Race, Ethnicity, and Policing
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Race, Ethnicity, and Policing

New and Essential Readings

Stephen K. Rice, Michael D. White

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eBook - ePub

Race, Ethnicity, and Policing

New and Essential Readings

Stephen K. Rice, Michael D. White

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About This Book

From Rodney King and “driving while black” to claims of targeting of undocumented Latino immigrants, relationships surrounding race, ethnicity, and the police have faced great challenge. Race, Ethnicity, and Policing includes both classic pieces and original essays that provide the reader with a comprehensive, even-handed sense of the theoretical underpinnings, methodological challenges, and existing research necessary to understand the problems associated with racial and ethnic profiling and police bias. This path-breaking volume affords a holistic approach to the topic, guiding readers through the complexity of these issues, making clear the ecological and political contexts that surround them, and laying the groundwork for future discussions. The seminal and forward-thinking twenty-two essays clearly illustrate that equitable treatment of citizens across racial and ethnic groups by police is one of the most critical components of a successful democracy, and that it is only when agents of social control are viewed as efficient, effective, and legitimate that citizens will comply with the laws that govern their society. The book includes an introduction by Robin S. Engel and contributions from leading scholars including Jeffrey A. Fagan, James J. Fyfe, Bernard E. Harcourt, Delores Jones-Brown, Ramiro Martínez, Jr., Karen F. Parker, Alex R. Piquero, Tom R. Tyler, Jerome H. Skolnick, Ronald Weitzer, and many others.

