Color-Blind Cops: How Racism Makes its Way into Everyday Policing

• In Event: 4413 - Urban Issues

Abstract

In a recent nationally representative survey of police officers (conducted by the Pew Research Center), a majority (56%) of officers in the U.S. reported a belief that “an aggressive rather than courteous approach is more effective in certain neighborhoods.” In this working paper, we draw on our ongoing analysis of ethnographic interviews with 43 officers over the course of 20 ride-alongs in a major metropolitan police force in the U.S. to illustrate how beliefs about the necessity of disparate policing are manufactured and operationalized in routine policing. Emergent findings regarding the people-, place-, and culture-based distinctions that officers make when it comes to policing "nice" areas and “the projects” illuminate the micro-patterns of disparate treatment that emerge from officers' reliance on these distinctions. We also show how the actions that flow from these distinctions, which officers treat as a form of "color-blind" expertise, operate as a vehicle for the maintenance and reproduction of racial and spatial inequality.

Authors

• Nikki Jones, Univ of California, Berkeley

• Kenly E. Brown, University of California, Berkeley

• Eduardo Bautista Duran, University of California, Berkeley

• Kaily Heitz, University of California, Berkeley

• Jasmine Linnea Kelekay, University of California, Santa Barbara

• Gil Rothschild-Elyassi, UC Berkeley

• Geoffrey Raymond, University of California-Santa Barbara