“Tragic but not Criminal: Challenging the ‘Objective Reasonableness’ of Police Killings”

This presentation examines how police killings are racialized and gendered by focusing on the ways in which violence against women, girls, and gender non-conforming people of color are rarely represented as a crime. White criminal defendants, like George Zimmerman and Michael Dunn, have rights that are respected. Police officers, like Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo, have protections and immunities. Men of color victims, like Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown, are legible as posthumously deserving (the pretense of) justice. But women like CeCe McDonald, Rekia Boyd, Jessie Hernandez, and Sarah Lee Circle Bear are never represented as entitled to any of these rights, protections, or justice. As such, centering their cases exposes the ways in which the logic of “objective reasonableness,” which justifies police killings, is in itself highly gendered and therefore far from “objective” and “reasonable.”