Vol. 11 No. 4 (April 2001) pp. 173-176.

THE POLITICS OF FORCE: MEDIA AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF POLICE BRUTALITY by Regina G. Lawrence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 254 pp.Cloth $45.00. ISBN: 0-520-22191-5. Paper $17.95. ISBN: 0-520-22192-3.

Reviewed by Jennifer A. Segal, Department of Political Science, University of Kentucky. Judicial Fellow, 2000-2001, U. S. Sentencing Commission.

The recent police shooting and subsequent protests in Cincinnati are the most current examples of how racially charged the issue of police use-of- force is in our communities. Regina Lawrence's THE POLITICS OF FORCE: MEDIA AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF POLICE BRUTALITY demonstrates, however, that there is much more to this very controversial issue. Her work is important for several reasons, not the least of which is that it is NOT about race. Instead, her concern is about the competition to define public problems and solutions. Towards her ultimate goal of establishing a theory of issue construction, Lawrence argues that the media provide a critical forum in which interests compete to control the substance and tenor of political discussion. By choosing as her substantive focus a controversial and divisive subject like police use-of-force, Lawrence has provided not only insight into the variety of factors that affect this competition, but also interesting details about real-life police use-of-force incidents themselves. Her analysis is directed largely at the Rodney King police beating, but she also examines several other lesser-known incidents. Her data come from the indices and the full text of NEW YORK TIMES (NYT) and LOS ANGELES TIMES (LAT) articles during 1985 to 1994, stories from a variety of other big city newspapers, and interviews with news reporters.

Lawrence begins in the first chapter ("Mediating Realities") with brief descriptions of three police use-of-force incidents that received varying degrees of news coverage by the NYT or the LAT to demonstrate the primary focus of her work: "...struggles among competing groups to define the meaning of news events and the news narratives about public problems that result from these struggles" (p. 3). Here, she introduces the idea that the media provide an arena in which "social construction" of the news occurs, a process that is "part and parcel of larger political competitions to designate and define public problems" (p. 3). Journalists are the "managers" of this arena, determining the winners of these competitions by identifying issues that are newsworthy and choosing who participates in the discussion of these issues. Lawrence introduces two competing models of news coverage: the official dominance theory, which posits that the official perspective is the most prominent in news about routine events; and the event-driven model, which posits that nonofficial, competing perspectives can be influential components of the news when events are more spontaneous. She argues that while the official dominance model explains most news coverage, and therefore most issue construction, events like police use-of-force incidents can be difficult for officials to control and may allow for the input and impact of nonofficial voices and interests.

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In Chapters Two ("Making A Problem Of Brutality") and Three ("Normalizing Coercion"), Lawrence elaborates more specifically on the nature of news coverage of use-of-force incidents. Generally, the NYT and the LAT report these incidents very infrequently. Lawrence suggests that this is not surprising. Not only is the issue of use-of-force ambiguous (e.g. police abuse is not always obvious), but also people disagree (often along racial lines) about the role and power of the police (pp. 22-23). There are additional obstacles to the public debate about the issue, not the least of which is political. According to the official dominance model, public officials do a good job of keeping these types of incidents out of the news. The analysis of the indices revealed that over three quarters of the news stories about police use-of-force relied on official sources; attention to "critical" nonofficials (e.g. activists and community leaders) was very rare (p. 44). A more detailed analysis of the full text of a sample of these stories revealed that "individualizing" claims (those made by officials to focus on individual events and diminish the larger significance of the incidents) were much more common in the lead paragraphs of both the NYT and LAT reports than were "systemic" claims (those made by nonofficials to increase the larger significance of the incidents) (pp. 34-36). Additionally, the vast majority of stories in both papers were "episodic" (providing the basic facts of the incidents), rather than "thematic" (providing a larger context for the incidents) (pp. 44-45). Finally, the media attention to police use-of-force incidents does not last long; the vast majority of incidents covered by the papers were reported only once or twice (p. 45). Lawrence provides reasons for this rather meager coverage in a discussion about the characteristics of police, media, and public perceptions that make the official dominance model the predominate explanation for news coverage of these incidents (pp. 51-59).

