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Okay. So my name's Mary Bosworth, and I'm the director of the Centre for Criminology and it gives me great pleasure

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to welcome you all here this evening to the 13th Annual Roger Hood Lecture,

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which today will be given by Professor Weaver from Johns Hopkins University.

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This prestigious annual public lecture series was launched in 2006 to honour and celebrate the long and distinguished

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career of Professor Roger Hood and his particular contribution to criminology in Oxford and further afield.

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Over the course of his career,

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Roger worked on a wide range of topics across numerous jurisdictions with significant impact on scholarship and also on policy.

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In his range, he offers an inspiring vision of academia that is driven by curiosity and by political and

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ethical beliefs that in this sometimes stultifying era of RDF counting and accounting is,

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I think, worth remembering and worth celebrating.

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It also means that each time we invite a speaker, it's relatively easy to find connections between their work and Roger's work,

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because Roger worked on so many different topics.

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So today the obvious points of linkage between Roger's work and that of our speakers also concerned race and ethnicity.

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They also share interest in the role of punishment and social control and in their passion for trying to bring about social change and social justice.

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Actually. Weaver is the Bloomberg distinguished associate professor of political science and sociology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

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She is here today and tomorrow as an asked a visiting lecturer hosted by the Centre for Criminology.

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So for those of you who want to learn more about Vision's work tomorrow at 10:00 for an hour or so,

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we have a much smaller seminar hosted in the Centre for Criminology.

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Fischer is known for her work on the persistence of racial inequality and colorism in the U.S.,

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the causes and consequences of the dramatic rise in prisons and the consequences of rising economic polarisation.

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Somewhat unusually for us that she is not actually a criminologist, although she probably wishes she was, but she's a political scientist.

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And so within that disciplinary frame,

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her work has focussed on how punishment and surveillance was central to American citizenship in the modern era and how it played a major

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role in the post-war expansion of state institutions and was a key aspect of how mostly disadvantaged citizens interact with government.

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This evening, she will share with us some findings from her current project on patterns of citizenship and governance across the US,

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cities and neighbourhoods in which she connects policing and incarceration to communities where these forms of state actions are concentrated.

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Consulting with people who are subject to such matters of coercion.

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Using an innovative technology that creates digital wormholes called portals.

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After her talk special talk for about an hour, then there'll be time for questions.

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And then after the talk, we will go upstairs to the cafeteria area and there will be wine and non-alcoholic drinks and some stuff.

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So please join me in welcoming the and. Thank you.

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It's an honour to be here. Thank you, Mary and Ian Loder, for inviting me.

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And thank you, Professor Hood, for having this lectureship.

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I hope that we can engage and learn together while I'm here.

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And I'm just if I if you can't hear me in the back, I'll move to the microphone.

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But I'm going to try for now just to be over here. In Newark, New Jersey, a young American testified to a perfect stranger.

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He gripped a paper bag in one hand with six fold numbers scrawled across.

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That bag, contained the items that he had on his person as his government put him in a cell at the Essex County Jail.

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He was on his way home that day, he said were being locked up and held at a ransom.

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I call that a ransom, not a bail, because this is a system that's created for the rich to get richer.

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You understand what I'm saying? We're not the rich. I feel as though that system is created by to generate more money for.

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For commissaries, for my family, to spend more money on commissary, food, and other families for other inmates who are in there.

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I have a four year old son. I don't wish to spend my money on commissaries.

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I don't wish to pay lawyers fees and court fees and ponds and things like that.

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No, I want to give my money to my son. You know, the summer, summertime is coming.

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My son loves nature. So, you know, what I would thought about while I was in that cell was doing more things that involved nature with him,

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taking him to the zoo, taking him to the park, taking him to the beach.

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That's where I wish to put my money into not back into this into this injustice system.

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909 miles away in a park in Milwaukee stood another man, 20 years his senior.

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But distance was no matter. That man stood right in front of them with the illusion of being in the same room connected by a digital wormhole.

