Low-income people of color have been shown to experience disproportionate stops, ticketing, and arrests within an order maintenance policing (OMP) approach to urban law enforcement. A small but growing number of studies have begun to explore the complex lived experience of police encounters within this approach—an important task given the significant consequences of such policing for individuals and communities. This article examines qualitative and quantitative data on incidents of discretionary arrest for low-level offenses, with a focus on young people of color. In-depth, semistructured interviews and focus groups, as well as structured interviews outside criminal courts across New York City, were conducted, offering insight into the scope and depth of impact that OMP has on communities of color. The authors’ analysis underscores how OMP can shift relationships to public space in ways that foster fear and social isolation, examines the varied responses of young people to an unwanted criminal identity, and suggests the importance of recognizing the cumulative nature of OMP’s collateral consequences.

This paper introduces a new conceptual framework referred to as “cumulative dehumanization” to better understand the ways in which dehumanization penetrates individual and collective bodies and minds, cutting across policy and ideology and accumulating materially and affectively over time and space. Cumulative dehumanization illuminates a web of vertical and horizontal, synthetic, and dynamic processes that result in an ongoing racialized, state‐sanctioned dehumanization that is fundamentally cumulative—both temporally and spatially—with a profusion of consequences attached. Within the landscape of aggressive surveillance and policing, we illuminate how cumulative dehumanization can be conceptualized as (i) an active condition of becoming, experienced as an accumulation of dehumanizing moments, structurally imposed on racialized communities under siege; (ii) a wearing down of the racialized and affective body, creating circuits of dispossession for entire communities; (iii) a product and (re)producer of the material and ideological modes undergirding racial capitalism; and (iv) a force met with individual and collective resistance. Linking literature on racial capitalism and affect, to the embodied social psychological phenomenon of dehumanization, cumulative dehumanization serves as a useful conceptual tool to examine the historical legacy of, processes embedded within, and entirety of collective consequences including resistance as inextricably linked. In doing so, we reveal the indivisibility of cognitive, embodied, psychological, social, material, ideological, and political circuits.

Amid aggressive surveillance and policing practices, Black Lives Matter has appeared-a social movement whose very name highlights collective resistance to pervasive dehumanization. Psychological studies find the persistent dehumanization of people of color and endorsement of legitimated violence against those dehumanized. As part of broken windows policing, people of color also disproportionately experience discretionary arrests, or charges for low-level, nonviolent offenses legally recognized as noncriminal. Accordingly, drawing upon data from over 200 interviews and surveys, we report on New Yorkers' experiences of dehumanization during discretionary arrests. In doing so, we introduce a new conceptual framework called "cumulative dehumanization," to illuminate an ongoing state-sanctioned, racialized dehumanization that is fundamentally cumulative, both temporally and spatially. We conceptualize cumulative dehumanization as: (a) an accumulation of systemic dehumanizing moments, experienced as an active condition of becoming; (b) a weathering of the racialized affective body, generating various modes of community dispossession; (c) a product and (re)producer of the material and ideological mechanisms upholding racial capitalism; and (d) a complementary accumulation of individual and collective resistance. Attending

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