“It all started with Eddie”: Thanatopolitics, police power, and the murder of Edward Byrne

<jats:p>On February 26, 1988, rookie New York City police officer Edward Byrne was shot dead while guarding a material witness in a drug trafficking case in South Jamaica, Queens. This article considers how state narratives and visual rhetoric emerging from Byrne’s murder emboldened the police power and a revanchist campaign aimed at “taking back the streets” secreted under the war on drugs. As such, this case powerfully illustrates a disparate politics of death and the ways that the state enlists thanatopolitical power in order to reaffirm and reproduce its sovereign authority. Such a reproduction or reanimation of power registers as the state’s ability to unleash violence unequivocally and unequally upon poor and marginalized communities, as later demonstrated by the legal and proper police murder of Sean Bell, a resident of South Jamaica, Queens killed by NYPD agents in 2006.</jats:p>