Efforts to understand racial inequality in policing often focus on the micro-level, examining the situational dynamics of police-citizen encounters. This Article explores racial inequality in policing from another angle: it asks how the police organization responds to and further constructs the surrounding urban environment. I examine a police department’s move toward local and decentralized approaches, captured in a redistricting reform and subsequent district-level strategies and initiatives. I draw on several sources of data, including public documents, in-depth interviews with decision makers and stakeholders, a year of ethnographic observation of police work in two districts, and data on calls for police service. I find that the police drew upon symbolic ideas that emphasized the violence of black neighborhoods and the economic value of white neighborhoods in developing local strategies. As they acted in relation to these distinctions, the police amplified disparities in service provision and social control, consolidating the character of an already segregated and unequal landscape

Chapter 5 explores how policing practices were implicated in defining and enforcing the boundaries of segregation. While the police insisted that their work was race neutral, I watched them pay attention to “race out of place.” The police collaborated with private establishments to exclude, contain, and control Black people in the city’s downtown entertainment corridor; officers marked Black bodies entering predominantly white spaces as potential sources of criminal threat and disorder; and organizational practices in routine traffic enforcement targeted vehicles that signaled race and class. Police scrutiny of Black people in the downtown revealed that the city’s revitalization was not for everyone. Ideas of commercial viability, worth, and order, on the one hand, and those of threat, criminality, and disorder, on the other, mapped onto people, as well as places. Hence, projects of spatial regulation in service of political-economic goals were also projects of racial regulation.

Chapter 6 focuses on the policing of white people in the West District to show how segregation as a social structure simultaneously endures and shifts. Proactive officers assumed that white people in predominantly Black neighborhoods were drug users who could be turned into confidential informants. They drew on segregation as a heuristic that problematized any boundary crossing. However, not all white people in the West District were considered to be “out of place.” In a gentrified, predominantly white neighborhood on the edge of the West District, residents sought to define their neighborhood as more akin to those in the East District. They drew on common narratives that distinguished between places of economic value and those afflicted by crime to do so. The neighborhood association’s successful advocacy for additional police service within the West District showed that segregation boundaries could shift, and meanings and resources that maintained the material inequalities between Black and white neighborhoods would follow.

As the overt institutional maintenance of black-white residential segregation declines, we can investigate its persistence by analyzing the racial projects of everyday life. Daily mobility—movement from place to place for the sake of routine activities—represents one such project. Daily mobility patterns reflect the material realities of uneven resource distribution across neighborhoods and unequal means of access across residents. Yet, daily mobility patterns additionally reflect residents’ subjective interpretations and agentic navigations of space. Various repertoires of meaning that evoke racial dynamics can maintain or challenge the ideational foundations of the racial order. In turn, they can deter or encourage the crossing of segregation boundaries. The daily mobility framework acknowledges that experiences of segregation can vary considerably, as they are shaped by both spatial-opportunity distance and social-psychological distance. As a means of illustration, this project presents divergent daily mobility accounts drawn from interviews with 12 residents of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Drug courts reflect an expanding effort to transform the state’s response to drug crimes. Such programs merge punitive and therapeutic strategies in efforts to rehabilitate clients. The author takes the case of one drug court to elaborate on a set of institutional practices characterizing this mode of intervention. On the basis of ethnographic observation of the court’s weekly review hearings, interviews with program professionals, and analysis of documents and media accounts, the author describes the centrality of the “family framework”—the idea that clients are childlike and “grow up” in the context of the program—to the priorities, norms, and practices of drug court professionals. The family framework relied on raced and classed constructs of dependence and deservingness. These constructs shaped program selection and completion, enabling the court to focus on a predominately white and often middle-class client base. The author suggests that this case clarifies how state projects can both intensively regulate and circumscribe their scope to a population deemed worthy.