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He responded with assurance, Yo, your voice is supported, bro, and explained that his wish was for prosecutors to walk a day in their shoes since,

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quote, I don't know what they don't know what it's like to live on the other side and they in charge of our fate.

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While he was a stranger, he was not unknown to the young man.

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His story was one that pulled on the entire generational cord of our memory.

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They each stood inside a chamber like this that we had repurposed from a container to ship goods to a container of ideas meant to ship our thoughts.

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The space inside is not unlike the young cell in the county jail or the many millions of cells in America's prisons,

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jails, juvenile detention and pre-release centres.

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But instead of isolation from others, instead of confinement, this Stark Room was designed to liberate,

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connect and amplify the testimony of America's fourth largest city.

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Wards of the state. We call it a portal. After the pair of men had left the gold virtual chamber, a young woman entered.

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She spoke to another mother, this time in Chicago.

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And over the course of the next year and a half, 2000 others entered these chambers, told stories,

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bore witness to each other, took in each other's accounts, and shared the freedom dreams inside these virtual front porches.

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My colleague at Yale Law School, Tracy Mears, and I, paired up with the artist and tech entrepreneur Amar Bakshi,

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who had designed this Goldberg experiment in his backyard to locate portals in 11 neighbourhoods

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in five cities across the United States and Mexico City with the help of curators,

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which I'll explain in a bit. We amassed a rich archive of narrative experiences between people who would not otherwise encounter each other.

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We had no idea what we were doing or even how to listen at this scale.

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But we did know that harnessing technology could become a counter infrastructure to a media that

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so often compounds their group stigma and create connected political spaces out of disconnection.

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Our reporters collaboration began from a radical partnering of immersive technology and public art.

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With research, we sense the power of this combination to utterly transform both what we know and how we go about knowing it.

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Their testimonies come during a time when 21% of the black population in our nation's largest city was being stopped

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by police when the racial gulf in prison admissions was so vast that the bureau stopped tabulating figures like this.

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In the late nineties, when footage of black men being felled by police like in my city, Baltimore, where Freddie Grey's neighbourhood.

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I'm sorry. This is the poster that came up after Freddie Grey died.

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And those of you who are following this and it set off a bunch of of riots and uprisings in Baltimore.

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And what it says is whoever died from a rough ride, the whole damn system.

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And the rough ride, of course, was the thing that snapped Freddie Grey's spinal cord in the police van.

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We come during a time when uprisings around police violence had set off a Black Spring that swept the

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United States and ignited black and brown communities to rehearse their ancestors pleas to say her name.

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Black lives matter. And no justice. No peace. To which they were told, now told their rage to stop coming undone,

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to show a personal responsibility that when we protested violence by the state, it was in fact us who were violent.

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During a time in which the American government infused incredible funds into the criminal justice system,

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monies that would continue to soak up the resources that would have actually improved the lives of what Joseph and I call race class,

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subjugated communities. How are people like the young man?

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I'm sorry. I just skipped over something. How are people like the young person in Newark and his older interlocutor governed?

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How is the power of state agents interpreted, resisted or deployed?

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How do city residents characterise both the nature of their citizenship and the logic of the state?

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What discourses and ideologies do they draw on to make sense of their interactions with street level bureaucrats?

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How do they were? You define and reframe conceptions of black and brown work, public safety and American democracy.

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And how do they innovate in response to police activity in their neighbourhoods?

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How do they imagine liberation? We don't know.

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I come to you from a field that studies state power, citizenship, governance and democracy,

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and we have precious few theories to offer or concepts to help us to understand these questions from

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a field framed by images of representative democracy and teach Marshall's conception of citizenship.

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Where debates about what drives people's preferences and interests dominate,

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taking non domination by the state as a baseline assumption from a field that is ever more concerned about the rise of inequality.

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That seems to forget that inequality isn't just about what material resources you command or not,

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but fundamentally about how the government treats and regards you from a field that has ultra flexibly relied on a single method.

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We don't know the answers to these questions because as social scientists,

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we have relegated people who the state has visited its most incredible uses of state power to confine and kill to a class to which we do not listen.

