Policing the Segregated City: Post-racial Ideology and the Regulation of Urban Space

• In Event: 213 - Regular Session. Deviance and Social Control

Abstract

Policing is at the center of debates over whether or not race is a foundational axis of social organization. This study asks how the police themselves reconcile a post-racial ideology with evidence of the salience of race in policing. Through a year of ethnographic observation of the police in two districts of a Rust Belt city, I examine how police personnel express and legitimate post-racial ideology in relation to situational officer decision-making, racial disparities in policing outcomes, and the structural inequalities attendant to segregation. I find that the relationship of the police to structures of racial inequality is rife with contradictions. On the one hand, police personnel deny the existence of racism and declare race irrelevant to their work. On the other, they draw upon racially-coded language to signal criminal propensity and they participate in the regulation of racialized spaces. Both of these dynamics are facilitated by the organizational and environmental context of racially homogenous police districts. This alignment between segregation boundaries and police district boundaries allows the police agency to define divergent policing priorities across the city, while obscuring the extent to which divergent strategies and tactics may produce racially disparate treatment.

Author

• Daanika Gordon, University of Wisconsin Madison