The charged language of policing
Mother Jones|January/February 2023
AMERICAN POLICE speak in a peculiar lexicon. When an officer guns somebody down, it is an "officer-involved shooting." When a department spokesperson speaks of "the use of force," police violence is reduced to basic physics.
ISAAC SCHER
The charged language of policing

"Fatality" dulls a plainer reality: that somebody has been killed.

A less-discussed clause carries with it the same obfuscation of meaning: "suicide by cop." The phrase refers to a person who provokes the police's violence to kill themselves. But too often it has been loosely applied to excuse police killings as unavoidable.

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