“Other than the Projects,You Stay Professional”: “Colorblind” Cops and the Enactment of Spatial Racism in Routine Policing

Abstract

In this article, we show how routine policing is conscripted into the project of maintaining and reproducing spatial racism in urban settings through an intersecting set of macro-level processes and micro-interactional practices. Our analysis of ethnographic interviews conducted with over 40 police officers during 20 ride-alongs in the Western United States identifies person- and place-specific heuristic classifications that police officers rely on to manage routine encounters. We find that officers use membership categorization devices to sort people and places in the city into distinct categories (e.g., nice places, normal people, the projects, and people in the projects), which, in turn, prefigure different orientations to action at the start of and throughout their encounters with the public. Our findings provide an empirical basis for thinking of professional police knowledge as encoding systemic racism in routine policing, rather than being a break from it.

Keywords

urban ethnography race and racism policing

In the wake of the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in 2020, millions of protestors marched in the United States and around the world to call for an end to police violence and systemic racism. The foregrounding of systemic racism as a driver of racially disparate outcomes in policing marks a departure from the two most prominent paradigms used to explain the impact of racism on policing in the decade prior: the “bad apples” and implicit bias paradigms.

The “bad apples” paradigm attributes racism in policing to a small group of bad actors who exploit their occupational positions to act in explicitly racist ways that result in direct and indirect harm to Black people and members of other minoritized communities. Although there is little empirical evidence to support the “bad apples” argument as a primary driver of racially disparate outcomes, recent reports and investigations document numerous instances of police officers endorsing racist and White supremacist beliefs and acting in explicitly racist ways against minoritized members of the public (German 2020; Hoerner and Tulsky 2019).

The implicit bias paradigm relies on a large body of social psychological evidence (Banks, Eberhardt, and Ross 2006; Eberhardt 2020; Eberhardt et al. 2004; Goff et al. 2008) that demonstrates how the racial history of the United States informs unconscious biases against Blackness and Black people. This paradigm acknowledges that a broader range of police officers may act in biased ways, but that they are not necessarily more or less racist than the average person, or more specifically, the average professional. Like doctors and teachers, police officers hold a set of “unconscious” or “implicit” biases, including common and quick associations of Blackness with suspicion, danger, and threat that help to explain racial disparities in stops, arrests, and police-involved killings. In recent years, police departments across the country have invested millions of dollars in implicit bias training for officers even though there is little evidence to support that such training is correlated with a reduction of force and/or decrease in police shootings (Worden et al. 2020).

Recent events, including the aggressive and arbitrarily violent policing of Black Lives Matter protests over the summer of 2020 (U.S. Crisis Monitor 2020), the subdued police response to the storming of the U.S. Capitol building by a mob of predominantly White pro-Trump supporters on January 6, 2021, and the involvement of police officers in the insurrection, highlight the limitations of the “bad apples” and implicit bias paradigms in explaining how racism informs contemporary policing. There is a pressing need for research that identifies and explains how systemic racism informs routine policing practices.

In this article, we draw on an interdisciplinary set of literature to provide a third way to explain how racism affects routine policing. Rather than relying primarily on psychological explanations for racial disparities in policing (e.g., explicit prejudice or implicit biases), we show how routine policing is conscripted into the project of maintaining and reproducing spatial racism (powell 2005) in urban settings through an intersecting set of macro-level processes and micro-interactional practices. We use the concept of spatial racism to draw attention to the role policing plays in “racially distributing benefits and burdens” at the individual and group levels in ways that reinforce how metropolitan areas are organized racially and how the boundaries of Whiteness are maintained (powell 2005:18). At the macro-level, spatial racism is (re)produced and maintained by what legal scholar Monica Bell (2020) describes as “segregation policing,” a concept that articulates the mutually constitutive relationship between race and space, and how policing acts as both cause and consequence of racial and spatial inequality. This study uses the tools of ethnography, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis to explain how systemic racism and an orientation toward protecting the boundaries of Whiteness are built into the micro-interactional infrastructure and spatial landscape of routine policing. Our findings complement recent research that uses a micro-interactional analysis to reveal how explicit and implicit racial biases inform racially disparate forms of policing (Rawls, Duck, and Turowetz 2018).¹

Our analysis of officers’ first-hand accounts of how they manage encounters in different parts of the city reveals a reliance on a set of explicit biases (positive and negative) that prefigure officer actions. These biases are understood by officers not as racism per se, but as a form of institutional expertise. This expertise, acquired through formal and informal socialization into the profession (e.g., field training, direct and vicarious experiences), is part of a shared body of institutional knowledge that is considered necessary for the competent performance of “professional” policing (Abbott 1988). Much like the reliance on racist colorblind ideologies in other professional domains, these seemingly race-neutral biases hide what is in plain sight: how routine policing practices reinforce systemic racism in policing through the policing of race in/and space.²

Specifically, our analysis of ethnographic interviews conducted with over 40 metropolitan police officers during 20 ride-alongs in the Western United States identifies person- and place-specific heuristic classifications that police officers rely on to manage everyday encounters with civilians. A close examination of what we refer to as officers’ encounter logics reveals how officers use membership categorization devices (Schegloff 2005) to sort people and places in the city into distinct categories, which, in turn, prefigure different orientations to action at the start of and throughout their encounters with the public. In this article, we highlight officers’ use of four membership categorization devices: nice places, normal people, the projects, and people in the projects. “Nice places” is used to reference “White space” (Anderson 2015) and is associated with a service-orientated/problem-solving approach to policing. “The projects” is used as a shorthand for historically marginalized neighborhoods in which low-income Black people and other non-White minoritized populations are concentrated. In contrast to “nice” areas, “the projects” are framed as spatially and culturally distinct from other parts of the city. The residents of the projects (“people in the projects”) are described by officers as a perpetual problem warranting a preemptively aggressive and dominance-oriented approach to encounters. Our findings provide an empirical basis for thinking of professional police knowledge as encoding systemic racism in routine policing, rather than being a break from it.

