Re-presenting Transactions: Prosecuting a Police-involved Shooting with Video Evidence

Abstract

The proliferation of videos of violent interactions between police and the public, and the subsequent examinations of those videos in legal proceedings (grand juries, criminal trials, and coroner’s inquiries), have occasioned some reflection on what video does in understanding such incidents. As was initially shown by Goodwin (1994), videos of violence are far from self-explanatory; conducting inquiries into such violent interactions involves a great deal of interpretive work. Here, I discuss a case study of the trial Constable James Forcillo of Toronto Police Service, which led to a paradoxical verdict of guilty of attempted murder relating to an incident where Forcillo shot and killed a young man, Sammy Yatim, onboard a Toronto street car. While videos often give the impression of increased accountability for and of police officers (cf. Harris, 2010; Ariel et al., 2015; Ready & Young, 2015), and the recoverability of police decision-making in their use of violent and lethal force, the question of how that accountability is enacted in legal settings requires attention in order to understand the significance of this particular type of evidence. Here, I demonstrate that video does not do the work of explicating the sense or motive of police actions therein, and as such inevitably must be augmented by further evidence before arriving at a verdict in cases of police-involved violence.