Policing as Public Good: Reflecting on the Term

Abstract

This Essay is based on a lecture that was to be delivered in person in March 2020 but was cancelled as a result of the initial ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic. That a discussion of policing in the United States was cancelled because of what may well turn out to be the most significant public health crisis of this decade, if not this century, is important as these two subjects are intimately related. Sociologists and others have long noted that crime, and especially violent crime, is concentrated in places.1 Research is also clear that the state's primary response to concentrated violence in communities has been to send police and other apparatus of the criminal legal system to respond to crime rather than to provide state supports and other resources better aimed at preventing the circumstances that render certain neighborhoods susceptible to violence. Criminal legal system exposure is, however, fundamentally linked to underlying inequalities in distributions of wealth and power, and those inequalities are concentrated geographically. Police contact, imprisonment, and other aspects of system exposure burden the same neighborhoods that are weighed down by lack of affordable housing, inadequate schools, food insecurity, lead poisoning, poor water quality, and so on-a state of affairs that has persisted in some places for generations. Indeed, political scientist Lisa Miller calls the state's failure (or refusal) to protect those living in racially-marginalized communities from violence through comprehensive, preventative measures racialized state failure.

This is where the COVID-19 crisis intersects with policing and violence. Exogenous crises, whether pandemics or natural disasters, interact with extant inequalities and compound them. From the COVID-19 pandemic, to the HIV/AIDs crisis, to Hurricane Katrina, recent history shows how disasters expose and amplify the spatial dimensions of racialized state failure. That the same activists and organizers who were calling for police abolition were also enacting local mutual aid projects to fill the state's void in the pandemic is not coincidence. Rather, it illustrates how current calls for police abolition and defunding are simply an extension of their long-standing work to transform the state's orientation toward racially subjugated citizens. When participants in uprisings across the country call for defunding armed first responders, as well as greater investment in both community organizations and government services better targeted at supporting communities in need, it can be understood as a call to reimagine how the state responds to projects of public safety. To be sure, one can understand this dialogue as a jumping off point for reconceiving the fundamentals of the relationship between the state and the citizens that comprise it.

In the pages below, this Essay highlights how ordinary people discuss a reconceptualization of policing in ways that respond to the current moment. The data comprise a set of over 850 conversations recorded and transcribed between 2016 and 2018, and that took place between dyads of people located across fourteen neighborhoods among six cities: Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Mexico City, and Newark. As detailed below, these conversations were collected through an innovative technology, "Portals," which allowed the conversationalists to speak to one another as if they were in the same room even though they were actually hundreds or even thousands of miles away from one another. Each conversation, initiated by a prompt, encouraged the speakers to discuss their experiences with police and with violence. These conversations yield rich insight regarding how people who regularly have contact with what political scientists Joe Soss and Vesla Weaver call the "second face of the state."