When Huck Finn met Karen: Tourism, Civic Custodianship, and Systemic Racism in New Orleans policing practices

• In Event: The Relationship Between Systemic Racism and Crime or Criminalization

Abstract

The proliferation of the tourism industry leads to elevated numbers of criminal activities in the neighborhoods. In reaction to the tourism–crime link, policing practices in a tourist city entail place-based strategies that maintain order and neighborhood safety to preserve the reputation as a tourist spot. Nevertheless, the place-based approach may produce unintended consequences of systemic racism, which entails more surveillance and law enforcement toward Black citizens, including stops, arrests, and other physical force tactics.
Civic custodianship further facilitates systemic racism in policing. Although civic custodianship represents how members of a community mobilize municipal governments and agencies to address problems of physical disorder in the public space, it often produces informal social control by problematizing non-white populations and neighborhoods.
Using data from the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) arrest and stop-and-search records and the City of New Orleans’s occupational licenses and service requests in a tourist city, New Orleans, this study examines systemic racism in hotspot policing practices and how civic custodianship moderates racialized policing. I anticipate that 1) there will be more policing in tourism venues in New Orleans targeting Black populations, and 2) civic custodianship will further increase racialized policing, regardless of offense charges and other factors.

Author

• Hyunsu Oh, Louisiana State University