The Color of Trust: Police, Conflict and Community

• In Event: Over-Policing Communities of Color

Abstract

Citizen perceptions of the police is not a new avenue of inquiry among social scientists and policy makers. Early research in this area began more than 80 years ago with the development of Bellman’s “Police service rating scale”. While the instruments used to measure this effect have changed over time, there exists a serious and dangerous divide between police and the community. Fueled by incontrovertible evidence about the impact of mass incarceration of young black men, and events like the 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown by officers in Ferguson and the 2015 death of Freddie Gray after his arrest in Baltimore, American policing is in the grips of a crisis of legitimacy that has given rise to a sense of social anxiety that is crystallizing activism around poverty, racism and social (in)justice.
Using focus group data, we explore young people’s perceptions of and experiences with police and other agents of social control in and around New Haven. We are specifically interested in the individual perceptions of those who have had disproportionate contact with law enforcement. Furthermore, we aim to juxtapose these incidents of police conflict, broadly defined, with the ways in which communities organize against racism and social injustice.

Authors

• Alan D. Brown, Southern Connecticut State University

• Cassi Meyerhoffer, Southern Connecticut State University