Condensed Eulogies: On Biology, Brutality, and Blame

These Field Notes are based on my 3-year ethnography of protests organized in response to police violence. During my fieldwork, I had several conversations with families that lost children at the hands of the state. While attending the 23rd Annual Procession for the United Family and Friends Campaign (UFFC) in October of 2022, I heard families recount the harrowing moment they received the news that “excited delirium,” “acute behavioral disturbance,” or some other medical condition was the alleged cause of death of their loved ones. These exchanges, largely unmediated by the researcher, not only reveal the immense emotional toll of police violence but also the work of diagnosis and its centrality to modern policing. Masking brutality with clinical terminology, medicine is wielded as a tool to shield the state from accountability. Hopefully, understanding these overlapping histories allows us to ask different questions about how both medicine and policing work together to create new classes of people.