‘The video does look concerning, but it is only a snapshot’ Public accusations and counteraccusations of [racist] police conduct in the U.K.

Au-Yeung, Terry S.H.

and Smith, Robin

2025. ‘The video does look concerning, but it is only a snapshot’ Public accusations and counteraccusations of [racist] police conduct in the U.K. Analysing Conversations in Forensic Settings, SpringerNature,

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Abstract

This article examines how public accusations and counter-accusations regarding racist policing are constructed through their visibility on social media. Analysing responses to a viral video on Twitter (now X) depicting a Black woman being handcuffed by police, we demonstrate how quoting tweets project different spatiotemporal structures, rendering the policing event a distinct, meaningful subject of moral judgment. We identify three formal types of moral praxes and their corresponding temporal structures. Accusing tweets, which comprise the majority of the dataset, invoke a comparative structure of perceiving the event in relation to recurring historical patterns, similar scenes staffed by different social groups, and contemporaneous contrasts with other public scandals of monetary scale. Conversely, a small subset of tweets mitigate blame by invoking a “we” temporality of pleasant, routine civic interactions. Finally, the Metropolitan Police’s official statement on Twitter represents a sophisticated moral praxis, avoiding direct engagement with the accusation-and-counter-accusation dialectic and subtly displacing blame by reframing the incident as a ‘snapshot of a wider incident,’ leveraging institutional knowledge like body-worn video and procedural timelines. While such an institutional proprietary eventful structure might protect the institution from immediate blame, it fragments public understanding and possessiveness of policing order, potentially eroding the basis of public trust in the police.

Item Type:	Book Section
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HM Sociology H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races
Publisher:	SpringerNature
Funders:	Economic and Social Research Council
Last Modified:	15 Oct 2025 09:35
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/181615

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