Beyond "Heartfelt Condolences": A Critical Take on Mainstream Psychology's Responses to Anti-Black Police Brutality

Anti-Black police brutality in the United States is not a new problem, but at least a 400-year old one. Mainstream psychology has responded to this critical racial and social justice issue by conceptualizing it primarily as an outcome of police officers' social cognition (e.g., threat perceptions) or implicit racial biases. Such individualistic and cognitive perspectives, however, ignore the fundamental role of anti-Black structural racism in facilitating the ability of law enforcement to terrorize, brutalize, and kill Black people with impunity. As with the media and public attention, mainstream psychology has also tended to frame acts of anti-Black police brutality as outliers, or occasional lethal and spectacular events, rather than as a broad spectrum of routine acts that structure policing and police brutality as a world for Black people in the United States. Informed by critical psychology, and the critical theoretical frameworks of critical race theory, intersectionality, and Afro-Pessimism, the goal of this article is to critically engage with the topic of anti-Black police brutality. By critically engage, we mean expose and challenge the economic, social, and material power relations that disproportionately expose Black people to police brutality; and conceptualize police brutality not as a series of aberrant incidents, but as a structure that in essence constructs and reifies Blackness and Whiteness. We also introduce the Anti-Black Police Brutality Continuum, a conceptual framework of police brutality as a broad spectrum of routine manifestations of anti-Black structural racism, and criticize mainstream psychology's deferral of a critical and transformative response to anti-Black police brutality. Public Significance Statement Police brutality in U.S. Black communities is one of the most critical social justice issues of our time. Although mainstream psychology has long been in the vanguard of advancing empirical knowledge about the effects of racist stereotypes, implicit racial bias, and other individual-level factors on police brutality, it has largely ignored the role of structural racism. This article challenges mainstream psychology to critically engage with the topic of anti-Black police brutality. The article also introduces the Anti-Black Police Brutality Continuum, a conceptual framework developed to increase knowledge about the non-lethal and lethal spectrum of anti-Black police brutality, and its deleterious physical and mental health