Race and State in City Police Spending Growth

Vargas, Robert; McHarris, Philip

doi:10.1177/2332649216650692

Cited by 12 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…The role of the police expanded alongside the rise of law‐and‐order politics in the 1970s and 1980s. Federal aid for law enforcement allowed municipal governments to increase their police spending even when otherwise cash‐strapped (Vargas & McHarris, 2017), and the average proportion of city budgets devoted to policing increased, while social spending stagnated (Beck & Goldstein, 2018). The expansion of policing had two main consequences.…”

Section: Policing and Urban Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

Police redistricting reforms and urban governance

Gordon

Davis‐Pait

2022

Law & Policy

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Police redistricting reforms are surprisingly understudied. While many understand redistricting in other realms as a mechanism of social inclusion and exclusion, police redistricting is often overlooked as merely technocratic. We argue that, in fact, police redistricting reforms are substantively and theoretically important because they articulate urban policy amid the pressures of neoliberal governance. Redistricting defines the functions and activities of the police, responds to political and economic pressures, and redistributes resources across racial spaces. To illustrate, we analyze publicly available materials describing 43 police redistricting reforms in 35 major cities in the United States. We find in these reforms an enduring emphasis on the role of the police as emergency service providers. Urban austerity and growth politics inflect redistricting and impact the distribution of police service across the city. While redistricting can theoretically result in more equitable policing, it can also amplify racial inequities by triaging resources toward downtowns and predominantly white neighborhoods, at the expense of police response in communities of color. We call for more attention to police redistricting as an arena of urban governance. | INTRODUCTIONPolice executives periodically redraw the boundaries of the mid-level geographic divisions of police districts or precincts. This process of redistricting defines a consequential administrative subunit that structures the delivery of police services across the city (Hassell, 2006). Redistricting also crafts work environments that can cultivate distinct systems of policing, as officers develop normative expectations and practices based on the specific social environments of their districts (Klinger, 1997). Districts are becoming even more important as strategic innovations like community policing encourage organizational decentralization, pushing additional decision-making power down to the level of district leadership (Skogan, 2006).

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Section: Policing and Urban Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

Police redistricting reforms and urban governance

Gordon

Davis‐Pait

2022

Law & Policy

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“…In contrast to the implicit bias literature, recent literature on (1) how colorblind racism (Bonilla-Silva 2013 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.…”

Section: Colorblind Criminal Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

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

et al. 2022

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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.

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“…Both Democratic and Republican-controlled administrations have financed the expansion of SRO programs in spite of a lack of evidence that they enhance school safety, and in the face of documented harms to marginalized students. Over the course of several decades of neoliberal policies, roles traditionally encompassed by social workers, educators, and other caring professions have been transferred to law enforcement (Vargas & McHarris, 2017), and the deleterious effects on youth have been unequivocal. It is incumbent on the new federal administration to end its support of school-based policing and invest deeply in student support professionals whose effectiveness has been affirmed by research (Cleveland & Sink, 2018).…”

Section: Conclusion and Recommendationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Defunding School Resource Officers: a New Commitment to Student Safety

Layton

Addo

2021

J of Pol Practice & Research

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The purpose of this paper is to outline the history of school-based policing, namely, the deployment of School Resource Officers (SROs), and examine the evidence of this program's impacts on school safety and on students in the USA. We offer a review of the literature documenting the costs and effects of SROs in US schools. More than two decades of research have not yielded evidence that police enhance school safety, but it has repeatedly been documented that embedding police in schools results in serious harms to minoritized students, especially those who are Black, disabled, LGBTQ, or low income. This review of the research makes clear that SROs have not delivered school safety and have caused considerable harm to marginalized students. It must therefore be a priority of the new administration to end schools' reliance on law enforcement to manage the students in their care and reinvest in the proven support that school-based social work affords to our youth.

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Race and State in City Police Spending Growth

Cited by 12 publications

References 53 publications

Police redistricting reforms and urban governance

Police redistricting reforms and urban governance

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

Defunding School Resource Officers: a New Commitment to Student Safety

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