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Brutal Serendipity: Criminological Verstehen and Victimization

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Abstract

This article explores police use of force and its aftermath by focusing on the immediacy of police–citizen interactions via an autoethnographic account that invokes the concept of criminological verstehen. Specifically, the article explores issues of constructed meaning via Yuen’s interpretive constructs of ‘safe spaces’ and ‘creative analytic practice’ as a way of coming to terms with the first author’s lived experience of police brutality and its consequent legal process. Based on document analysis of official records such as police citations, medical files, and court transcripts, along with media accounts and the first author’s personal notes, the process of memoing provides an immersion into and an exploration of the data, and a tool for ascertaining meaning from it. Resultant themes of presentation of self, identity accomplishment, and silence are discussed in relation to the sorts of experiences and emotions necessary to a verstehen-oriented victimology. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of this exercise in criminological verstehen.

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Notes

  1. Throughout, first person accounts from the first author’s memos and notes are italicized.

  2. A pseudonym.

  3. Carl Root. “Lebowski, Primus, Cool Hand Luke and Me: This Kind of Edgework is for Assholes”. International Crime, Media and Popular Culture Studies Conference, Indiana State University, September 2011, Terre Haute, IN.

  4. A pseudonym.

  5. The accounts of Kraska, Mattley, Jacobs and Lyng are all included in Ferrell and Hamm’s (1998) edited volume.

  6. Kluckhohn and Murray wrote that “Every man is in certain respects: (a) like all other men, (b) like some other men, (c) like no other man” (Kluckhohn and Murray 1948: 35).

  7. http://youtu.be/TZ05rWx1pig and http://youtu.be/6AdDLhPwpp4 respectively.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Criminology, University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Avenue, Tampa, FL, 33620, USA

    Carl Root & Wilson R. Palacios

  2. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Texas Christian University, TCU Box 298710, Ft. Worth, TX, 76129, USA

    Jeff Ferrell

Authors
  1. Carl Root
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  2. Jeff Ferrell
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  3. Wilson R. Palacios
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Correspondence to Jeff Ferrell.

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Root, C., Ferrell, J. & Palacios, W.R. Brutal Serendipity: Criminological Verstehen and Victimization. Crit Crim 21, 141–155 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-013-9181-8

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