Findings from our research can also inform current conversation on police reform, “defunding,” and police abolition. Our description of how systemic racism is built into the spatial and interactional infrastructure of contemporary policing has implications for ongoing efforts to reform policing, like the proposed George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, and other state and local efforts that invest primarily in police trainings that center unconscious bias and forms of police accountability that focus primarily on ridding the institution of “bad apples.” As we show here, such reforms are not likely to sufficiently address the problem of systemic racism in policing. Instead, as we state in the conclusion to this article, we need to consider a broader set of alternatives, including recommendations that emerge from calls for police abolition, that argue for reducing the footprint of law enforcement while investing in systems that foster safety and well-being in neighborhoods most affected by crime or violence.

Policing Race and Space in the united states: a Brief History

The history of policing in the United States is inextricably intertwined with the nation’s history of racial capitalism, slavery, and settler-colonialism. The earliest municipal police departments in the United States were established in the early and mid-nineteenth century with a primary goal of serving the capitalist class and maintaining the racial order. In addition to policing ports, property, and labor lines in industrializing cities, police departments were, from their founding, bound up in the project of policing the mobility and behaviors of Black people, free or enslaved. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required Northern police forces (along with all White people) to detain and return Black people suspected of fleeing enslavement to bondage or face punishment under the law (Hinton and Cook 2021).

In the South, a system of racially targeted law enforcement predated police departments in the North by nearly two centuries. By the time paid municipal police forces arrived in cities in the North and West, the Southern system had evolved into an interconnected web of intrusive surveillance and barbaric violence (Cox 1945; Hadden 2003). Ordinary White people, constables (elected officials most akin to modern-day sheriffs), small police forces in the cities, and holdovers from military patrols, shared the responsibility of racially targeted law enforcement (Hadden 2003). The system of racial control relied most heavily on the overlapping efforts of overseers, slave patrols, and expert slave catchers, whose responsibilities were defined by spatial boundaries: overseers policed Black people on plantation property; slave patrols policed small geographic areas surrounding plantations (described as districts); and expert slave catchers received a bounty for recovering enslaved people who escaped the reach of slave patrols.

The “spatial organization of domination” (Hartman 1997:69) transformed after emancipation as responsibilities for maintaining the racial order, including responsibilities for enacting racially targeted violence, were redistributed (Hartman 1997:69; Hadden 2003). Formal police departments established in the South post-emancipation assumed the duties once performed by slave patrols and constables. The most brutal and barbaric aspects of the pre-emancipation system—the work of overseers and expert slave catchers—were taken up by White vigilante groups, which sometimes included police officers. These vigilante groups, including the first and second waves of the Ku Klux Klan, operated as “the true instrument of law enforcement” throughout the Jim Crow era (Hadden 2003:216).

During the Great Migration, Black Americans who fled the racial terror of the South confronted an institution of policing that remained committed to protecting the interests of Whiteness (Bass 2001). In booming industrial cities, law enforcement acted as aggressive strike-breakers and stood on the side of White homeowners, business owners, and politicians who were opposed to racial integration in public and private space (Drake and Cayton 1944; Ewing 2018). The police would continue to play a key role in maintaining racial boundaries in the aftermath of World War II, as the federal government subsidized the movement of millions of White people fleeing urban areas to newly established, racially exclusive suburbs.

The legacy of racial exclusion, spatial containment, and racially targeted policing created a tinder-box for urban uprisings in the 1960s, many of which erupted after aggressive or lethal encounters with the police. The Kerner Report (1968) attributed the cause of the uprisings to White racism and explicitly racist policing, and documented the ways that explicit forms of racism and racial prejudice served the racial order and informed routine policing. The Kerner Report also cited routine assaults on the dignity of Black people at the hands of officers along with a large-scale lack of accountability for police wrongdoing.

The failure of the nation to follow through on the strong recommendations for structural change published in the Kerner Report is well documented (Harris and Curtis 2018; Hinton 2016). The institution of policing, however, would see significant change and growth in the decades following the report’s publication. During this time, racism in policing was framed primarily as a psychological or organizational problem that could be solved with increased investments in the professionalization of law enforcement (e.g., policy changes, improved training, and the use of data). In turn, the federal government, informed by theories of organizational dynamics, invested heavily in the professionalization of policing. This investment increased dramatically from the 1970s through the end of the twentieth century, as the federal government funnelled funds to state and city police departments to fight wars on drugs and street violence (Hinton 2016). Inner-city neighborhoods across the country became the frontlines for these wars and the “warrior cops” who fought these battles (Balko 2013). In the post-9/11 landscape, police professionals would increasingly rely on data to target people and places for increased surveillance and enforcement. This seemingly colorblind reliance on data would be used to justify the intrusion and expansion of policing into non-White communities, including economically marginalized Black and Latinx neighborhoods in affluent and progressive cities across the country (Ferguson 2017).

Explaining the Role of Racism in Twenty-first Century Policing

Today, large cities across the country are home to the most professional police forces in our nation’s history. For some, this professionalization is evidence of a break from the explicit and systemic racism of policing’s past. The embrace of implicit bias as a dominant paradigm for explaining the role of racism in policing in the twenty-first century emerged at a time when law enforcement agencies across the country were confronting charges of racial profiling that suggested a conscious and intentional effort to target people of color. The resulting body of research on implicit bias and policing emphasizes the role of unconscious bias rather than the explicit racial attitudes of police officers or structural forms of racism (Eberhardt 2020; Goff and Kahn 2012).³ For example, simulated “shooter bias” studies have documented a correlation between implicit bias and the use of lethal force. In a series of studies (Correll et al. 2002, 2007; Cox et al. 2014; Plant and Peruche 2005), researchers find that participants (college students and police officers) identify African Americans as threats faster and shoot Black suspects more quickly, even when unarmed, than White suspects. Glaser and Knowles (2008) also revealed that people who implicitly associated Black people with weapons tended to show a stronger shooter bias. Studies also show that officers’ response times in decisions to shoot Black suspects is faster than for Whites (Correll et al. 2014; Mekawi and Bresin 2015).