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Information

Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2010
ISBN
9780814776476

Part I

The Context

Introduction to Part I

Stephen K. Rice
The following section is foundational: it provides the criminological, sociological, social-psychological, and legal lens through which to better understand the theoretical basis and empirical examination of race, ethnicity, and policing. The section also provides the reader with a conceptual road map to better “place” the methodological advancements and controversies outlined later in the volume, illustrates how scholarship tends to coalesce around different ecological contexts and units of analysis (e.g., the neighborhood versus the individual), and provides an appreciation of how varied orthodoxies influence the pictures that get drawn. The chapters by Tyler and Fagan, and Weitzer are tasked with providing these distinctions, while the chapter by Jones-Brown and Maule assesses police bias and profiling legislatively and jurisprudentially. The section also includes foundational work by Skolnick on “the symbolic assailant” and by Lamberth and Harris on early statistical assessments of minority motorists’ experiences—assessments that have formed the basis for much of the public’s interpretations of “driving while black/brown.”
The first chapter in the section, Skolnick’s seminal “A Sketch of the Policeman’s Working Personality,” advances a thesis that has informed decades of research on the social psychology of policing as an occupation: that through a confluence of pressures that include exposure to danger, problems of authority, police solidarity, and the need for efficiency, police officers develop distinct ways of perceiving the world around them. As a result, this “working personality” tends to facilitate a suspicious comportment on the part of officers—an orientation in which officers develop perceptual shorthands to classify certain individuals as potentially violent based on inputs such as language, dress, gesture, or not “belonging” within a street scene. Conditioned by an officer’s inherent need for order (e.g., via regularity, predictability, and safety), these “symbolic assailants” come to be cast as differentially likely for police interrogation. In the years subsequent to Skolnick’s publication, researchers have worked to assess the implications and by-products of this thesis, such as whether race and ethnicity are utilized by police in much the same way as language or gesture: as triggers for differential stop, search, and interrogation independent of observable behavior or situation. Either tacitly or explicitly, each of the contributions to Race, Ethnicity, and Policing focuses on this important question.
As with Skolnick’s description of the “symbolic assailant,” Lamberth’s 1993 census of violators on the New Jersey Turnpike may too be considered seminal in light of its sizable impact on public perceptions of “driving while black/brown” and as one of the earliest efforts to apply research design and statistical analysis to claims of profiling by police (also see Paulhamus, Kane, and Piquero; and Ridgeway and MacDonald, this volume). To establish a benchmark, or “denominator” (i.e., the number of drivers of a particular race on the turnpike over a period of time), and to gauge driver behavior (i.e., violators vs. nonviolators, by race), Lamberth set up surveys that afforded both metrics: one a static assessment of drivers and race from predetermined observation points, the other being a novel “rolling survey” to assess speeding. Lamberth’s findings indicated that African Americans represented fewer than 15% of the drivers on the turnpike, 15% of the speeders, but 35% of those who were stopped by police. As such, blacks were almost five times more likely to be stopped as were others, and by reviewing arrest data he determined that blacks were nearly seventeen times more likely to be arrested. Subsequent research in Maryland yielded similar results, including suggestions of racial bias in decisions to search. Largely through Lamberth’s early efforts, swaths of roadway in New Jersey, Maryland, and other states have become central to national dialogues on race, ethnicity, fair procedures, and the effective rule of law.
Harris’s chapter finds its footing in Lamberth’s New Jersey and Maryland scholarship, incorporates additional empirical (albeit nonobservational) work by Harris and Lamberth on Ohio traffic stops (similarly indicating racial disproportionality in ticket issuance), and further contextualizes these findings by incorporating interviews with African Americans that are presented as illustrating the “frightening and embarrassing nature of the experiences, the emotional difficulties and devastation that often follow, and the ways that they cope, bring[ing] to life the statistics” (also see Brunson, this volume). The chapter moves on to place racial profiling in the broader context of race in the criminal justice system, provides an outline of legal principles that relate to allegations of profiling and the (sometimes-limited) recourse available to those who perceive unfair treatment, and ends with recommendations for ways forward. To this last point, Harris calls for additional local- and state-level enactment of measures similar to the Traffic Stops Statistics Act of 1997 so that complainants can more readily utilize the whole host of legal rights available to them (e.g., Equal Protection Clause, civil rights statutes, state law).
Tyler and Fagan provide a critical counter to long-standing sociological perspectives: that while such inputs are no doubt important to understanding relationships between minority groups and legal authorities, they are inadequate in capturing the street-level mechanisms by which individuals choose to comply with the law, cooperate with the police, and support the empowerment of police to use discretion. To this question, Tyler and Fagan point to the influence of perceived procedural justice in conditioning police legitimacy: “The procedural justice model of policing argues that the police can build general legitimacy among the public by treating people justly during personal encounters. This argument is based upon two empirical arguments. The first is that people evaluate personal experiences with the police by evaluating the fairness of police procedures. The second is that this means that by using fair procedures the police can increase their legitimacy, even if their policing activities involve restricting or sanctioning the people with whom they are dealing” (241). As such, the procedural justice model is contrasted with instrumental perspectives which assert that legitimacy is less a function of process than outcome: that the public is more attuned to credible sanctioning threats, the ebb and flow of crime control/crime rates in a community, and the fair distribution of police services (or attunement to risk, performance, and distributive fairness, respectively). To test the relative influence of procedural versus instrumental judgments, Tyler and Fagan analyze responses to a panel study focusing on New York City residents that tap both the constructs and the characteristics of police legitimacy and cooperation. Consistent with the model, legitimacy is found to be linked to the justice of the procedures utilized by the police in exercising their authority, and legitimacy more relates to experiencing procedural justice than to the favorability of outcomes. Tyler and Fagan’s findings inform related efforts that aim to place greater emphasis on measures of fairness in police-public interactions (e.g., Brunson; Rice and Parkin; and Hickman, this volume).
Reflective of individuals being couched within ecological contexts, Weitzer provides an important overview of major empirical findings about race, ethnicity, and policing at the level of the individual (e.g., age, gender, and social class predicting public attitudes and experiences) and in contexts to include neighborhoods, cities, and nations. Consistent with Martínez (this volume), Weitzer pays particular attention to imperfections and inaccuracies in the manner in which the “Latino” or “Hispanic” experience has been explored, in that it tends to mask differences such as national origin, immigrant versus native-born status, frames of reference regarding police conditioned by home country (e.g., benevolent or brutal), stratification, integration, and alienation. With regard to ecology, Weitzer provides a comprehensive review of evidence that suggests that place matters: that neighborhoods and cities (and perhaps nations) play at least as much of a role as individual-level characteristics in explaining public treatment by police. Weitzer also provides useful recommendations for the application of social disorganization theory, conflict theory, minority threat theory, and group position theory in the study of race, ethnicity, and policing. In total, the chapter illuminates voices that hope to better understand how the individual is embedded within space and place (e.g., Tyler and Fagan; Parker, Lane, and Alpert; and Stults, Parker, and Lane, this volume).
Harris’s brief discussion of legal principles provides a segue to Jones-Brown and Maule’s comprehensive overview of fundamental constitutional rights that inform the study of race, ethnicity, and policing (e.g., expectation of privacy, equal protection, freedom from unreasonable intrusion), the socio-legal background in which these rights are embedded, and the conditions under which judicial and legislative bodies have taken action to better protect these rights (e.g., U.S. v. Brignoni-Ponce, vis-àvis the inadequacy of ethnicity alone in determining reasonable suspicion). The authors also contend that the U.S. Supreme Court has been ineffectual in establishing a similarly clear standard on the impermissible role of race as sole determinant of reasonable suspicion—a failure that, when coupled with decisions that have expanded the scope of police discretion, “make racially biased policing legally invisible in the absence of direct admissions or overt racial epithets by police during traffic or pedestrian stops” (emphasis added). Jones-Brown and Maule go on to outline cases that they characterize as having expanded police discretionary authority in ways that enhance the likelihood of racially biased policing. The chapter closes with a discussion of successful settlements of racial profiling lawsuits and with an accounting of national legislation that has facilitated data collection on the part of police departments or formally prohibited racial and ethnic profiling. In sum, the chapter provides a legal/legislative lens through which to better explore how and under what conditions citizens’ demeanor affects the police-public dyad; whether nonnative, undocumented, or “special” populations experience unique vulnerabilities in their experiences with legal authorities; and how modifications to law and policy might better facilitate police accountability and a democratic ideal (e.g., Engel, Klahm, and Tillyer; Weitzer; Martínez; and White, this volume).

Chapter 1

A Sketch of the Policeman’s Working Personality

Jerome H. Skolnick
A recurrent theme of the sociology of occupations is the effect of a man’s work on his outlook on the world.1 Doctors, janitors, lawyers, and industrial workers develop distinctive ways of perceiving and responding to their environment. Here we shall concentrate on analyzing certain outstanding elements in the police milieu, danger, authority, and efficiency, as they combine to generate distinctive cognitive and behavioral responses in police: a “working personality.” Such an analysis does not suggest that all police are alike in “working personality,” but that there are distinctive cognitive tendencies in police as an occupational grouping. Some of these may be found in other occupations sharing similar problems. So far as exposure to danger is concerned, the policeman may be likened to the soldier. His problems as an authority bear a certain similarity to those of the schoolteacher, and the pressures he feels to prove himself efficient are not unlike those felt by the industrial worker. The combination of these elements, however, is unique to...

Table of contents