In light of police violence and injustice, criminologists tend to focus on masculine and violent police cultures, the lack of democratic oversight and on social processes of dehumanization. Yet much less attention, however, is given to the objects commonly used in violent and lethal police encounters: guns. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with police officers in Miami, I suggest that police officers tend to re-contextualize police gun violence in terms of individual liability and legal culpability—as a question of what constitutes a legal shot. While a legal framing might protect police officers from prosecution, the legal shot first and foremost enables state institutions to explain police brutality as “incidents”: as unintentional and exceptional outcomes of an otherwise warranted form of policing. Recognizing how the legal shot attunes our attention to individual misconduct and legal solutions to systemic and racialized police violence, I suggest, is an important step in exploring the possibilities to disarm the police, and to organize around the question of how to imagine and push for a more inclusive form of public safety.

中文翻译：

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合法射门？迈阿密的警察枪支暴力和个人责任

鉴于警察的暴力和不公正，犯罪学家倾向于关注男性化和暴力的警察文化、缺乏民主监督和非人化的社会进程。然而，在暴力和致命的警察遭遇中常用的物品却很少受到关注：枪支。借助与迈阿密警察的长期民族志实地调查，我建议警察倾向于根据个人责任和法律责任将警察枪支暴力重新置于情境中——作为合法射击的问题。虽然法律框架可能会保护警察免受起诉，但法律枪击首先使国家机构能够将警察的暴行解释为“事件”：作为其他有根据的警务形式的无意和特殊结果。