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When police brutality becomes front-page news, it triggers a sudden, intense interaction between the media, the public, and the police. Regina Lawrence ably demonstrates how these news events provide the raw materials for looking at underlying problems in American society. Journalists, policy makers, and the public use such stories to define a problematic situation, and this process of problem definition gives the media a crucial role in our public policy debates.Lawrence extensively analyzes more than 500 incidents of police use-of-force covered by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times from 1985 to 1994, with additional analysis of more recent incidents such as as the shooting of Amadou Diallo in New York. The incidents include but are not limited to those defined as "police brutality." Lawrence reveals the structural and cultural forces that both shape the news and allow police to define most use-of-force incidents, which occur in far greater numbers than are reported, she says. Lawrence explores the dilemma of obtaining critical media perspectives on policing policies. She examines the factors that made the coverage of the Rodney King beating so significant, particularly after the incident was captured on video. At the same time, she shows how an extraordinary news event involving the police can become a vehicle for marginalized social groups to gain entrance into the media arena.In contrasting "event-driven" problem definition with the more thoroughly studied "institutionally driven" news stories, Lawrence's book fills a major gap in media studies. It also offers a broader understanding of the interplay between the criminal justice system and the media in today's world

"Twenty years ago, when The Politics of Force was first published, the issue of police brutality was rarely covered in the news. This book was inspired by events following the Los Angeles Police Department's brutal treatment of Rodney King, a Black motorist whose beating by LAPD officers was captured from the balcony of a nearby resident, George Holliday, who happened to have a video camera (this, of course, was in the era before digital phones). First aired by a local television station, scenes from that videotape were shown repeatedly on national news outlets for weeks, giving rise to an unprecedented public reaction. "When George Holliday's video surfaced," one Black journalist observed, "it signaled to a lot of citizens just how bad police violence visited upon marginalized communities actually was" (Smith 2015). The officers' subsequent trial and acquittal, and the uprising in Los Angeles that followed, kept the issues of race and policing in the news for many weeks. That tumult was eventually replaced by relative silence on the issue, occasionally punctuated by news coverage of other violent police-citizen encounters, such as the brutal NYPD assault on Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in 1997 and the death of Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo in 1999, hit with 19 bullets fired by NYPD officers. But as is the case with other policy problems not championed by elites, coverage of police brutality was limited, sporadic, and largely tied to the occasional incident that became a major news story. Then, in the summer of 2014, 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Though what exactly lead up to Brown's death may have been unclear, the aftermath was captured on a bystander' cell phone video. It showed Brown's body left uncovered and unattended, face-down in the street, while neighbors grew agitated and police seemed to mill casually about. Suddenly, the issue again became national news. Brown's death and the intense social media activity and protest it evoked within and beyond Ferguson prompted another, more prolonged and more searing national argument about police brutality"--