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Over the past few decades and maybe longer, we have learned next to nothing about the political lives of highly policed communities.

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From orthodox methods like social surveys. In part because those surveys ask the wrong questions.

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In part because survey research rarely went into these communities or sampled in prisons and jails and halfway houses and pre-release centres.

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And in part because asking somebody whether they strongly agree, somewhat agree,

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neither agree or disagree with this or that with trusting the government or not,

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does little to shed light on the actual lived experience of the state and government authority in these places.

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And yet I also come to you with the words of James Baldwin,

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the American writer in my mind when he spoke of policing in Harlem half a century ago, saying that Negroes were forbidden the very air.

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I study one of the largest transformations in the relationship between American government and citizens in the post civil rights era.

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My colleague Amy Lehrman and I have argued,

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argued that carceral encounters affected the health of American democracy by creating what we called custodial citizenship.

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My past work has shown that criminal justice structures how people engage with the state, they are politically socialising experiences.

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We found that criminal justice encounters and if my book could be summed up in one slide, this would be it.

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We found that criminal justice encounters had a chilling effect on political engagement, setting off political withdrawal.

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Today, I'm going to discuss discourses from the most extensive collection of firsthand accounts of the police by those who are policed.

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To date, my argument is both methodological and substantive.

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Methodologically, I argue that amid big data and ever more sophisticated tools of slicing it,

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a people's history offers the most complex accounting of the American policing regime in our time.

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They are the most credible reporters we have singular in their authority to describe to us modern policing.

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Their political knowledge runs deep. They know long before consent decrees.

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Journalistic exposes and police video footage.

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What was going on? Because they lived it daily.

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And they are a crucial counter-narrative to bodies of numerical knowledge that often provide misleading testimony to the public.

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My favourite example of this I heard from Frank Barber a recently where in my home city of Baltimore,

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Maryland, police stops show up as zero in the official statistics.

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Police simply did not report their stops of citizens.

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Now imagine if we wanted to understand apartheid, the Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag,

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or other state projects of control and violence only through statistics and discounted the Diary of Anne Frank.

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The Freedmen's Bureau's Interviews of Slaves.

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Martin Luther King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail and other firsthand witness tell me, are stories secondary to statistical inquiry?

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But not just that the method enables substantive revelations.

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Substantively, I argue that we missed specify the structure and experience of the American state.

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If we want to theorise governance of America in America and beyond, racial capitalism and other projects of state supervision,

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we need to understand the experience and critiques of democracy from below, how they judge how responsive authorities are, how they imagine freedom.

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As Joe Soares and I have argued, if one's aim is to understand state powers, to govern citizens,

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regulate their behaviours, revoke their freedoms, redefine their civic standing and impose violence on them.

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We need to abandon the preoccupation of scholars to imagine a government as only

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a system that registers preferences and distributes uplifting material benefits.

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And here, their analysis of the second face of the state.

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Today I discuss currents or frames, resonances that emerged from the collective narratives that challenge these liberal democratic framings.

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I discuss what I call the state's baptism of youth, making motherhood a contested authority.

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I discuss how they characterise their relationship to government as one marked by distorted responsiveness,

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and they see policing not as an outcome to be explained,

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but as a mechanism where the logic that motivates the state's orientation to its citizens is to

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generate revenue by positioning their communities as profit sources and to keep blacks corralled.

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And they inhabit what I'm calling two distinct constitutions,

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the formal dictates in the rulebook and the real rules that they needed to know to stay alive and navigate police activity.

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Today, we listen. We take the radical step of giving witness without mere spectatorship.

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We test whether our conceptions of democratic life can withstand the glare when held up to the light of race, class, subjugated communities.

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We depart from the Academy's insistence that we only rely on statistical portrayals created by

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those in the free world to represent the ideas and experiences of those in the unfree world.

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Now let me explain how portals works. Since this method is unlike pretty much anything we've seen in the social sciences,

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gold shipping containers with immersive audio visual are placed in areas with high foot traffic and community partners who see it as a benefit.

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Amar Bakshi already had a vast portal network in 15 countries.

