Policing, Property, and the Production of Racial Segregation

Abstract

This paper argues for a re-consideration of policing as a key factor in the historic and contemporary production of racial residential segregation. Historical evidence suggests that policing can be understood as a substituting force among many modes of segregation which increased and decreased in use and effectiveness based on social and legal context. However, in contemporary contexts, policing not only substitutes for other mechanisms of segregation, but also has become synthesized with them. The proliferation of crime-free and nuisance housing ordinances suggests that policing has been metabolized into the everyday ways that white residents segregate neighborhoods. These ordinances encourage individuals to surveil their neighbors and file complaints with them through city bureaucracies and municipal police departments. These processes threaten and in many cases produce eviction, which has segregatory consequences when white residents police their Black neighbors. Building from Cheryl Harris’ work on whiteness as property, I theorize policing as a form of property. Through an examination of crime free and nuisance ordinance policing, I argue that to engage in neighborhood policing is to acquire social status and power through dispossession, forms of social status unavailable to those vulnerable to such policing. As traditional mechanisms of racial segregation weaken or change, seeing how policing functions as property reveals one way that whiteness is imbued with new meaning in the face of de-segregation.

A Legal Geography of Prison and Other Carceral Spaces

“…Examples of municipalities' reliance on nuisance claims to evict residents from public housing across the US abound (Kurwa 2022), with data from Milwaukee showing deep racial discrepancies in their application (Desmond and Valdez 2013), and discussions from Los Angeles revealing eviction as a simultaneous "space-making and race-making project" (Graziani et al 2022:442). While Bonds (2019:580) rightly contends that "we must theorize the politics of residential property ... as fundamentally connected to practices of policing and the carceral management of urban space", geographers are revealing how it is examples of eviction from publicly subsidised and state controlled residential property that offers more to our understanding of the carceral continuum than even exclusion from private-sector housing available on the free market.…”

“…Examples of municipalities’ reliance on nuisance claims to evict residents from public housing across the US abound (Kurwa 2022), with data from Milwaukee showing deep racial discrepancies in their application (Desmond and Valdez 2013), and discussions from Los Angeles revealing eviction as a simultaneous “space‐making and race‐making project” (Graziani et al. 2022:442).…”