Racial Profiling and Police Violence against Latinos/as in Arizona: Understanding Racial Oppression and Reasonable Suspicion

• In Event: 032 - Section on Latino/a Sociology Paper Session. Criminalization, Violence, and Social Harm Affecting Latino Communities

Abstract

In the wake of police violence and murder directed at Black people many scholars have argued this has long been the case in the US. This paper argues that police violence is part and parcel to the existence of the nation state. Focusing on Latinos/as in Arizona this paper address the questions of how and why police violence is possible through an examination of the discourse that justifies such violence.
The importance of discourse and language have time and again proven to shape the experiences of groups of color (Van Dijk 1993 Matsuda et. al 1993). However, rarely is there a face given to the whites and the white supremacy that is often shaping the media’s representations of Latinos/as. This article locates these narratives in discourses by examining one of the sources used by much of the news media— the press release. It is not this article’s intention to comprehensively address white supremacy in the media itself but rather to locate its usage among a government organization located in Phoenix, Arizona metro area. Using more than 90 press releases from 2011 from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s office, this article looks at the source of narratives about Latinos/as living in the Southwest and in particular Latinos living in Maricopa county.

Author

• Daniel Justino Delgado, Salem State University