Abstract

The paper explores police violence against ‘Black bodies’ and argues that such bodies are rendered both hyper-visible and invisible in interactions with the formal criminal justice system. It shows how ‘Black bodies’ are hyper-visible and subjected to high levels of over-policing, surveillance and control, yet those same bodies then become invisible through repeated failures to successfully prosecute the perpetrators of state violence, despite the existence of camera-phone and closed-circuit television footage which repeatedly shows state brutality. The paper illustrates how ‘Black bodies’ are continually marked out as risky, dangerous bodies, and comments on the role played by this racist gaze in the politics of policing.