IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication Mar 2008

Teaching Deadly Force: Collaborative Dynamics and the Rhetoric of Police Policy

Michael Knievel University of Wyoming

Abstract

After the controversial police shooting of a developmentally-disabled African-American teenager in July 2003, the new mayor of Denver, CO, appointed a politically diverse task force to revise the police department's use-of-force policy and propose a new model for police oversight. This teaching case is based on the task force's deliberations and collaborative efforts to build policy consensus in a sometimes rancorous, high-stakes environment. In it, I reconstruct the story of the shooting that gave rise to the task force, trace the arc of the task force's 104-day existence, and analyze the letter and final report submitted by the task force's co-chairs to (1) demonstrate the highly-pressurized nature of policy language invention and the crucial impact of word choice in such policy, and (2) illustrate the difficulty the task force encountered in attempting to secure consensus and the manner in which the final work product acknowledges, rather than obscures, this struggle. Finally, the case includes recommended readings and a guide for individual and group activities for implementation in either an undergraduate- or graduate-level technical communication course.

Journal
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication
Published
2008-03-01
DOI
10.1109/tpc.2007.2000048
CompPile
Open Access
Closed
Topics
rhetorical criticism teacher development collaborative writing technical communication
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No articles in this index cite this work.

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