Having established a basic understanding of the nature of the LAT and NYT coverage of these incidents, Lawrence turns to a prominent example of the breakdown of the official dominance model. In Chapter Four ("Rodney King and the Los Angeles Times"), she argues that, "Dramatic news events can upset official control of the news agenda by providing journalists with dramatic story possibilities and a host of cues to pursue politically volatile issues." (p. 63) The data demonstrate that the beating of Rodney King marked a turning point in the type of coverage police brutality received in the LAT. A significant increase in the mentions of police brutality, the number of unofficial voices, and the number of systematic claims included in the stories is apparent after this incident (pp. 66-69). Lawrence describes three story cues that were critical in making the King incident front page news: the narrative power of the video taken at the scene (which challenged the official description of events), the official and political responses to the beating (largely in the form of Mayor Bradley disputing the police version of the incident), and the public reaction to the incident (as activists called loudly for the removal of Chief Gates from office).

More generally, there are several cues that may encourage journalists to deviate from the official dominance model of news reporting (Chapter Five: "Making Big News"). Among them are competing accounts of the incident (conflict increases the likelihood of coverage), legal proceedings (that add dimension to the story), anomalous or patterned events (e.g. particularly outrageous or repeated incidents of police misconduct), and citizen action in

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response to the incident (pp. 100-107). An analysis of over one hundred randomly selected incidents reported by the NYT and LAT revealed a positive correlation between these cues and the amount of coverage afforded the incidents. This finding is consistent with an examination of three high profile use-of-force incidents reported in the NYT in the early 1990s (Chapter Six: "Struggling for Definition"). She concludes, "What initially drives journalistic attention, it appears, is a combination of promising narrative cues that at some point are joined by citizen and official responses." (p. 110)

In Chapter Seven ("Interpreting Rodney King"), Lawrence returns to the King beating by examining coverage it received in several other newspapers across the nation. Like previous analyses, these stories illustrate a diminished official dominance model: nearly half of the news items suggested that King was the victim and that the police were the aggressors (p.148). Additionally, the most notable story cues were the strong citizen reactions and the high level of local and federal government response to the brutality, driven in part by the connection made between contemporary police use-of- force and historical treatment of blacks in the United States. This is the only point at which the issue of race enters significantly into Lawrence's examination of police use-of-force; the symbolism between past and present provided the context for activists and others to propose a solution to this problem: community policing. In the final analysis, Lawrence argues that, while the most powerful and organized voices have the greatest access to the media and have the resources to provide their preferred problem definition to the public, symbolic associations can overcome the power and resources of the most dominant voices to open the door for competing voices in public discourse (p. 165).

Lawrence concludes in Chapter Eight ("Accidents Will Happen") by suggesting several propositions for a theory of problem definition and solution: (1) journalists mediate public discourse insofar as they are more or less receptive to different events; (2) story cues influence the directions that problem definition take; (3) problem definition results from the combination of official and nonofficial efforts to frame issues in ways that best represent their interests; (4) the process of problem definition, as it occurs in the media, is "variable" and "contingent" (pp. 179-80). Although she acknowledges that questions remain about the power of the media and how the public discourse in that arena translates into actual policymaking, Lawrence states, "Nevertheless, even if it does not lead to real policy changes, event-driven problem definition can have an important impact on public discourse and politics." (p. 185)

Although Lawrence's research makes an appreciable contribution to our understanding of the process by which some voices are more successful than others in influencing public discourse in the United States, it also has some limitations. Most importantly, the descriptions of the data (in the text and in the appendix) suggest that the analyses do not reflect the whole range of variables and potential relationships that might exist and contribute to a more thorough explanation about how and why the media report use-of-force incidents. There are some interesting questions left unanswered, such as which of the story cues are the most important in driving journalist attention to police use-of-force incidents, how the cues interact with each other to influence news coverage, and whether previous reports of these incidents affect

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future reports (and, as a result, future discussion about the problem of police use-of-force).

Nevertheless, THE POLITICS OF FORCE: MEDIA AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF POLICE BRUTALITY would be a meaningful addition to a wide variety of undergraduate courses, including those about the media and mass communication, interest group politics, and even race and politics (as an excellent example of the multidimensionality of many race-oriented issues).