The charged language of policing

AMERICAN POLICE speak in a peculiar lexicon. When an officer guns somebody down, it is an "officer-involved shooting." When a department spokesperson speaks of "the use of force," police violence is reduced to basic physics.

- ISAAC SCHER

"Fatality" dulls a plainer reality: that somebody has been killed.

A less-discussed clause carries with it the same obfuscation of meaning: "suicide by cop." The phrase refers to a person who provokes the police's violence to kill themselves. But too often it has been loosely applied to excuse police killings as unavoidable.