Copspeak, “the past exonerative” tense, and punching Nazis

In the Constitution, any suspect is innocent until found guilty by a court, even suspects who kneel for eight minutes on the throat of an unarmed, handcuffed person who is caught on video pleading to breathe, passing out, and dying. If the court hasn’t (yet) ruled that a death is homicide, then it’s not accurate to describe the death as a “murder” or to describe a person who has just been arrested, but not formally charged yet, as a “killer.”

Having said that, the “past exonerative voice” is a powerfully descriptive name for how the journalists who are trained to rely on official police reports can be complicit in distorting the truth when the human beings who write those documents choose to deploy specific grammatical structures designed to de-emphasize the choices made by officers who are “involved in shootings.” Such reports use words like “police-involved shooting” or “scuffle” and omit details such as whether the person who was shot by police was armed and shooting, or unarmed with their hands up; whether the person who was shot was breaking down a door into an innocent person’s apartment, or was at home in bed and woken up in the middle of the night by armed intruders who were at the wrong address.

Here’s a good example of the kind of spin I’m talking about:

Liberal arts college teacher assaults member of alt-right group.

Pop culture satire is harmless, but this kind of linguistic manipulation is often done by the powerful in order to distort the truth.

Bearing in mind that not every journalist who uses “allegedly” is part of a conspiracy to support a racist justice system, here’s a good breakdown of the power of language, when it’s used by people in power to obscure wrongdoing.

The past exonerative tense transforms acts of police brutality against Black people into neutral events in which Black people have been accidentally harmed or killed as part of a vague incident where police were present-ish.

Examples of Usage

“Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis tweeted Tuesday afternoon that 4 officers involved in the arrest of a man who died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by an officer’s knee had been fired.” (SOURCE)

This classic example of past exonerative tense muddles the events so convincingly that it seems that no one person is responsible for the killing of George Floyd, that the officers were chiefly involved with an arrest rather than a murder, and that knees are sentient, independent entities. —McSweeney’s