abstract: Recent events in places such as Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, have focused the public's attention on citizen deaths during arrest encounters with officers in police departments across the United States. Riots and protests have broken out across the nation and resulted in a recent President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing to address some of these major issues. Arrest-related deaths (ARDs), however, are not a new phenomenon and have long generated controversy among the public. Despite the reoccurring nature of ARDs, no publicly available, central national registry of ARDs exists to allow for an in-depth analysis of such cases, as well as the development of training and policies to decrease police and citizen harms. In an effort to fill this gap, the current study conducts a retrospective, open-source, web-based search of media reports to explore the prevalence and nature of all types of ARDs that occurred through the United States in 2005 and 2006. The purpose of the study is to investigate ARDs, but to also assess the reliability of media reports as a source of data. The study finds that media reports are not adequate for identifying the prevalence of ARDs, but are useful when investigating circumstances surrounding deadly police-citizen encounters to an extent. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Criminology and Criminal Justice 2015

Death in custody elicits accusations and emotional outbursts by the victims' families, community, activists and the general pubic. These controversial cases have become a regular feature in the news. Using thematic analysis, I examine news reporting on the deaths of two racialized individuals with mental illness at the hands of law enforcement officers in Ontario in 2016. This study draws on the concepts of framing and narratives to examine how news media reporting of law enforcement deaths involving racialized men suffering from mental illnesses may produce conflicting narratives and frames. The news media's coverage of such incidents presents various narratives and frames in an attempt to assist the general public in making sense of the incident. Journalists' quoted sources and their messages resulted in the frames that were found in this study. These frames included opposing views on the use force, the influence of race and mental illness, injustice, and uniqueness of the event. Similarly, the narratives included comments and discourses on the event, how people make sense of what happened and why it happened the way it did, and what can be done to prevent these issues from recurring. Narratives about the identities of both victims and law enforcement agents, the nature of law enforcement work, and system change were also included. The different narratives and frames that appear in news reports of law enforcement brutality cases may create a polarized community with a section of the citizenry agreeing with and supporting these frames while the other section opposes them. The use of force, a contentious issue, is visible to the public and frequently elicits competing claims that serve to frame it as a necessary part of law enforcement work or as brutality that primarily targets the vulnerable in society. This study is significant because it investigates narratives and frames in order to fully comprehend and appreciate the contrasting discourses surrounding the use of deadly force by law enforcement against racialized men with mental health issues in Ontario.

The universally controversial issue of deaths in custody is especially pertinent to South Africa. This study was prompted due to the increasingly diminishing ability for a concerted effort at tackling this issue by all parties involved. The 5 year retrospective, descriptive case audit performed at the Pretoria Medico-Legal Laboratory aimed to evaluate the current medico-legal investigation of deaths in custody in Pretoria, South Africa. Over half of the deaths (52%) occurred as a result of police action, 30% in police custody and 18% in correctional services custody. Gunshot wounds and hangings were the number 1 and 2 most common causes of death, respectively, with homicide and suicide being the 2 most common manners of death, respectively. The principal conclusion from the results is the presence of a flawed and malfunctioning medico-legal investigation system. The introduction of a formal protocol is urgently required to provide a framework for these investigations. / Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / Forensic Medicine / MSc / Unrestricted