap victims were secretly drugged, subjected to torturous
terms of confinement, and sexually assaulted; some died as a result (Ellis et al., 2018;
Reilly, 2018; Speri, 2018). Much of the US public was horrified and took moral (and
sometimes physical) stands against this violence, which continues unabated. Yet none of
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Roussell et al.
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