Drawing the Street: How Rural Black Residents Imagine the Street and Experience Police Street Checks

• In Event: Roundtable: Criminal Justice Contact and Race/Ethnicity

Abstract

Whether called carding or stop-and-frisk, the police street check has disproportionately impacted Black communities across North America, even as criminological research has yet to seriously examine the street that is ostensibly being checked. As a site of encounter between police officers and civilians, “the street” is critical for conceptualizing the value and relevance of police street checks, and its meaning has been highly shaped by an intertwined set of binaries – urban/rural, black/white, dangerous/safe – in political discourse, popular culture, and criminology’s own urban-centric focus. To trouble these binaries, particularly the associations of Blackness with urban danger, this project explores how the street appears in the imagination, memories and lived experiences of rural Black communities in a region where Black people are six times more likely to be the subject of a street check than their white counterparts. Participant-produced drawings of street scenes are used to elicit narratives among rural African Nova Scotians about what they know, feel and think about the streets on which they live and work. With this visual research methodology, participants and researchers can explore how ongoing productions of race, racisms and space are entangled with imagined dangers, and the effects of police practices.

Authors

• Anita Lam, York University

• Timothy Bryan, University of Toronto Mississauga