Social Proximity and Meaning-Making in a Policing Community

• In Event: Sociology of Law Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Sociology of Law Section Roundtables: Table 1 — Policing, Misconduct, and Reform

Abstract

This study examines how residents of a police-dense neighborhood interpret police authority under conditions of social proximity. Drawing on 46 semi-structured interviews in a New York City community, I analyze the cultural logics that residents utilize when evaluating policing, including in instances of identified misconduct. Rather than testing whether proximity strengthens legitimacy, this article treats police communities as analytically powerful case of meaning-making, where officers are encountered as neighbors, relatives, and community participants in addition to state agents. In contradiction to communities in which police interactions occur in an enforcement context, interactions with police in policing communities are much more frequent, intimate and socially embedded. I find that residents draw on recurring interpretive frameworks — including empathy, reciprocity, and responsibility displacement — that reconfigure the moral evaluation of police authority. These findings contribute to sociological theories of police legitimacy by demonstrating how sustained, everyday interaction shapes the cultural interpretation of coercive power.

Author

• Shoshanna Coalson