Police Violence, Community Dialogue, and Political Engagement in Urban America

• In Event: Police Violence and Civic Engagement

Abstract

Policing and the criminal justice system are major components of political life in marginalized urban communities (Cohen 1999; Isaac 2015; Soss and Weaver 2017). How does this facet of urban politics impact the broader political and civic engagement of local residents? Existing work on this question is sparse and focuses primarily on the ways in which levels of criminal justice contact stymie political participation (Weaver and Lerman 2010; Burch 2014; Lerman and Weaver 2014). In recent years, however, episodes of police violence have sparked vigorous discussions, debates, and movements in poor and predominately-minority communities across the US. These local and often-informal responses to police violence have been understudied by scholars of American Politics and Race Politics. This gap limits our understanding of the links between the criminal justice system and urban political and civic engagement: while most residents may not directly experience high-profile incidents of police violence, such incidents may nonetheless spur informal dialogues that help shape local attitudes and behavior as well as influence the way politicized racial identities are activated and used.
This paper uses a randomized field experiment to help address this gap. In the experiment, which we will field in spring 2018, patrons in predominately-African American barbershops and beauty salons in Columbus, OH will be randomly selected to participate in lightly-moderated discussions about police violence. Comparing these patrons with members of control and placebo groups, we will measure civic engagement in terms of participation in a voter registration drive, intention to vote, and real-world donations to social initiatives. Our preliminary hypotheses bridge existing work on the political effects of the criminal justice system in the US with recent findings on the political and social effects of exposure to larger-scale violence (see Bauer 2016). Our broad expectations are as follows: we expect that discussions about police violence lead certain residents to increasingly withdraw from formal political life while contributing to more localized and targeted social initiatives; Black women and men will speak differently about police violence; and that linked fate moderates attitudes on local and federal governance. In building and testing these hypotheses, the results of this study will improve our understanding of the links between policing, politicized racial identities, political participation, and civic life in marginalized urban communities.

Authors

• Bradley E Holland, Ohio State University

• Brianna Mack, Ohio State University