Policing the ‘progressive’ city: The racialized geography of drug law enforcement

Abstract

This article explores selective drug law enforcement practices in a single municipality, San Francisco, where racial disproportionality in drug arrest rates is among the highest in the United States. We situate this work in the vein of recent case-study examinations done in Seattle, Cleveland, and New York to help build a more nuanced picture of how the local geography of policing drugs produces racialized outcomes. Within this, we examine how historically embedded local politics shape the varied styles and structures of policing that result in racially discriminatory enforcement patterns. Our goal is to begin sketching out a robust framework of 'place' as an orientation for examining discretionary local policing practices, especially as they impact marginalized groups and communities of color.

Producing race disparities: A study of drug arrests across place and race*

“…Scholars have underscored a constellation of legal, organizational, political, individual, contextual, situational, and ecological factors that shape drug law enforcement and the race disparities it produces (Beckett, Nyrop, & Pfingst, ; Beckett, Nyrop, Pfingst, & Bowen, ; Eitle & Monahan, ; Engel, Smith, & Cullen, ; Lynch, , ; Lynch, Omori, Roussell, & Valasik, ; Mitchell, ; Mitchell & Lynch, ; Parker & Maggard, ; Parker et al., ; Tonry & Melewski, ). Many law enforcement agents and scholars have asserted that these factors are nonracial, contending that racially disparate policing represents officers’ reasonable, nondiscriminatory responses to legitimate factors disproportionately found in neighborhoods of color, such as high violent crime, disorder, economic disadvantage, and calls for service (Bratton & Knobler, ; Engel et al., ; Kelling & Coles, ; Wilson & Kelling, ).…”

The Divergence of Democratic Policing: Reflection on Brazil and Argentina

“…The specific attributes of a place play a significant role in substantiating patterns of drug arrests, disqualifies the notion that aggreagate data fairly represents the extent of the problem. With the use of a few maps, the paper affirms the coorelation between incidents of narcotics and districts with large black population [19]. By singling out jurisdictions, case studies are best able to show the precise circumstances under which selective drug law enforcement takes place.…”

“…Using the subject of drug law enforcement to show selective treatment by police in San Francisco, Lynch et al [19] are able to show in depth the issue of police impartiality and structural location with regards to race and geography. The reality of San Francisco is that they have the highest rates in racial dispropornality on the subject of drug arrest.…”

“…The reality of San Francisco is that they have the highest rates in racial dispropornality on the subject of drug arrest. Despite being a 'progressive' city, there is a sharp contrast of San Francisco's liberal persona; characterized by numerous movements for social justice, juxtaposed with its history of oppresive policies against the disenfranchised citizenry [19]. This policing quagmire of selective enforcement of the drug law is linked both directly and indirectly to the local politics of the city that influence the structures of the police force, resulting in racial discrimination.…”

Policing the Anticommunity: Race, Deterritorialization, and Labor Market Reorganization in South Los Angeles

“…Feelings of nostalgia and empowerment produced by the word “community” cover over a racial and economic project of control and exclusion extending from the larger neoliberal architecture of urban renewal, gentrification, and the staffing of a restructured economy. The violence of 1991–1992 may have laid the groundwork for such a governance shift, but the efforts of the state to restructure urban space have been the story of the past several decades irrespective of urban pacification (Lynch et al ; Smith ). As numerous scholars have suggested, the drawing of community boundaries is a political act bound up in racial preference and concern for the needs of capital (Beckett and Herbert ; Davis ; Herbert and Brown ; Stuart ).…”