Although unconscious bias interventions have been shown to be effective in short-term decreases in implicit bias, a common critique of the science of bias is its inability to identify and, in turn, address the mechanisms through which subconscious mental processes give way to explicit and calculated steps of police decision making. There is also little evidence to suggest that reducing implicit bias leads to reduced use of force by officers (Worden et al. 2020). As an explanation for how racism shapes contemporary policing, the implicit bias paradigm is also limited in its ability to address how structural and institutionalized forms of racism intersect with space in ways that inform routine police work.

Colorblind Criminal Justice

In contrast to the implicit bias literature, recent literature on (1) how colorblind racism (Bonilla-Silva 2013, 2016) informs the administration of justice and (2) the intersection of racism, space, and policing provides a more substantive consideration of how structural racism reproduces racial and spatial inequalities generally and in criminal legal contexts (Armenta 2017; Delgado 2018; Golash-Boza 2016; Manning, Hartmann, and Gerteis 2015; Milner 2020; Steinmetz, Schaefer, and Henderson 2017; Vargas and McHarris 2017).⁴ Nicole Gonzales Van Cleve’s (2016) ethnographic analysis of how colorblind racism obfuscated the extent to which racism permeated the daily operations of Chicago’s criminal court system is especially instructive. In an analysis of how court officers use the term “mope,” Van Cleve reveals how negative moral and cultural assumptions about defendants of color are mobilized in ways that legitimize differential treatment. In a courtroom setting that prides itself on values of work ethic, competency, motivation, and efficiency, the “mope,” almost always a non-White defendant, is constructed as deserving of harsh, punitive responses. The resultant charges assigned to “mopes” signaled “not a type of criminal, but a type of racialized being” (Van Cleve 2016:58). The normalization of this language and behavior by institutional actors allows them to evaluate their actions not as racist, but as the actions of a morally competent professional.

The process by which judges and lawyers sort criminal defendants into categories of deservedness and, in turn, appropriately punitive spaces within the institutional boundaries of the criminal justice system (e.g., probation, jail, prison, rehabilitation), is mirrored in the institutional and informal lexicon of policing and its resultant practices. Institutions of governance in and around municipal policing are largely determined through the geography of the city, which is itself determined by the distributive processes of spatial racism (powell 2005). These distributive processes include racially restrictive housing policies, zoning decisions, transportation decisions, and related municipal decisions that, as powell (2005) wrote, distribute “the benefits and burdens” of Whiteness (p. 29). The outcome of these processes is revealed in persistently racially segregated cities characterized by sharp economic inequality and the formation of what is colloquially understood as what Elijah Anderson and others have conceptualized as “White space,” overwhelmingly White public spaces perceived to be off limits for Black people, and “Black space” i.e., the ghetto (Anderson 2015; Lipsitz 1995, 2007; Jaffe 2012; McKittrick 2011; Shabazz 2015).⁵ These racialized spatial divisions coexist with other geographic and municipal divisions, like police districts, “hot spots” within a district, and an officer’s “beat,” among other criminalizing distinctions (e.g., gang injunction zones).

As legal scholar Monica Bell writes, “the various practices of urban policing” act as “consequences of and contributors to residential segregation” (Bell 2020; see also Bass 2001, Capers 2009). The routine distribution of divergent forms of policing within racialized space also generates fundamentally different experiences of policing for groups and individuals within those spaces. Furthermore, in low-income neighborhoods, or “Black space,” where residents are categorized as “criminals” and crimes are more serious, police tend to respond to cases with less attentiveness, less respect toward the civilians involved, and with higher levels of force to restrain individuals during encounters (Boyles 2015; Brunson and Weitzer 2009; Gaston and Brunson 2020; Klinger 1997; Lanfear, Beach, and Thomas 2018; Mastrofski, Reisig, and McCluskey 2002; Terrill and Reisig 2003). As we show in this article, and in contrast to the literature on implicit bias, the explicit and racialized biases of officers toward the people and places they patrol act as an institutionalized justification for disparate forms of treatment within and across racialized space in the city.

Setting and Methods

In the western part of the United States, Golden City is, like many cities in the country, both diverse and segregated. It has a moderate-to-low level of racial segregation between White, Black, Asian, and Latinx populations. Among an estimated population of over 750,000 people, White residents make up about half the remaining half includes a significant percentage of Asian residents, followed by Latinx, Native, Black, and multi-racial residents. Law enforcement data show that violent or serious crimes are concentrated in a relatively small percentage of geographic spaces in the city, which are described in police lingo as “hot spots.” As is the case with other cities in the Western United States, these spaces first emerged in the city as a consequence of patterns of racial segregation that took root in the wake of the second wave of migration of Black Americans to the West. As primarily residential and, in some cases, now quickly gentrifying spaces, residents of “hot spot” areas often experience a disproportionate degree of targeted surveillance (e.g., person- and place-based policing; Beck 2020; Jones 2018). The Golden City Police Department has also followed national trends in policing since the 1980s, which is characterized by the physical entrenchment and bureaucratic expansion of law enforcement in historically marginalized neighborhoods (Jones 2018). Despite its otherwise liberal reputation, Golden City’s criminal justice data reveal significant racial disparities when it comes to arrest and incarceration.

