Researching in Community-University Borderlands: Using Public Science to Study Policing in the South Bronx

• In Event: 63.034 - Research for Justice: Challenging Discriminatory Policing, School Closures, and Youth Unemployment

Abstract

This paper, co-authored by fifteen participants in a multi-year action research project in the South Bronx, details a collaborative research effort that documented and analyzed policing in its neighborhood and how residents perceived and experienced those practices, and then used the findings in educational interventions designed to reeducate and activate the aggrieved public to disrupt the ‘stop and frisk’ violence being imposed. This participatory action research (PAR) public science case study shows how research conducted in solidarity with an emerging police reform movement can effectively respond to ongoing and aggressive policing policies that most heavily impact poor communities and communities of color and that create another pipeline to prison aligned with school discipline policies that target the same population of students. It describes participatory, research-action, "sidewalk science" strategies designed to better understand and challenge the ongoing structural violence of the carceral state. The collaboratively written story is told across three sections that outline the genesis of the project, its major commitments as a collective, and its powerful PAR and public science “interventions” that transform traditional university practices.

The project emerged in a confluence of responses to both the daily violence that manifests a continuous history of state violence through racist policing and incarceration policies and practices (Alexander, 2012), and the violences enacted in the long history of university complicity in the racist and colonial exploitation and ongoing dispossession of indigenous and other aggrieved communities (Smith, 1999). The praxis of contesting these structural violences (Farmer, 1996) located certain university epistemic and professional restraints as part of that violence. The study reveals how PAR and public science shaped by shared interpersonal and social ethical and political commitments and accountabilities can be an effective counter that can pry open new spaces of possibility both in communities and in the academy.

The multi-vocal discussion in this paper is particularly attuned to growing numbers of people across cities, campuses, and coalitions who are taking action and challenging the ongoing pervasiveness of state sanctioned police violence and the unprecedented expansion of the carceral state enacted largely on poor black and brown bodies as well as other people whose often multiply intersecting positions are relegated to the margins, considered a threat, and targeted (e.g. LGBTQ-identified, homeless or precariously housed, immigrants particularly undocumented, people with psychiatric disabilities and mental health issues, Muslim practicing religions groups, and activists, among others). This violence intimately threatens and criminalizes these lives in their homes, at their schools, and in their workplaces. Community based research is complicated and messy and longitudinal, and the authors conclude with humility and uncertainty as well as a sense of pride and accomplishment. This enlightening first-person account of the project represents the best of public science – publically oriented science by the public, with the public, for the public good – that reached from the streets of the South Bronx all the way to the White House, and there is much more to be learned from them.

Authors

• Brett Stoudt, City College of New York - CUNY

• Maria Elena Torre, City University of New York - CUNY