Say Her Name: Gender, Race, and Police Violence during Investigatory Stops

• In Event: 4347 - Exploring Crime, Law and Deviance

Abstract

The social movement #SayHerName focuses on police violence against Black women in the US. However, research on police violence is rarely intersectional, and questions regarding how race intersects with gender during policing interactions remain. We offer an intersectional analysis of police violence using New York City investigatory stop data from 2007-2014. Our findings reveal that police perceptions of Black and Latino men’s hypermasculinity illuminate who is stopped, but those perceptions of racialized hypermasculinity fail to explain Black and Latina women’s heightened experiences of police violence compared to White women. In fact, Black men and women, as well as Latinos and Latinas, share similar risks of experiencing police violence compared to White men and women respectively. Yet gender is strongly associated with the risk of experiencing any police violence within racial groups. Black men are more likely to experience any police violence than Black women and the same gender gap exists for Whites, Asians, and Latinx persons. However, these gender gaps largely disappear when limiting our focus to potentially lethal violence. Together, these findings have implications for theories of hypermasculinity, gender irrelevance, and intersectionality.

Authors

• Brianna Remster, Villanova University

• Chris M. Smith, University of Toronto

• Rory Kramer, Villanova University