The Police as Place-Consolidators: The Organizational Amplification of Urban Inequality

Abstract

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

Reply to the commentaries: A radical revision of experimental social psychology is still needed

“…Fourth, they cite Swencionis & Goff (2017), which is a review paper that provides no evidence that violent crime rates do not contribute to disparities in fatal shootings. Finally, they cite Gordon (2020), which has no supportive data on the claim that deployment of police to different neighborhoods does not reflect crime rate differences across those neighborhoods.…”

Vehicle Stops and Group Position: How Missouri Agencies Use Place and Race to Explain Disparities

“…Furthermore, Bell (2020) suggests that local police activity does not merely serve to produce public safety but operates as a proxy for racial dynamics that, on one hand, gives racialized meaning to local areas and, on the other hand, shapes neighborhood preferences that reinforce the racial hierarchy (see also Gordon, 2020; Trounstine, 2018). Because whiteness connotes power over the police (Bell, 2017), Whites’ preference for predominantly White neighborhoods (e.g., Charles, 2006; Hwang & Sampson, 2014; Krysan et al, 2009) can be reified by the place-bound or located institution of policing that functions as an “exclusionary amenity to drive away undesirable people” (Bell, 2020, p. 936).…”

Missing context from experimental studies amplifies, rather than negates, racial bias in the real world

“…4). However, “dangerous, urban” settings are themselves racially coded from decades of segregationist housing policy, racist political rhetoric and media representations, and targeted over-policing (Gordon, 2020; Hurwitz & Peffley, 2005; Rhodes & Brown, 2019). Indeed, the data show that urban backgrounds actually increased the tendency to shoot White targets to the level of Black targets – an unsurprising effect given that these backgrounds themselves contain race-stereotypic cues.…”