Data Collection and Analysis

The analysis presented here is based on approximately 86 hours of ethnographic interview data from 43 police officers during the ride-alongs. Two trained field researchers (including the first author) collected data during 20 ride-alongs with patrol officers from May to August 2012. Slightly over half of officers were White and male (23). Of the six officers who identified as female, four were non-White (Asian (1), Black (1), Latina (1), Native American (1)) and two were White. The remaining male officers were Asian (6), Black (5), Latino (2), and Native American (1). The median age of officers who participated in the ride-alongs was 35, with most under 40. The median number of years in law enforcement for officers who participated in the ride-alongs was 6, with a minimum of 2 years and a maximum of 32 years. Ride-alongs were conducted in each of the city’s police districts, as well as a special housing police unit.

We conducted interviews with officers on the way to a call and immediately following a call to probe on key themes or observations. Interviews took the form of a casual but guided conversation (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995; Spradley 1979).⁶ We framed questions using language commonly used by officers. Key areas of thematic interests were prepared at the start of the observations. New thematic areas were incorporated into the ethnographic interviews over the course of data collection. Interview transcripts were prepared and coded using a qualitative analysis software package (dedoose.com). A small team of research assistants coded transcripts for officer’s encounter logics and a related set of sub-codes (race logics, gender logics, place logics, and people logics). We defined encounter logics as accounts that provided a logic for how officers manage some aspect of an encounter (e.g., openings, trouble, situational aspects). This definition reflects our interest in the more granular, micro-interactional dimensions of the encounter. The research team met weekly to discuss coding and emerging themes. Members of the research team also prepared memos on emerging findings, which formed the basis for the analysis presented here.

Findings

Our analysis of police officers’ accounts of how they manage encounters echo classic and contemporary ethnographic studies of policing that have consistently shown that in practice patrol officers rely on tacit and explicit biases to sort people into categories and then use these categories, which Emanuel Schegloff, citing the work of Harvey Sacks (1992), described as membership categorization devices (Schegloff 2005:454), as a basis for their actions.⁷ For example, in a classic study on policing, Van Maanen (1978) collapsed the categories officers used to sort civilians into three general groups: suspicious persons, assholes, and know-nothings. Similar to our work here, Van Maanen was concerned not merely with the grouping of individuals into a typology, but “how the various typifications carried by the police are recognized as relevant and hence utilized as guides for action by a police officer in a particular situation” (p. 308, emphasis added). Like Van Maanen, we found that officers use a range of descriptive categories for members of the public, including “normal” (e.g., guy, citizen), gangbangers, “Fuck you” people, drunks, and regulars. In addition, we found that officers used membership categorization devices as shorthand for the qualities and character of places in the city, for example: “nice” areas, “the projects,” “high-crime area,” “the street,” and so on. Officers also combined the categories of people and places in ways that revealed the seemingly mutually constitutive qualities of each; for example, “Young kids in the projects think it’s, you know, easy to rob”; “The bus is packed and it stopped by [%street] so it’s, ya know, kinda by some undesirable people”; “the privileged drunks” from [%area].⁸

In the following section, we demonstrate how one officer uses membership categorization devices (the categories “131” and “132”) in routine police work. We then turn to a description of how officers use the categories of “nice” places, “normal” people, “the projects,” and “people in the projects” in ways that prefigure how they manage encounters with certain people in certain parts of the city. We end with a discussion of how these routine racialized practices contribute to the maintenance of racial and spatial inequality through the differential distribution of the benefits and burdens of policing within “White space” and “Black space” in the city.

“Most of the People Are 132”: How Officers Use Membership Categorization Devices

The degree to which membership categorization devices are embedded in the institutional discourse of policing was revealed in a conversation with Officer Yancy, an officer with 11 years of experience assigned to the Hayden district, where entertainment, tourism, and the city’s financial district converge. The park resembles a “cosmopolitan canopy,” which Elijah Anderson describes as an “urban island of civility” in the context of a cityscape that is otherwise defined by racial segregation and inequality (Anderson 2012). As a space that draws tourists and locals alike, it is not entirely unusual for Black people to be present, although, as is demonstrated in the excerpt below, they may be subject to heightened surveillance in the context of their otherwise cosmopolitan surroundings.

During a walk-along with Officer Yancy, the researcher asked for the name of the park they were currently patrolling. Officer Yancy responded with the name of the park and then explained how it is different from other parks in the city. His description included a typology of people who frequented the park, using what he described as a common institutional categorization used by officers on patrol: 131 and 132. As Officer Yancy explained, 131 is an official category used to indicate that a person has a felony record, while 132 is used to indicate a person without a record. In Officer Yancy’s account, 131 and 132 categories are used as a shorthand for categories of people with certain qualities (e.g., “clean” or “normal” people and “bad” people).

Officer Yancy:

This park is very, ah, a lot of people call, you know, they did, their dog is running out of their leash, you know, without their leash, but you go talk to them, they’re all, they’re all normal . . . 132 that means they’re like, this is interesting, I mean, we have a record using, like, 131, 132. 131 that means you got felonies, priors; if you’re like 132 that means you are, you know, you’re clean . . . You know most of the people are 132, I mean that’s the term we use, and a lot of people they’re like, they’re out there with their family pet . . .

Interviewer:

Ahha . . .

Officer Yancy:

[pointing to a group of four Black men] See there go the locals right there? The guy in the middle, they’re in drugs. He’s very, very bad people . . .

After this explanation, the officer slowly approaches the group of “locals” before asking, “So, eh, everything all right?”

