Race, Gender, and Police Violence in the Shadow of Controlling Images

Abstract

Despite the emergence of the #SayHerName movement alongside #BlackLivesMatter, research on police encounters is rarely intersectional and has largely neglected the potentially violent consequences of gendered and racialized “controlling images.” Using New York City investigatory stop data (2007–2014), and drawing on controlling images theory, our analysis shows that Black men and women experience higher rates of police violence than White men and women. Within race, analyses indicate that Black men experience more police violence than Black women. The same gender gap exists for Whites, Asians, and Latinx persons, suggesting that broad cultural perceptions of femininity and masculinity shape police violence. However, these gendered frames mostly dissolve in instances of potentially fatal violence, as we find no gender differences within race or ethnicity in these extreme cases with one exception: police point their guns at Black men slightly more than at Black women. Further, the controlling image criminalizing Black men casts a long shadow—police are more likely to use violence on individuals stopped in the company of a Black man across gender, race, and ethnicity. This study provides a comprehensive, intersectional analysis of police encounters, both reaffirming and extending controlling images to understand why race, ethnicity, and gender disparities in state violence experiences persist.

Viewing violent policing videos contributes to trauma symptoms for Black Americans.

“…The finding that policing-related distal and proximal stressors have a pernicious impact on Black Americans but not White Americans highlights that systemic racial bias in policing reinforces White supremacy by undermining the health of Black Americans through multiple mechanisms. This is especially important to consider in the context of bias against Black Americans in policing due to historically embedded racism in state-sanctioned institutions (Gaynor et al, 2021; Jamison, 2021; Remster et al, 2022).…”

“…While other minoritized groups may also be subjected to racial bias in policing (e.g., see Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study, 2019 Police Violence US Subnational Collaborators, 2021), some posit that discrimination against Black Americans has been embedded in the criminal justice system since its inception. In other words, state-sanctioned police violence is intertwined with the historical context of racial discrimination against Black Americans in the United States and is justified through various mechanisms ranging from systematic portrayals of Black men as criminal (Remster et al, 2022), to decisions reached via historically significant legal cases (Gaynor et al, 2021), to the establishment of the criminal justice system itself (Jamison, 2021). Disparities in policing have ramifications beyond the criminal justice system; vicariously experiencing violent police–citizen interactions can undermine the mental health of Black Americans.…”