“Keep our kids safe”: Youth, police, and the politics of safety

• In Event: Expanding Carcerality

Abstract

What are the current and past relationships between carcerality, youth, and safety? This paper argues that safety, as currently conceptualized and practiced, is carceral. As illustrated in recent books such as Damien Sojoyner’s Against the Carceral Archive, carceral logics view Blackness via narrow frameworks and violent binaries. I add that racially minoritized young people, particularly Black and Latinx youth, and their neighborhoods have historically been viewed and positioned as “unsafe” and in need of “safety.” To do so, I draw on archival, content, and fieldwork analysis during (1) the formation of the Los Angeles School Police Department in 1948 and (2) the carceral technologies and practices developed and exported by the Los Angeles School Police Department and the Los Angeles Police Department. By parsing these different events, I consider historical, spatial, and ideological carceral processes and the violence they unleash on racially minoritized youth.

Author

• Uriel Serrano, University of Southern California