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Conversations were taking place all over the world from Erbil, Iraq.

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Herat. Afghanistan. Berlin. Mumbai. Seoul.

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He had them in refugee camps outside of prison and goes in museums and even universities.

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When a person comes inside, they're connected by life size video.

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To a person in a parent city whom they don't know.

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We ask nothing else of them but to tell us briefly about themselves and their policing interactions.

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Then participants engage in a two way 20 minute unscripted conversation with someone else who could be in a different time zone.

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Who could be in a different state. It could be across the world.

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Their conversation is not moderated by a researcher.

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Instead, portal participants are prompted with a single question.

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How do you feel about police in your community?

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This allows exchanges about everything, about policing, but everything else trump, gentrification, immigration.

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This is curators divide and Newark curators divide in Newark and Lewis Lee in Milwaukee.

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After participants leave the dark chamber.

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They jot down their thoughts in the gold book that sits outside each portal, which you see excerpts from here.

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Each of the Portals dialogues is video recorded and transcribed, and I will be drawing on 800 of these transcribed conversations today.

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A key player is the curator, a member of the local community, sometimes unemployed, often who has a history of criminal justice contact.

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Who holds events. Works with other curators in the network. And has pop up initiatives for the benefit of and designed by the community.

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The portal becomes a space for art and performance, a gathering spot for children who have chess tournaments and poetry slams and other initiatives.

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We located the portals in communities that were, broadly speaking, having high rates of police surveillance and interventions.

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Almost half of our portal participants had been stopped over seven times by police in their lives,

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and a large share were stopped in the last week or month alone.

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But they captured a broad swath of America.

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They stretch across policing regimes. Here, I'm just showing you where some of the places that the portals have been located.

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From Milwaukee to Chicago to Newark. Now, we did not put that police car there.

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Baltimore and Los Angeles.

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But importantly, the portals are located in different in cities with different policing regimes and local histories from one reformist regime.

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After a high profile scandal to one in the midst of oversight by the federal government.

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Baltimore after it was caught planting toy guns on people and after it's severed the spinal cord of a late teen.

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To Milwaukee, who just as I boarded the plane to come see you today, have tased the body of a football player,

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Sterling Brown said, setting off revolts in that city within cities.

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We moved the portal to different neighbourhoods with very different local schools and social relations.

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For example, a portal could be eliciting conversations between an upwardly mobile working class Latino student at CSU Dominguez Hills,

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which was founded after the Watts riots to the Imani neighbourhood in Milwaukee,

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the most impoverished and distressed neighbourhood with a poverty rate of 48% in a city that is the most racially segregated in the nation,

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the 532006 zip code, which is where we located the portal, has the highest share of incarcerated black men in America.

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Only 38% had not spent time in a correctional institution in that neighbourhood.

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But another portal sat in an equally impoverished site that was activated.

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Our newest portal site is in Chicago at the Let US Breathe Collective Activist Collective in Chicago,

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which was founded in opposition to police torture at the infamous Homan Square black site where 7000 people disappeared around a single portal.

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There is also dynamism. Even in distressed neighbourhoods, a portal will draw in second generation immigrants, former gang members,

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budding activists, college students, working class people on their way to work sex workers.

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A site may be near an open air drug market, a bus stop, a housing project or halfway house, a homeless encampment and a workers co-op.

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It may draw in, as in L.A. police officers, as well as inmates wearing ankle monitors because they're still under supervision.

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And the dyadic nature of portals comparable conversations invites another source of variation.

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We span generations,

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so conversational pairings can be between an older man in one city and a younger person could be between two Latinos and between L.A. and Chicago.

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It could spanned race and gender and other class statuses.

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Portals also capture and we didn't realise this of the stark differences in political time.

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In other words, we had the Milwaukee portal before, during and after police killing of silversmith.

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So we can literally witness in real time how political discourses are changing during that uprising.

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Today. My approach is not to evaluate a specific hypothesis.

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The approach is interpretive to locate what Kathy Cohen and others have called an oppositional ideology,

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the frameworks that marginal groups use to interpret their political world and assess their positioning.

