Institutional Abandonment: Police Culture and Enforcement Practices Toward People Who Use Drugs in Baltimore City

• In Event: Lightning Talk: Law Enforcement: Duties, Performance, and Tactics

Abstract

Cities and states across the U.S. are awash in efforts to shift away from the criminalization of illicit drug use toward a public health approach. The past several years have witnessed the implementation—and in some instances the reversal—of drug decriminalization policies and investments in public health infrastructure. This ongoing ethnographic case study examines how patrol officers negotiate, contest, and make sense of drug policy and police reforms during interactions with people who use drugs. In contrast to existing studies emphasizing law enforcements efforts to manage social suffering by punishing, coercing, or offloading responsibility of the poor to adjacent state institutions, I present a case in which street-level officers have largely ceded authority over illicit drug use altogether. Drawing on interviews and ride-alongs with the Baltimore Police Department, I show the causes and consequences of patrol officers’ abandonment of people who use drugs.

Author

• Bradley E. Silberzahn, University of Texas at Austin