Like a Demon: Racialized Threat, Deadly Force, and Police Discourse

This article examines how law enforcement discourse makes racialized police violence intelligible through accounts of threat, authority, and institutional legitimacy. Using a purposively constructed corpus of grand jury testimony and retrospective accounts concerning Officer Darren Wilson's killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the study combines critical discourse analysis with the discourse-historical approach. The complete law-enforcement portions of the selected sources were coded for nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivization, mitigation and intensification, and recurring strategies identified in research on racial discourse. Four interlocking strategies organize the findings: denial of racism, positive self-presentation of officers and police institutions, negative other-presentation of Michael Brown and Ferguson’s Black community, and appeals to deference that delegitimize post hoc criticism. Together, these strategies show how formally race-neutral vocabularies of size, threat, disrespect, professionalism, and officer safety can connect the legal language of objective reasonableness to historically racialized expectations about dangerousness. The article extends scholarship on police storytelling by demonstrating how legal testimony and institutional narratives can work together to transform a contested killing into an account of professional duty, survival, and legitimate authority.