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So instead of asking people whether they think police are fair or whether they trust police all the time, sometimes or never, what a survey might do.

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Instead, we ask How do they define the limits of the permissible of police and residents?

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Instead of asking, Does having a police encounter cause a particular attitude or behaviour,

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as those analysing surveys might do with some difficulty, we instead listen to hear their causal story of the state in their communities.

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I'll offer four main currents or frames that jumped off the page at us as we were analysing these transcriptions.

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There's far more than I'm going to be able to cover today, and I invite you to ask questions about the method,

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about what we're finding about differences across cities or across generations or across race.

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But for now, these are four of the frames that occurred regardless of place and regardless of generational status, regardless of race.

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Policing in America at least, is a childhood intervention.

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When we think of police practices, we should conjure up an image of a 12 year old or an eight year old.

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The figure before you documents the age distribution of those in our study who had been stopped

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by police most at their first encounter were under the age of 14 and the dosage was strong.

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Many of them would go on to say that they had been stopped five times, six times, seven times.

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This is consistent with other studies,

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one of the largest studies of American children born in 20 U.S. cities in the late 1990s and followed through to their 15th birthday,

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documented that 45% of black boys reported being stopped by police by this young age, compared to 23% of all kids, which is still pretty high.

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The average age of their first police encounter was between 12 and 13.

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The findings of a big black, white gulf were, quote, robust controls for peer and family circumstances.

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I call these early encounters a state baptism.

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They are just early memories the way we would remember our first dance or bar mitzvah or even first loss.

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The emotional force of youth's first experiences of police baptism.

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Supplying a visceral memory of the state's potential for violence.

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The humiliation of being spread eagle up against the hood of a police car for onlookers to see.

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And more broadly, of learning one's place in the political and racial order.

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This memory may confirm communal experiences. The state giving status.

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One woman says, I've been having problems with them since I was 12.

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I will remember this day because it was my first police interaction.

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They ran past us and the police just came and just grabbed me up.

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Me and my cousin up. We like we not with them. We don't even know them.

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And I remember this officer and she names them here real big dude.

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Like, I was scared of [INAUDIBLE]. I was 12 years old. I thought I was going to die.

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She was 18 years old in Milwaukee and went on to describe her biggest fear of being able to take her

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son to the park and take him swimming and not be no police up there because now they are everywhere.

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A young man also in Milwaukee says at a young age, like 12 years old, I experience the police.

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They come into my house looking for one person, but still they feel the need to put a gun to the head of a 12 year old.

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And that's my first time seeing a gun. And it's like, wow, this is what I'm exposed to.

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Like just predetermined by who knows what, but not me being a young person because I just I just hit 19.

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I just finished high school. And I'm trying my best to be a positive influence on my community and really do something big.

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Another young woman says, When I was about 14 and 13, I always been a full figured girl.

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The police would stop me when I was walking outside with my friends at night.

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Are you a prostitute? Ask me questions like that. I'm a 13 year old girl at the time.

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And finally, when I first got locked up, man, and put in a jail cell, I was eight years old.

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I was in second grade. And after that, bro, I was like ten, 11, 12, 13.

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Each one of those years, the police called me. They used to pick me up and drop me off on the other side of the tracks.

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That curse word was a little bit too much to say on on tape.

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I do do it in the US, but I hear that Oxford is a more buttoned up.

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But we've known all of this for some time.

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In his widely cited 1993 article, Lawrence Sherman describes how young minority males were heavily exposed to, quote,

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police disrespect and brutality, both vicariously and in person prior prior to their peak year of first arrest and initial involvements in crime.

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We've known this since our earliest longitudinal studies, cohort studies started interviewing,

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finding that 36% of those in the 1979 cohort stopped by police were stopped at age 15 or younger before the rise of broken windows policing,

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which I'll talk about. And we've known it in virtually every commission since Kerner that found that many of

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the cities went up in flames revolting because of police violence toward a black kid.

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It was thus fitting that Childish Gambino's recent viral video of his This Is America featured police

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violence in the backdrop of black kids dancing in school uniforms to people know Childish Gambino.

