This article uses a new technology, “Portals,” to initiate conversations about policing between individuals in communities where this form of state action is concentrated. Based on more than 800 recorded and transcribed conversations across 12 neighborhoods in five cities, the largest collection of policing narratives to date, we analyze patterns in discourse around policing. Our goal in closely analyzing these conversations is to uncover how people who experience state authority through policing characterize democratic governance by mapping citizens’ experiences with and views of the state, how they judge the responsiveness of authorities, and their experience-informed critiques of democracy. Methodologically, we argue that observing through Portals real conversations of ordinary people largely unmediated by the researcher allows us to transcend certain limitations of traditional, survey-based techniques and to study politics in beneficially recursive ways. Theoretically, we demonstrate that Portals participants characterize police as contradictory—everywhere when surveilling people’s everyday activity and nowhere if called upon to respond to serious harm. We call this Janus-faced interaction with the state “distorted responsiveness,” and we demonstrate the organic connection of this characterization of police to our participants’ theorization of their broader relationship with the state. We argue that their understandings of their own relationships with the key state institutions in their lives are foundational to developing a fuller understanding of democracy in action. In short, by focusing on how individuals experience citizenship in the city through ordinary experiences with municipal bureaucrats who figure prominently in their lives, we can develop a theory of the state from below.

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A growing body of literature examines how direct or vicarious contact with forms of state surveillance affects political behavior and perceptions of government legitimacy. We develop a new method, Portals, to collect conversations between black residents from highly policed areas in five different U.S. cities between 2016 and 2018. While existing research emphasizes how interactions with the carceral state are alienating and demobilizing, our analysis of these conversations identifies productive ways in which citizens respond to oppressive encounters with police. The political discourses used by Portals participants, we argue, are centered on a logic of “collective autonomy”—given police ignorance, abuses of police authority, and the little political power that residents of highly policed communities have to demand change, many conclude that power is best achieved by strategically distancing from state institutions in the short term while building community power in the long term. Crucially, articulations of collective autonomy transcend the ideological positions of participants and track closely with an ideological tradition in black politics that persists across generations and contexts of state oppression.

One segment of the population experiences different rules and differential citizenship.

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