Dissecting ‘Resisting Arrest’ in Cases of Police Violence

Sandra Susan SmithDissecting ‘Resisting Arrest’ in Cases of Police Violence
Sandra Susan Smith, Daniel & Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice, Harvard presented this talk as part of the 2023 IRP Spring Seminar Series.
Research consistently finds civilian resistance to be one of the strongest correlates of non-lethal police violence. What are the interactional dynamics underpinning this observed relationship? Prior work assumes that resisting arrest is a consistent and coherent pattern of civilian behavior that causes police to respond violently. In contrast, this paper draws from ethnographically-rich civilian accounts of 353 police encounters to show that ‘resisting arrest’ covers a heterogeneous set of interactional dynamics that are united by how police use violence to accomplish a wide array of personal and professional ends. The paper identifies four distinct interactions captured by ‘resisting arrest’: (1) the police falsify resisting arrest charges as a means of justifying their actions; (2) initial police intervention seeds confusion that leads civilians to struggle back; (3) fear of police violence leads civilians to run; and (4) a sense of injustice leads civilians to protest. Analyzing the interactional dynamics across these distinct patterns reveal violence to be a central part of the ‘cultural toolkit’ that police use to respond to a wide range of uncertainty and dissent that falls under the label of ‘resisting arrest.’ The paper assesses the implications for methodology, theory, and policy, including the problems with using resisting arrest as a variable in future work and as a legal justification for police violence.