The Politics of Force Media and the Construction of Police Brutality, Updated Edition

Published over twenty years ago, Regina G. Lawrence's The Politics of Force was the first scholarly book to look at the way in which media coverage of unexpected, dramatic events shaped public consciousness about important social and political problems. At a time when police brutality was rarely discussed in the news, Lawrence examined police use of force in over 500 incidents, with an in-depth look at the Rodney King case. In doing so, she showed that when incidents of police brutality became news, they offered one of the few real opportunities for marginalized voices and activists to find a public platform and take on the powerful.

In the intervening years, the empirical and theoretical contributions of The Politics of Force have become more significant, not only because police brutality is back in the news, but because the media system itself has changed. In this updated edition, Lawrence contextualizes and extends these contributions, while including a closer look at race and racial justice in incidents of police use of force. Reflecting on the context in which the book was written--a time when race and policing received limited coverage in the news and in the field of political communication--Lawrence considers what has changed in media studies since the year 2000, what things haven't changed, and why. Moreover, Lawrence examines coverage of more recent incidents of police violence and the ways in which the voices of citizen activists are treated in the news today. In turn, she addresses the important question of how defining political problems through such events might or might not produce more lasting policy change. Expanding on her landmark publication, Lawrence provides an accessible update on news production dynamics and police use of force for a new generation of scholars, students, and activists.

Regina G. Lawrence is Associate Dean of the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon and Research Director for the Agora Journalism Center. She is a nationally recognized authority on political communication, civic engagement, gender and politics, and the role of media in
public discourse about politics and policy. Her two latest books are Hillary Clinton's Race for the White House: Gender Politics and the Media on the Campaign Trail and When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina. From 2011 to 2015, Lawrence directed the Annette
Strauss Institute for Civic Life at the University of Texas-Austin. She has served as chair of the political communication section of the American Political Science Association and as a research fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard University. She is currently the editor of the journal Political Communication.