In the above excerpt, Officer Yancy provides a dual-layered account of two commonplace professional categories of police talk: “131s” and “132s.” The officer first explains the official meaning of these categories: “131 that means you got felonies, priors; if you’re like 132 that means you are, you know, you’re clean.” Officer Yancy’s explanation reveals how otherwise neutral institutional categorizations take on moral dimensions in routine police work (cf. Meyer and Rowan 1977). The moralized dimensions of these categories are revealed in the officer’s translation of the official category of 131 and 132 into the commonsense categories of “normal” and “very bad.” Here, the officer completes his more formal explanation of the two categories by singling out a group of Black men: “See the locals right there? The guy in the middle, they’re in drugs, he’s very very bad people . . .” The officer’s action after this invocation—approaching and questioning the group of men—reveals how this categorization informs action. Here, the benefit of police inattention is distributed onto “normal” and “clean” people in the park, even though they may be technically violating the law (e.g., by not having their dog on a leash), while the burden of suspicion and police intrusion is distributed onto a group of Black men deemed “very bad people” by an officer, absent any other articulated or observable violation of the law.

Policing “Nice” Places

In the previous section, we highlighted how an officer uses a seemingly neutral membership categorization device (131/132) to make distinctions among different types of people within a shared space and how those distinctions are linked to action. In the following sections, we show how officers’ use of membership categorization devices for people and places intersect in ways that prefigure how officers manage encounters and, in turn, act as vehicles for the production of racially and spatially disparate outcomes. We examine four distinct membership categorization devices that officers reported relying on in routine police work (Schegloff 2005): “nice” places, “normal” people, “the projects,” and “people in the projects.” The use of the descriptor “nice” for places in the city is reserved for middle-class or wealthy areas inhabited by White people and professionals; officers typically adopt a service-oriented approach to the inhabitants of “nice” areas, unless a person or group of people is deemed out of place.

During ride-alongs, officers referred to large and/or expensive homes in residential areas, commercial streets that contain restaurants, shops, parks, and scenic views as areas that were “nice,” “cool,” “rich,” “cleaned-up,” or “quiet.” These identifiers were often coupled with characterizations such as “boring,” “slow,” or “laid back” to describe officers’ experiences on patrol and, in turn, the approaches they took to managing encounters in these places. Paradoxically, several officers reported that they disliked patrols in these areas because the calls were relatively infrequent and usually non-emergency (i.e., “paper calls”). Neighborhoods were distinguished in police discourse by the apparent wealth of an area, “car sector,” and its proximity to lower income areas of the city and the projects. Officer Brittany describes the dividing lines within one district this way:

The Four Car is like the . . . has a lot of, uh, very nice rich homes . . . sometimes people call it the paper car, because a lot of, you take a lot of reports, mostly theft and stuff like that. Um, Three-Car’s the Dyson-y area, so if you like drugs or that kind of thing you can do that. Um, the Two-Car has a lot of our, our projects. So, if you want to do housing, um uh public housing, you do (that) with the Two-Car.

In this excerpt, Officer Brittany provides a cognitive map of the district to describe the primary institutional problems that are confronted in each area. The Four Car patrols an area with “very nice rich homes” where the primary problem is identified as paperwork associated with thefts in these homes. This is an example of the service-orientation to residents in this area. The Three Car area is associated with “drugs or that kind of thing.” The Two Car is associated with “our projects.” In addition to illustrating how areas within a district are divided up in officers’ minds, Officer Brittany’s excerpt reflects an unspoken racialized hierarchy of White/Black space in the city. “The projects” or “public housing” is synonymous with Black space and, referentially, “very nice rich homes” is associated with White space. Both White space and the Dyson-y area, which is a space commonly associated with unhoused populations, are associated with specific activities: “paper” calls (e.g., burglaries that require documentation for insurance purposes) and “drugs,” respectively. In contrast, “the projects” or “public housing” is represented as a problem in and of itself—a problem that requires no elaboration.⁹

Orientation toward Professionalism, Service, and Problem Solving

The categorization of “nice” areas is accompanied by generalized categorizations of people in these places. Officers used terms like “middle upper-[class]”; “normal families”; and “business owners” to describe people in other sectors of their district. Categorizing civilians by class status and neighborhood affiliation becomes an important way for officers to determine who needs protection, for example, by identifying residents in “nice” areas as potential victims in need of protection from burglars and other outsiders who might do them harm.¹⁰ This typification also establishes who is “normal” and thereby does not warrant heightened suspicion from the police.

An additional characteristic of nice people in nice areas cited by officers was their orientation toward policing and perceived respect for police officers. For example, Officer Yancy, who provided the explanation of 131s and 132s, describes the “normal families” who reside in a segment of the Byers district as people who appear to appreciate the police. Similar to Officer Brittany, Officer Roger, assigned to the Belcourt district, associates the Four Car Sector with “normal” families who occupy a middle-class status (through home ownership) with an appreciation for the police:

Officer Roger:

So, up here this is the Four Car sector. This is where all the normal families, I guess you could say, and the houses [. . .] This is where everybody here waves at you and, ya know, pats you on the back. Thank you for being up here. You know, ’cause [sic] crooks . . .

Officer Roger’s description of the area illustrates an empathetic orientation to the neighborhood, a shared understanding of the role of police in the neighborhood (to keep out “crooks”), and an appreciation of the general positive orientation of the people in the area to the police. Here, we also see how reciprocity shapes the distribution of police services: the residents described by Officer Roger receive police protection of their person and property, and officers receive the psychological benefit of appreciation and respect.

The service-orientation illustrated in Officer Roger’s account also appears in the following description from Officer Karen, a 28-year-old Asian American woman with five years of experience as a police officer. Unlike other officers who divided their district into racialized car sectors, Officer Karen talked about her entire district, Belcourt, a largely residential area that also includes schools, a college campus, and some tourist attractions, as a nice area associated with routine service calls.

In the following excerpt, Officer Karen describes how she generally approaches encounters in Belcourt:

Interviewer:

And, uh, when you go speak to somebody is there a specific way you kind of like to approach the situation?

