The State from Below: Distorted Responsiveness in Policed Communities

Abstract

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.

Police Legitimacy and Citizen Coproduction: How does publicized police brutality impact calling the police?

“…Combined with aggressive and racially disproportionate policing practices and arrests for minor offenses, this dichotomy is termed the "overpoliced-underprotected" paradox. The police are perceived to be "everywhere when surveilling people's everyday activity and nowhere if called upon to respond to serious harm" (Prowse et al 2019).…”

“…These results suggest that, in the absence of alternatives, managing crime and disorder drives citizens to demand police services despite damaged police legitimacy (Hagan et al 2018), a process facilitated by strategies of "situational trust" (Bell 2019). Moreover, in contexts of already high legal cynicism where demand for police services are high, a well-publicized brutality incident may not reduce demand for police services because residents already have well-formed beliefs about the police, who are highly visible in their neighborhoods (Prowse et al 2019). Instead, routine interactions -voluntary and frequently involuntary -may inform attitudes towards and structure demand for policing (Lerman & Weaver 2014).…”

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

“…Conversations from The Portals Project admonish researchers to rethink how they view marginalized people, who are too often characterized as politically unwitting passive subjects of the state. Members of over-policed communities understand that they are both over-policed and under-protected (Prowse, Weaver, and Meares 2019). The knowledge held by RCS communities accrues through interactions with police, which convey dissonance between how the law should function and how it functions in reality (Weaver, Prowse, and Piston 2019).…”

Implementing Checklists to Improve Police Responses to Co-Victims of Gun Violence

“…7 Similarly, Lisa Miller argues that “security from violence is an important state obligation,” and that violence and state punishment should be considered together as “social risks” from which the state often fails to protect marginalized communities — “particularly with respect to African-Americans.” 8 Recently, “the dual position of being abandoned and overseen, unprotected and occupied” has been usefully described by the concept of “distorted responsiveness” by the police — a state that is over-vigilant in punishing minor indiscretions like selling loose cigarettes but negligent with respect to serious threats to community safety. 9…”