Analyzing Police-Civilian Interaction Through a Spatial Lens

This article examines police violence through a spatial lens. It performs a micro-sociological qualitative analysis of body-worn camera (BWC) video data of 17 cases of police operations. Methodologically, the study combines grounded theory and systematic video data analysis (VDA). The hypothesis-generating study examines interactions between officers and civilians, along with their situational outcomes, within the context of spatial contestations of the public and the private. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the production of space and Benn and Gaus’s concepts of publicness and privateness, this research contributes to the under-researched factor of social space in the micro-sociological analysis of police violence. The study finds that across the data analysed, tensions around the features of public and private space are among the conditions that increase the risk of escalation and violence. Social space, the article argues, is thus likely to constitute an independent variable in the analysis of police–civilian interaction.