Professing interactionist bio + social terminology, contemporary biocriminology asserts a break from its biologically essentialist past. Assurances notwithstanding, whether biocriminology has undergone a decisive paradigm shift rejecting notions of biological criminals and bad brains remains uncertain. Unfortunately, discussions of biocriminology's assumptions are mired in politics, obscuring important scientific issues. Motivated to clarify misunderstanding, I address the ontoepistemology of biocriminology from a scientific realist perspective. Drawing on familiar notions of crime as a social construction, I explain how and why biocriminology's ontoepistemology is inconsistent with the social reality of crime for scientific not ideological reasons. I explain that recognizing crime is a social construction does not imply that crime is not real or objective and cannot be studied scientifically. On the contrary, the irreducibly social nature of crime requires that scientific realists reject assumptions of 'biological crime' as well as the biologically reductionist epistemology on which biocriminology depends.
This article is situated in ongoing discussions about the influx of images of police violence. To date, much scholarship has centred on Foucauldian notions of knowledge-power and sousveillance. Alternatively, I attend to how video evidence produces understanding of police violence in court through a case study of the murder trial of Officer Michael Slager who shot and killed Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina. While audio and video direct evidence of the moments leading up to Slager's decision to shoot was presented, cross-examination focused more explicitly on post-shooting conduct as circumstantial evidence. This approach highlights an issue for video evidence, that what is to be settled at trial may not be directly re-presented in video. Gurwitsch's notion of Gestalt and Garfinkel's adaptation thereof are proposed as an alternative means of interrogating video evidence.