Extent, characteristics, and influence of police involvement in the death certification process in France and in the United States

• In Event: Defining and Predicting Violence in Various Cultural Contexts

Abstract

Homicide investigations start with the sometimes arduous task of identifying whether a death is a crime. For that reason, the involvement of police on death scenes is not limited to suspected homicides. One could argue, however, that to a hammer, everything is a nail, and previous studies have indeed shown that the precision with which death is expected to fit in the categories of homicide, suicide, accident, or natural is socially constructed. This is made particularly evident in an international context. In order to ascertain the possible role of the police in such a social construction of death, the present study analyzes autopsy narratives as well as field notes from four medical examiners’ or coroners’ offices, two located in the U.S., and two in France. Such content analysis reveals points of congruence as well as divergence between sites and countries in the ways in which police get involved in death investigations, the former pointing to some level of universality in the ways deaths are constructed, while the latter are evidence of the relativity of the social construction of death. The analysis also identifies the factors associated with those points of congruence and divergence.

Author

• Melanie-Angela Neuilly, Washington State University