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Confronting Death: What Does Barnes v. Felix Reveal About The Future of American Policing?
On April 28, 2016, a routine stop to address unpaid tolls on a Toyota Corolla resulted in the death of 24-year old Ashtian Barnes at the hands of Officer Roberto Felix Jr. As the vehicle lurched forward, Felix, still holding on to the car, blindly placed his gun to the back of Barnes’ head and fired twice, killing him near-instantly. The circumstances of Barnes’ murder are commonplace. Race-Class Subjugated (RCS) communities, specifically Black and Latino Americans, are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement—and police violence remains the 6th leading cause of death for American men aged 25 to 29.1 When read alongside precedents established in Tennessee v. Garner (1985) and Graham v. Connor (1989), Barnes’ 2025 decision highlights a narrative Americans are growing intimately aware of: Black lives are structurally and systematically undervalued by the American judiciary.
In Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe offers an analysis to both grasp the persistence of racialized violence in the United States and the conditions required for its transformation. Mbembe defines necropolitics as the leveraging of sociopolitical power to influence who within the state is considered dead and alive, in both a physical and political sense. He argues Black Americans are purposefully ‘deadened’ through police violence and legalized rationales. Viewed through this lens, Barnes v. Felix (2025) can be read as an opportunity for necropolitical reconciliation—where the state is held accountable for its standards and use of violence—ultimately driving a new form of social relation among citizens and to the state itself.
The Courts, Police, and Declaration of ‘Dead’
Police infrastructure acts as the most-visible ‘face’ of governance to RCS communities, which metes out punishments to uphold (white) American democracy.2 RCS Americans, before they are dead, are made devoid of autonomy and relegated to a form of inhumanity manufactured by the association of Blackness with crime and danger. In a biopolitical sense, Mbembe argues non-white Americans are essential to democracy for holding the burden of death, allowing for the political empowerment of an immortal, dominant, whiteness. Racism persists as a tool of social categorization habituating the American population to buy into systemic violence as a sign of political sovereignty.
This pattern of violence is exemplified decades before Barnes v. Felix. The 1974 case of Edward Garner, for instance, reveals the structural deadness of Black bodies noted by Mbembe. After responding to a call about a suspected break-in, Officer Hymon pursued Garner—an unarmed teenager attempting to flee. Under a Tennessee statute that authorized officers to use “all necessary means to effect the arrest,” Hymon shot Garner in the back of the head as he ran away. Though Garner’s father’s suit was shot down at the state level, the Supreme Court review found Hymon in breach of Garner’s Fourth Amendment protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” as Hymon was ‘unreasonable’ in framing Garner as life-threatening.
At first glance, this appears to be a victory. Garner, a young unarmed boy, did not deserve to die on the proverbial sword of Hymon’s unreasonability. Mbebme correctly notes that the vague limits of reasonableness perform a significant amount of heavy lifting. Necropolitics here concerns the power of perception: “To be sovereign is to exert one’s control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power”.3 Though Hymon is censured for stepping over the bounds of reason, the court ruling buttresses the perspectives, fears, and implicit biases of officers over their suspects. While there may be a legal standard for a ‘reasonable’ police officer, however, this does not exist outside the context of policing culture. Officers often work grueling hours under unfavorable conditions which increase levels of paranoia. The focus on an officer’s vulnerability by the court reflects how excessive fear and suspicion are constructed as reasonable justification for consequent outbursts of violence. By prioritizing officer mindsets over those of suspects, the state subtly affirms a hierarchy over life—one that grants police the full protection of their “life” and, simultaneously, renders them largely unculpable for the violent acts they commit. Systematized definitions of reasonable comport implicitly cast judgement upon Black lives that makes encounters with the police and corresponding legal battles the site of necropolitical ‘deadening’. Police, given greater emotional license, act as players in a larger system of judicial exploitation.
This paradox of reasonableness is further illustrated in the aftermath of Graham v. Conner (1989). Dethorne Graham, a diabetic, had been driven to the store by a friend to purchase orange juice and offset dwindling insulin supplies. When he saw the line inside, he left without making a purchase and returned to the car. Moments later, police stopped the vehicle, suspecting wrongdoing. Despite Graham showing signs of medical distress, the officers forcefully detained him—handcuffing him as he entered a diabetic seizure, during which his leg was broken. Graham’s victory builds upon the Fourth Amendment case of Tennessee v. Garner, striking previous rulings that implied excessive use of force was in-part contingent upon an officer’s malicious intent. The impossibility of objectively proving an officer’s intent is therefore bypassed.
While a seeming advancement in officer accountability that rebalances the standards of who holds the burden of proof, Graham’s case inadvertently allowed for the necropolitical norms of policing to reinvent themselves in what the Court deems the ‘moment-of-threat doctrine’. Colloquially referred to as the ‘First Amendment for Cops’, this standard circumscribes the context of an officer’s force, focusing on their actions solely in the moments preceding the discharge of force. The pivot to analysing an officer’s split-second actions synthesises action with intent, imbuing an officer with a near-instinctual moral authority: the claim of self-defense under perceived threat. This maneuver transforms what should have been a triumph for racialized Americans into a device exerting narrative control in favour of the officer.
