Agency, culpability, and police brutality: French reports of death during les contrôles policiers

This article proposes an analysis of recurrent linguistic strategies that have become prevalent in French journalistic writing about les contrôles policiers. It compares the coverage between 2016 and 2022 from two French newspapers, Libération and Le Figaro, and their use of temporal adverbs when discussing the deaths of individuals of color in police custody. Drawing from Norman Fairclough, Judith Butler, and discourse analysis, as well as the biopolitics of Michel Foucault, I argue that this linguistic structure is a method that devalues victims of police brutality by fostering misunderstandings of how racialized individuals die during these police stops. I suggest therefore that these linguistic structures inscribe a negative perception of the racialized individual that perpetuates a social indifference to their deaths.