Officer Karen:

I usually introduce myself. You know, “Hi, I’m Officer Karen” or, or, uh, first name basis, “Hi, I’m Karen.” You know did you call? Or, um, you know if it’s a call of service, you know like did you call, how can I help you? Or, uh, what, what is the issue today? Like what’s bothering you? Like we’ll get like a gist of, uh, what’s the call about. So, let’s try, uh, these calls aren’t really talking calls [points to monitor in the car], they’re more paper calls . . . you just ask to try to figure out, um, what’s going on . . . if they, if they want to report a crime or something that’s done or just something that they want you to help ’em figure out, like a dispute with a neighbor or like sometimes issue with the city, like, oh, a tree fell down, I don’t know who to call or, you know . . . problem solving.

In this excerpt, the officer demonstrates an orientation that is defined by personalization and service rather than suspicion or dominance. The officer deflects attention away from her authority by introducing herself on a “first name basis.” She describes responding to a call by beginning with a question that is common to service interactions: “How can I help you?” She describes taking time to “get to the gist of it” and to work in collaboration with the resident “to figure it out.” The officer describes these types of calls as “talking” calls, which puts the officer in an investigative, problem-solving, and record-keeping position. The officer’s description of her orientation to residents in a “nice” and “slow” area also indicates an alignment with the resident’s concerns and, to some degree, the resident’s definition of the problems in an area.

The officer’s account of how she approaches an encounter in a nice, and therefore “slow,” district also reveals a procedural logic that distributes another key benefit to residents in the area: time. As Officer Karen explains, “in the slower stations,” officers have the time to think and move slowly, which influences the quality of their interactions with residents.

Officer Karen:

I don’t know if somebody else told you but a lot of the times, some of the busier stations, you just take calls and calls and calls of service. But, um, some of the slower stations, you have that ability to say hey, you know, I’m wondering what that guy, that guy’s doing. You know? You can just ask. Or like a consensual encounter, like you, know like, I’m wondering . . . let’s say it’s someone blocking the street, then you have that time to come out of your car and ask them versus going to call to call . . . I mean you kind of just drive around and, um, um, figure out what you want to do or, um, but most of the time this is a pretty mellow district, so it’s not as, uh, busy as others.

In a beat that is “laid back,” Officer Karen can orient toward problem solving in a “slow” area, but in a “busier station,” she says, “you just take calls and calls and calls of service.” Officer Karen’s orientation toward time facilitates the distribution of service-oriented policing to a segment of residents in Belcourt, which is consequential for how residents experience the “benefits and burdens” of policing. In something of a paradox, the “laid back” nature of some beats allows for the delivery of the type of policing that is often called for in areas in which police are often concentrated. As we see in the following sections, in “the projects,” where residents are understood as the problem or a potential problem, the burdens of policing, rather than its benefits, are distributed more freely.

Policing “the Projects”

In our analysis of officers’ accounts, the orientation toward professionalism, protection, and service in “nice” areas stood in stark contrast to how officers generally reported orienting toward “the projects” and “people in the projects.” People in the projects/the streets were often framed in categories that represented a problem or potential problem. Instead of terms like “nice” or “normal,” the categories used to describe people in the projects included terms like “users,” “people on warrants,” and the “homeless.” Officers would sometimes qualify this categorization by saying “not all of them [people in the projects],” suggesting that people who exist outside of these categories are exceptions to the rule. In contrast to the sense of anonymity that is granted to people in nice areas, people in the projects/the street were represented as highly visible to police surveillance (i.e., known to the police) and the threshold for police intrusion was remarkably low. For example, officer accounts revealed an orientation toward “proactive” and targeted policing (i.e., “take ons”; “looking” for people with warrants), a level of intrusion not experienced by residents in “nice” areas.

In contrast to descriptions of “normal” families who “pat” officers on the back for doing their job (per Officer Roger’s description above), the category of “people in the projects” was commonly linked to a belief that people who lived in or near the projects held an oppositional orientation toward the police. This oppositional orientation was seen as endemic to the culture of people in the projects. Several officers identified the socialization of children by their parents or caregivers as both symptom and cause of this oppositional orientation. For example, Officer Mavis, an officer in his early 30s with 10 years of experience on the force, including experience as a school resource officer, described a central challenge with working with school-age children in two predominantly African American and Latinx parts of the city commonly associated with “the streets.”

Officer Mavis:

A lot of the kids come from the housing projects (and), and it seems like they’ve been told not to trust the police, to, ah, hate the police, and I mean it’s it’s hard to initially try to break that barrier, to try and get through to them. Hey, we are not the bad guys, we’re here to interact with you guys and to help you and, ah, answer your questions. I’ve worked in the Orhill when I was a new officer, driving through the projects and there’s five-year-olds, six-year-olds saying f- the police.

Interviewer:

Oh really?

Officer Mavis:

And you’re like, and you know it’s not coming from the kids, it’s coming from the parents. I mean it’s really frustrating.

Other officers provided similar anecdotes as evidence of children being socialized into an anti-police orientation:

Officer Landon:

It’s just a long history of bad police community interaction over there and . . .

Officer Patricia:

Yeah.

Officer Landon:

. . . it’s so hard it kinda works against itself . . . wave to a little girl three years old and the mother says “don’t you be talking to him.” So, it kinda starts there, you know, can’t talk to the police and it’s hard to break the cycle.

Another officer echoes the sentiments shared by the officers above:

Officer Jay:

It’s pretty bad, you know? When I first come out here, I’m driving to Westboro. A three or four-year-old kid comes out and cussed at us, like c’mon.

In each of the excerpts above, officers locate the source of what they describe as an oppositional orientation toward the police in the culture and socialization of children and youth in the projects and not as a consequence of police behavior.

