Rethinking the “Gold Standard” of Racial Profiling: §287(g), Secure Communities and Racially Discrepant Police Power

Abstract

In this article, we explore methodological difficulties related to proving racial profiling, specifically in the context of §287(g) and Secure Communities enforcement. How it is that critical immigration researchers understand racial profiling as the object of their research, and how might they go about substantiating racial profiling in the field? Can racial profiling be made a straightforward object of problematization and, if not, why? We are particularly interested in how racial profiling can be so self-evidently at the core of programs like §287(g) and Secure Communities and yet how racialized law enforcement decisions and tactics are so often inscrutable—and difficult to prove—in the context of routine police work. Building on original fieldwork findings and data on roadblocks by §287(g) and Secure Communities agencies in central North Carolina, we dissect the differences between racially discrepant police work and racial profiling, and argue that chasing the “gold standard” of racial profiling risks leaving racially discrepant policing on the table as an apparently unproblematic, and perhaps even defensible, outcome of policing. As such, we argue that critical scholars should leave aside the problem of proving racial profiling and instead refocus on the problem of racially discrepant policing.

No Justice, No Peace: Political Science Perspectives on the American Carceral State

“…The web of policies criminalizing immigrants without authorization is thick, but the institutional nexus for these two bodies of law is the conscription of local criminal legal administration in immigration enforcement (Armenta 2017; Coleman and Kocher 2019; Moinster 2019). Focusing on the expansion of immigration enforcement into the country's interior highlights that police are integral to reinforcing substantive lines of citizenship that extend beyond formal legal boundaries.…”

“…Policies and practices laden with ethnic, racial, and class biases likewise produce racially and ethnically disparate outcomes. Research suggests that, as in other areas of enforcement, officers view themselves as unbiased administrators, without recognizing that “policing, as a practice, does not simply draw on pre-established racialized tropes” connecting Black and Latinx people to criminality, but “actively constitutes this questionable connection on an ongoing performative basis,” (Coleman and Kocher 2019, 1,187). Emerging research among political scientists complicates this assessment of enforcement officers with explorations of the more complicated identity negotiation that occurs for Latinx immigration enforcement agents (Cortez 2017).…”

Policing car space and the legal liminality of the automobile

“…Yarwood and Paasche, 2015; Coleman, 2016; Kaufman, 2016; Jefferson 2017, 2018; Radil et al, 2017; Correia and Wall, 2018; Hamilton and Foote, 2018; Loyd and Bonds, 2018; Bloch and Meyer, 2019; Ramírez, 2019), the research on policing as an everyday practice and local manifestation of state power has been slow to materialize, let alone emerge as a recognizable subfield within human geography. Plainly stated, as Coleman and Kocher (2019: 19) argue, ‘despite repeated calls for geographers to engage with the cops as core to the domestic face of state power and authority…the dearth of research in geography on policing is remarkable’.…”

“…It is clear that overlooking the primacy of the car in geographical scholarship on policing is in need of remedy. This is especially so given how, for example, homeless abatement efforts increasingly rely on no-parking ordinances and ‘car-camping’ bans (Robinson, 2019), as well as how pretextual traffic stops deemed legal by the Supreme Court effectively permit racial and place-based profiling (Coleman and Kocher, 2019). Further, as Stuesse and Coleman (2014) show, analysis of the car as a carceral site is needed given how contemporary policing of undocumented immigrants relies first and foremost on the automobile and automobility as a locus of contact and capture.…”

Political geographical perspectives on settler colonialism

“…Yet it also has broader political stakes as well. Indeed, geographers' engagement with settler colonial studies is reinvigorating considerations of the discipline's complicity with racialized state power, violence and empire (Coleman & Kocher, , p. 31; Bonds & Inwood, ; Inwood & Bonds, ) and in doing so the very terms of what it might mean to “decolonize” geography (De Leeuw & Hunt, ). In this article, we seek to foreground what we see as the most productive engagements with the settler colonial framework by political geographers and others.…”