Chronic Discontent, Police Illegitimacy, Bureaucratic Disorganization, and Homicide

• In Event: Posters II

Abstract

This paper assesses recent homicide trends, focusing primarily on perceptions of police legitimacy and the structural conditions under which trustful and legitimate perceptions of the police matter. A review of relevant literature demonstrates that such trust matters most in inner-city African American communities that have high rates of homicide. It is argued that, in order to accurately assess homicide trends, detailed city- and/or neighborhood-level homicide data must be made available and ethnographic interviews must be conducted with a large sample of law enforcement agents and African American residents from underprivileged communities. This will allow researchers to examine whether chronic discontent and police illegitimacy are activated during periods of heightened civil unrest, causing homicides to rise in black disadvantaged communities but not others and to examine how changes in policing may not only lower police use of force but also lower black-on-black violence, which is viewed in this paper as the more prominent issue at hand.

Author

• Paige Vaughn, University of Missouri - St. Louis