Other officers also shared with researchers their understanding of the culture of the projects as distinctly different from other parts of the city. In contrast to the more general descriptions of culture cited above, the following excerpts illustrate how officer biases operate as a form of institutional expertise that prefigures action. For example, Officer Patricia explains how strategies oriented around de-escalation—a key pillar of modern-day policing—operate differently in the projects:

Officer Patricia:

Yeah, we have to go in there, um, you know how we talked about coming to a situation and don’t come high but low, keep it all de-escalated, to de-escalate the situation. Over there [the projects] you have to be very careful because if you do, some of those people perceive it as a weakness ’cause you’re walking in too nice, and they feel like they can walk all over you. You’ve gotta be assertive.

Officer Landon:

Yeah.

Officer Patricia:

You’ve gotta go in there showing that you mean business and you’re here to take care of the situation, and you’re gonna handle it because if they see you like that, and they see you, and they misinterpret it as being weak. They will take advantage of that . . .

Another officer, Officer Karen, summed up a similar sentiment this way: “For the most part of Belcourt you’re dealing with professionals. Other than the projects, you know, you stay professional.”

The accounts from Officers Karen, Patricia, and Landon illustrate how officers treat biases rooted in presumptions of difference as a form of expertise that then informs how they interact with people in/near the projects. Officers Patricia and Landon explain how their expertise about people in the projects alters their use of de-escalation. These excerpts also show how policing strategies are informed by spatial contexts, which, given the high degree of racial segregation in the city, are also racialized. In this way, officer “expertise,” which is rooted in categorizations of people in the projects as inherently different, becomes a mechanism for the unequal distribution of the benefits and burdens of police services. Put simply, officers deliver civil, service-oriented, problem-solving police services to “nice” people in nice places, while “people in the projects” receive a form of policing oriented toward aggression, danger, and dominance.

Orientation toward Danger and Dominance

“The projects” appeared in officers’ accounts as a category of space that represented a racial, spatial, and moral “other” when compared (necessarily so) with nice places. Although “the projects” is technically a term used to describe a residential space (i.e, housing projects), it was often used synonymously or in place of “the streets.” Accounts of policing the projects revealed an orientation toward danger, resulting in elevated levels of vigilance and heightened awareness from officers to “keep their eyes open” when responding to calls in the area. In the following excerpt, two officers describe how the potential for danger shapes their responses to calls for service:

Interviewer:

So, when you guys go to a call in there, the projects, does that change the way you go talk to people?

Officer Charles:

Yeah most of the time you like—

Officer Jay:

Well, you’d be more careful.

Officer Charles:

And if you got a hot call coming out, you send a unit to the other side.

In contrast to the general “laid back” orientation to policing in nice areas, here officers describe how an orientation to danger and threat influenced their responses to calls “in the projects.”¹¹ Here, officers describe how they are “more careful” and call on additional units for support at the start of encounters prior to gathering additional information on the call.

A key way in which the distribution of the benefits and burdens of police services is revealed is in officers’ orientation to the routine work of policing the projects. For example, as a consequence of intrusive surveillance, disproportionate contact with the criminal justice system, and a commitment to proactive policing practices, the work of some officers entails simply going out “to look for people we know that have warrants.” Officer Gary described this form of proactive policing this way: “So that was pretty much what we do. We just look for people we know that have warrants or are committing crimes.” Officer Gary points to a civilian outside of the vehicle and explains to the interviewer, “We’ve arrested him with a gun about eight months ago.” He continues, “he had a warrant. We knew he had a warrant. There’s a warrant for that case. And we saw him and immediately recognized him. We knew he had a warrant and arrested him with a warrant.” This excerpt reveals how the disproportionate contact of residents of the projects with the criminal legal system provides a basis for the daily routines of police officers in the projects, which further legitimizes general perceptions of all people who live in the projects as potential threats or criminals.

Practices of hyper-surveillance within a small geographic space also make details about a person that are not necessarily obvious to a lay observer (e.g., knowing someone as a “user” or on probation) but readily available to police officers, which then serves as a justification for intrusion into the lives of residents. Here, we see how the policing of “the projects” once again distributes the benefits and burdens of policing. People in “nice” places are granted a degree of anonymity that is not equally distributed to people in the projects.

The categorization of the projects as dangerous and people in the projects as criminal also prefigure use of physical force. In the following excerpt, Officer Karl provides a rationalization for why he might use physical force at the start of an encounter to protect himself from the potential threat of violence. Officer Karl provides this explanation following a description of responding to a robbery call in the projects and how encounters in the projects can draw unruly crowds. His use of “[Pacific Islander] child”¹² is reference to a racial/ethnic group associated with housing projects in a part of the city.

Officer Karl:

Um, there’s nothing more important than [officer safety]. Um, you can work on your image (later), you know what I mean? If an officer has to put somebody on the ground, it’s a 12-year-old, [Pacific Islander] child, 6′5″, you know, [Pacific Islander] kids, you know, he’s 12 years old but he’s 5′11″, 250 pounds. Are you really gonna have a conversation with this kid ? . . . No, you’re gonna throw him on the ground first, you’re gonna de-escalate the situation, then you’re gonna tell the family, “Your son is 12-years-old, but he’s 6′2″ and I’m 5′7″.”

Interviewer:

That’s a big kid.

Officer Karl:

I am not gonna take a chance, not on your kid.

In nice areas, officers prioritize the protection of “normal” residents. In the projects, officers prioritize their safety and the safety of their peers. Like the excerpts from Officers Patricia, and Landon, Officer Karl describes de-escalation not as a tool to reduce the threat of force used by officers, in this case toward a child, but as a forceful way to establish dominance and control at the start of an encounter as to minimize the potential for violence used against an officer. Read alongside accounts of how officers orient toward policing “nice” areas with “normal” civilians, we see how the police aggression and force is held in reserve as a benefit of Whiteness, and how the burden of Blackness, in the form of police aggression and violence, is distributed more readily toward people in or associated with the projects.

