Cultivating “Camera Cues” to Capture Police Misconduct: Urban Residents’ Cultural Development Amid Proactive Policing

• In Event: 3520 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 2. Homeownership, Poverty, Policing

Abstract

This article uses 25 in-depth interviews with Chicago residents to examine how proactive policing culturally patterns residents’ appropriation of their cellphones to negotiate police interventions. Focusing on Englewood, home to one of the most intrusive and pervasive policing efforts, this study finds that residents’ repeated interactions with officers enabled them to decipher which officers’ statements and behaviors foreshadowed police misconduct. Equipped with this information, residents develop a cultural frame of “camera cues,” whereby they understand officers’ statements, behaviors, and demeanors as instructions to film the ensuing event. By using this interpretative framework, residents were able to sense when police misconduct was on the horizon and film accordingly. As residents identify camera cues to mitigate harmful police contact for themselves and others, they also strategize ways to circulate the videos to extra-legal avenues to broadcast their struggles with police misconduct.

Author

• Brandon Alston, Northwestern University