Shared Experiences: Police, Space and Race in Two Cities

• In Event: Policing the Boundaries: Gangs, Identity, and the Social Control of Marginalized Populations in Urban Settings

Abstract

Many authors have shown how the police have become a key institution in the construction of spatial and racial identities. For many nonwhite residents of low-income neighborhoods, the encounters with the police, too many of them violent, become a central experience in the construction of their communal identities. Benedict Anderson defines national communities as imagined ones, because, despite the lack of one-on-one contacts between all members, they are able to imagine each member due to the cultural rituals they share. A similar process takes place with nonwhite residents of low-income communities, and the shared experiences with the police are a central component of their imagined community. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted in Sao Paulo’s western and southern periphery and Los Angeles southern and eastern regions, I expand on this idea of the imagined community and argue that residents of both cities share experiences that indicate their belonging to a wider community that crosses national borders. What is it about policing that, even in different contexts, people share similar experiences? This paper is an attempt to theorize the way policing is experience in hyper-capitalist and racially stratified societies, which leads to the shared experiences.

Author

• Sebastian Sclofsky, University of Florida