Discussion

In “Dreaming of a Self Beyond Whiteness and Isolation,” powell (2005) asks, “How is it that Whiteness and racial hierarchy endure despite the end of Jim Crow?” For powell (2005), the process of spatial racism answers this question:

The way we organize our metropolitan areas, especially through persistent segregation, plays a large part in maintaining a way of racially distributing benefits and burdens, and provides the necessary space and boundary for Whiteness to continue to flourish. It is clear . . . that the spatial and social are mutually constitutive. (P. 29)

Powell’s analysis highlights the substantial role of law and government policies in constructing and defending White space “and its attendant privileges.” The concept of spatial racism is also a reminder that racial inequality does not exist solely because of how one group is treated—it is reproduced and maintained because something is happening to one group while something else is happening to another. Findings from this study show how the state maintains and exacerbates the White space/Black space binary at the micro-interactional level through the investment in and legitimization of routine policing practices that distribute the benefit of Whiteness and the burden of Blackness one police encounter at a time. In Golden City, people in White space receive a form of service-oriented policing (Bell 2020) while people in Black space are simultaneously oriented toward in harsher and more aggressive ways. This finding is consistent with a recent nationally representative survey of police officers which found that 56 percent of police officers believed “an aggressive rather than courteous approach is more effective in certain neighborhoods” (Moran, Turner, and Schliehe 2018).

Furthermore, our findings show how officers treat explicitly biased, racialized, and racist logics as a form of expertise that situates “the projects” and people there outside of the expectations and obligations of normative human interaction (e.g., “. . . other than the projects, you stay professional.”). Professionalism, which manifests in the respect and accountability afforded to residents, attention to report writing, and the performance of service thorough investigative work, is reserved for the protection of “normal” citizens and Whiteness/White/private space, while in and near “the projects,” presumptions about the place and the people as potential sites of hostility and danger legitimize dominance-oriented approaches to police encounters. In this way, routine police practices and the logics that inform them reinforce the exclusion of Black space through either enclosure or containment from the rest of society. Findings from this study require us to consider policing practices not merely as a public service or a public good, but as a key contributor to the construction of Whiteness as a privileged category of place and personhood.

Implications

Findings from this study can inform current conversations on police reform, “defunding,” and police abolition in several meaningful ways. First, our findings caution against broad-based investments in the increased professionalization of law enforcement. Instead, as policing scholar Van Maanen warned in 1978, investments in professionalization as a primary response to the problems of policing are likely to “widen the police mandate” and “amplify the potential of the police to act as moral entrepreneurs.” We concur with Van Maanen’s conclusion, and the calls from many activists and organizers today, that “what is required is not professional police but accountable police” (Van Maanen 1978:158, emphasis added).

At a minimum, accountability requires that explicitly racist bad actors are removed from policing and excluded from law enforcement. This should be a priority given recent reports and evidence of White nationalists infiltrating law enforcement agencies across the country (Brennan Center for Justice 2020). By their own account, many officers are not “unbiased” and/or unconscious of their biases when it comes to policing practices, but they do not associate these biases with prejudice or racial hatred. A key take-away from our research is that systemic racism is embedded in policing in ways that are not accounted for in the “bad apples” or implicit bias paradigms. Our findings reveal how a set of deeply rooted explicit but seemingly race-neutral biases (from the perspective of morally competent officers) are treated as a form of institutional expertise that justifies the unequal distribution of police services. Far more attention should be given to the explicit and institutionalized biases that officers rely on and how these biases generate disparate treatment across racial and spatial categories.

Our findings also caution against a belief that systemic racism can be successfully rooted out of policing in its current form. As Bell (2020) notes,

Race feeds into the heuristics, or cognitive shorthand, for police . . . There is no way to train officers not to use at least some heuristics, and those heuristics will always be racially oriented in the context of segregation. (P. 168)

Given the degree to which the heuristics of routine policing prefigure suspicion, dominance, and aggression toward people of color within and beyond Black space, it is imperative to restrict as much as possible the ability of officers to use force against members of the public. We must also pay attention to the role that seemingly race-neutral heuristics are used to justify the expansion of police surveillance and enforcement through new technologies (e.g., PredPol, Clearview). As recent research has shown (Brayne 2018; Ferguson 2017), these technologies tend to be adapted into pre-existing racialized policing projects with similar outcomes for marginalized communities.

A return to powell’s discussion of spatial racism provides support for calls for “defunding” the police and police abolition that are based on an understanding of how inextricably bound up routine policing is in historical and contemporary practices of White supremacy. This understanding of the problem with policing was put front and center by millions of protesters across the country who protested against police violence and systemic racism throughout the summer of 2020. From this perspective, it is not possible to address the problems of policing solely within a paradigm of policing. Continued and increased investments in policing in its current form represent a continued investment in the unequal distribution of the benefits of Whiteness and the burdens of Blackness. Policing, as a project of Whiteness, aims to reinforce spatial-racial exclusivity (Boyles 2020) by controlling and containing Black people through the production of segregated Black spaces. Therefore, our findings suggest that any effort to “reform” policing that does not account for the interminable project of Whiteness is likely to fail.

Ultimately, our analysis leads us to support abolitionist calls to reimagine community safety in ways that can mitigate and not exacerbate racial inequality. Such efforts are already underway in cities across the country. Rather than tinkering around the edges of a system of oppression that has historically defended White supremacy and private ownership, we should invest in social institutions, relationships, and practices that center the value of Black life and build up the capacity of historically marginalized individuals and communities.

Footnotes

*

Kenly Brown is now affiliated to The Spencer Foundation, Chicago, IL, USA; Kaily Heitz is now affiliated to University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA; Jasmine Kelekay is now affiliated to University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA; Gil Rothschild Elyassi is now affiliated to University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

Notes

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