Black Deaths in Custody: Performing Accountability in the Coroner's Court

Despite there being over 1, 680 deaths in UK police custody since 1990, there has not been a single successful prosecution of a police officer. Those who have died following restraint or excessive use-of-force are disproportionately black people and people of colour. Their families and campaigners decry this police impunity. A common denouncement is that the police are above the law. However, it would be more accurate to observe that the police act very much within the law, for it is the law that justifies the killing of black people. My project is focused on how judicial institutions and their officials make decisions and performatively justify black death in the Coroner's Court.

Normatively, the purpose of the Coroner's Court is to find facts in relation to an unexplained and unexpected death. Accountability is considered as a mechanism to retrieve facts and compel the police to be answerable at an inquest. This prescriptive perspective is adopted by criminologist Baker (2016), who maintains accountability, as a socially relational construct, is liable to collective failure. However, this failure is not so much an unintentional consequence, rather, following McKernan (2011), failure is a condition of accountability. That is, giving an account always already undermines the account itself, for values such as responsibility and transparency can be compromised from the accountability process. These values are connected to the principles, standards, and codes, which an accountability process seeks to discover if they were used or abused. In inquests, the Coroner's Court investigates and questions the conduct of a police officer during a death in custody. Answers are provided by way of providing an account, that is, narrating a story. A mode of expression and cognition (Boland and Schultze, 1996), narrativisation fashions selfhood and constructs subjectivity.

While my project would examine the narratives of police accounts, I will go further to explore the performance of accountability. By performance I mean the production of subjecthood and the laws that govern life and death. The subjects of my study would not be limited to the police but include the coroner, legal council, and the jury, to survey the operation of the Coroner's Court and the role of its players.