I’ve been delinquent in blogging since becoming more serious about consistently posting on YouTube, but this is a post that I think is very important, and I’ll be building on in future posts. I have been waiting until I’m sufficiently “in-between” cases to be able to talk about this, but I’ve basically been retained for at least one, if not two or three, cases at any given time.

The video I’m linking here lays out, in broad strokes, a pattern I’ve seen over and over again in my consulting work as an expert witness: law enforcement make unfounded, often wildly incorrect claims about speech and texts — almost always Black English — that go unchallenged because the detective or federal agent is assumed to be competent. After all, they purport to have training in “gang slang,” and have years of on-the-job expertise. However, what I’ve seen again and again is a combination of unintentional linguistic bias, social bias, overconfidence, and for want of a better word, incompetence, in amateur lexicography. In fact, most do not even know they are engaged in amateur lexicography. They almost always have no training whatsoever in linguistics or lexicography. They do not follow best practices in lexicography because they quite literally have no idea what those practices are.

I should be clear that I am not in any way anti-law enforcement. Not only do I have friends who are LEOs, but I work security, I volunteered for the NYPD Citizens Academy training program, and I share most of the same goals as the police: I want to see fewer drug dealers and gang members causing harm in our communities. I just want to see them do this right, rather than criminalizing slang, or even non-slang regular-old Black English.

And a particularly disturbing pattern I have seen has come not from bias, but from intentionally misrepresenting the speech (or writing) of people they’ve arrested. In some cases, it really is ignorance or incompetence. In others, it gives the appearance of calculated malice: using the authority of the badge to knowingly misrepresent what was said or written, to malign a defendants character.

It would not take much to get a single member of a gang squad trained on the basics of lexicography and lexical semantics, and then law enforcement could be sure that the are only bringing evidence that is a “slam dunk.” And they won’t have to go up against my expert witness reports or me on the stand.

The video below only discusses a fraction of the linguistic absurdities I have either encountered directly, or heard about from lawyers directly involved. I believe in the promise of our judicial system, and want us to live up to it. We must do better.