Withdrawing and Drawing In: Political Discourse in Policed Communities

Abstract

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.

Fiscal Pressures and Discriminatory Policing: Evidence from Traffic Stops in Missouri

“…The advent of “law and order” policing in the 1960s and the Wars on Crime and Drugs has had long-lasting effects (Harmon 2012; Hinton 2016; Soss and Weaver 2017; Wilson and Kelling 1982). The models of policing that have emerged since then and through the 2000s continue to share a commitment to “the elimination of disorder and the regulatory enforcement of codes against disordered people and places” (Soss and Weaver 2017, 570) and have contributed to community views of the police as an oppressive institution (Weaver, Prowse, and Piston 2020). As long as such “disorder” is associated with poor communities of color, we should continue to expect to observe racially disparate policing outcomes, including those stemming from traffic stops.…”

Race, Place, and Context: The Persistence of Race Effects in Traffic Stop Outcomes in the Face of Situational, Demographic, and Political Controls

“…In this paper, we seek to evaluate whether an officer's decision to search a vehicle can be explained by the race of the driver, even after contextual factors are taken into account. Research highlighted elsewhere in this volume, including Ash, Fagan, and Harris (forthcoming); Rocha et al (forthcoming); and Weaver, Prowse, and Piston (2020), contextualize our analysis and give further reason to be concerned about these characteristics of policing: they may be driven by a racialized practice of financial extraction, and they may have numerous downstream consequences for political behavior of the different groups involved.…”

Representation, Incorporation, and Corrections Spending: The Counterbalancing Effect of Black Political Incorporation

“…This study cannot tease out the precise mechanisms by which descriptive representation is influencing corrections spending, but future research could tease out how other institutional characteristics, such as party or committee leadership (Preuhs 2006) or district characteristics such as whether the representative has a prison in their district (though Black legislators are less likely to represent districts with prisons as they are more likely to represent urban areas; Thorpe 2015), affects corrections-related outcomes. Finally, it is important to note that though these results are encouraging, significant barriers to full incorporation are still faced by Black Americans, a challenge made worse by the continued marginalization of that group in the criminal justice system (Weaver, Prowse, and Piston 2020). Despite these barriers, however, growing racial diversity has the potential to counteract punitive impulses of legislators, a finding that is replicated in another minority community, Latinos (Maltby et al, forthcoming).…”