Mbembe’s theory would classify this as a manifestation of the urge to be both “master and controlling author of his own meaning”.4 Force is predicated upon a network of interconnected statues and norms which structurally target Black citizens.5 Their deaths as racialized suspects are made necessary or desirable, leaving no opportunity for the ‘criminal’ to defend himself, to speak of circumstance. For officers to be assured of their inviolable position as “master and controlling author” of democracy, their lives are cast in direct opposition to Black Americans. Violence and the assertion of death goes beyond physical acts and psychologically casts RCS Americans as unreasonable themselves, in that any resistance—any emotion—endangers the viability of contemporary policing practices. Police officers, as beneficiaries of white supremacy, manufacture RCS Americans as “a mortal threat or absolute danger whose biophysical elimination would strengthen his [their] life potential and security”.6 Instances of police violence, rather than being instances, are ritualized byproducts of racist legal enforcement which entrench systemic racism as a whole.
Ashtian Barnes and the Future of Reasonableness
For both Garner and Graham, the Justice system rewards their litigatory efforts without shifting systemic conflations of Blackness with criminality. What makes the case of Barnes any different? This Supreme Court ruling is unique in that its argumentation explicitly challenges the validity of the ‘moment-of-threat’. The ruling acknowledges how “earlier facts and circumstances may bear on how a reasonable officer would have understood and responded to later ones,” and that sole attention to the moment before violence is enacted—when death is actualized—paints a purposefully incomplete picture.
What unfolds here is the democratization of narrative power between the officer and the public. By widening the scope of evidence in cases of undue use of force, shifting who holds the burden of proof, Barnes posthumously defends the worth of Black life, resisting consumption by a state that predicates freedom on its ability to dispose of men such as him. This ruling hints that American democracy, powered by Black suffering, is purposefully unsustainable and ultimately self-destructive. This form of predatory inclusion only leads to RCS communities pulling away from the state they historically helped create, cyclically subject to vicious cycles of criminality and exploitation. Black Americans, ensnared as an “internal colony”, reveal democracy in their inability to fully participate in it.7
Mbembe suggests that cases like Barnes v. Felix must be considered in the longue durée as incremental procedural advances toward structural change, contributing to the gradual production of non-predatory forms of relation. Black Americans, given a unique political personality, perspective, and heritage through the horrors of enslavement, cannot so simply be ‘rid’ of the United States, and are instead tasked with figuring out “how to retrieve the human from a history of waste” and “a history of dessication”.8 These court cases, though often reifying systems of oppression, represent attempts to ‘resist becoming waste’ and act as symbols for the possibility of a different manner of mutual relation. To resist the state’s dictate of death involves the daily, collective work of exposing the self to the ‘Other,’ and jointly navigating this newfound legal vulnerability through the widening of narrative scope.
Looking Forward
The potential impacts of Barnes v. Felix will be put to the test by The Supreme Court’s specific use of language, which leaves the adaptability of precedent up to future rulings. Neglecting to assign fault to Felix for escalating the stop creates only the possibility for Barnes’ family, and others in similar situations, to receive the level of accountability the ruling strives to offer. It is not that “officer-created” escalations of violence will unilaterally be ruled as present, but that they now must be considered within the “totality of circumstances” such cases hinge upon.
Attorney Adam Fomby, who represented Barnes’ mother Janice Hughs, holds faith the case is “going to affect how they [the police] interact with everyday people on the streets.” Barnes v. Felix raises the potential for increased police accountability and counteracts the premature deadening of RCS communities in America. Though public surveillance and awareness of police use of force cannot alone eradicate the unnecessary deaths of men like Barnes, it represents a democratisation of who can assign and defend the value of life. More power in the say over death is afforded to communities beset by racially intensified policing, and can help nurture an environment in which Black voices and experiences are accounted for, rather than discarded as waste.
Edited by Martin Rojas Remolina
The argument defended in this article is solely that of the author and does not reflect the position of the McGill Journal of Political Science, the Political Science Students’ Association, or the Political Science Department.
Featured image by Philip Cohen
- Owens, Michael Leo et. al. Deadly Force: Police Shootings in Urban America. Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2025, 18.
↩︎ - Soss, Joe and Vesla Weaver. “The Police Are Our Government: Politics, Political Science, and the Policing of Race-Class Subjugated Communities,” Annual Review of Political Science 20, 2017, 567. ↩︎
- Mbembe, Achille and Steve Corcoran. Necropolitics. Durham North Carolina: Durham University Press, 2019, 66. ↩︎
- Mbembe, Necropolitics, 68. ↩︎
- Owens, Deadly Force, 204-05. ↩︎
- Mbembe, Necropolitics, 72. ↩︎
- Membe, Necropolitics. 76. ↩︎
- Mbembe, Necropolitics. 158-59. ↩︎