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Good. Wasn't sure how that reference would play. The violence of those early encounters are not momentary disruptions.

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The legal scholar Devin Carbonneau, drawing on his own experience, calls it a racial naturalisation,

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where you learn how what it means to be black and how you're positioned.

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More concretely, sociologist Amanda Keller has found high levels of PTSD among children who have a police encounter.

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In another study this time, while Jeff Fagan, children who lived in a high policing zone,

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had their test scores drop and it took a year for them to recover.

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And we're beginning to find out the stops themselves are criminal.

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Jennifer.

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Phil Goff study of New York City policing found among boys who were stopped and had not broken the law were much more likely to later commit a crime.

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Police stops instead of targeting crime growth. Crime prone youth create their own self-fulfilling prophecy.

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So why are black and brown kids having their first encounters with the state at the precious age of eight, nine, ten, 11, 12?

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Perhaps it's because police evaluate black boys as older.

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In fact, Goff also finds that police evaluate the same black boy as being four years older than white young boys,

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and they're only seen as innocent until age 1210.

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But that may be too generous. The state may be commandeering oversight normally entrusted to parents.

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I once sat next to a major criminal justice expert who told me without hesitation or remorse,

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that we policed black communities more heavily than white ones,

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even though drug offending was similar in both places because, quote, We can't trust the parents to handle those kids in black communities.

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Women in the portal often spoke of how the boundaries of maternal authority were encroached on by police.

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They recounted their labours to keep their children safe, wishing they wouldn't age too soon or grow tall.

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The possibility of state violence or target and targeting of their children surrounded them.

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Motherhood became a contested authority, Kim says.

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Anyway, the police have stopped my son twice coming from the train. Tina says, Why?

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Kim says, Because he was walking too fast. Yeah, that was recently.

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That pisses me off. I'm like, What the [INAUDIBLE] you supposed to walk? Slow dragging?

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I don't allow him to wear his pants down and none of that. I cannot let the police dictate to me how to control my household.

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I cannot let the police dictate to me how to how to raise my kids.

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Now they want to tell us we can't put our kids outside. It's too much.

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And another conversation. One woman said, you can't even raise your children properly, you know, with someone else trying to be their dad.

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And at first, this took me a while to figure out she was actually talking about the police.

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I mean, you're not even part of my family. How are you? How are you providing for me?

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It's as though they're as if they're giving us family support. And her interlocutor says, how are you even being supported?

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I can't even get you to come to my neighbourhood if somebody gets shot before our stolen car.

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You can you can do 70 and 80 miles per hour down a one way street and all this all these children playing on it.

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My second argument actually riffs off of that last line.

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It concerns the nature of government.

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Now, democracy is predicated on political equality, on the notion of an equal distance quote of all citizens to government.

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The Democratic ideal, as Robert Dole enunciated,

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was for continued responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens considered as political equals.

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The state must give equal weight to citizens views.

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Political scientists have been keen to document how rising inequality has translated into a government skewed to the rich

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that the preferences of the poor and middle class rarely get translated into policy outcomes decided step toward oligarchy.

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You can hardly round the corner in my discipline without coming across permutations on that argument.

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Inequality is a threat to democracy, goes the refrain to a chorus of studies.

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But a more basic reading of the state's responsiveness goes beyond the preferences policy wonk.

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It's the idea that when citizens need and summon government action from frontline bureaucrats in their neighbourhoods,

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they are responded to and that when they step onto the sidewalk to go to church, work or school, they can claim non-interference by government.

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Scholars of American political development have been better, recognising that the state is more than whether it registers preferences or not.

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They tell us that the American state is submerged, fragmented, delegated out of sight, private and most of all, this is my favourite week.

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This is mostly right. If race, class, subjugated communities stand outside your field of vision,

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it pretty well describes white Americans experience of government who only interact with the government at IRS time or a voting time.

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As Patricia Fernandez Kelley reminds us, in fact. The mark of middle class living is a reduced contact with the public sector.

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This is a highly salutary view of the American state and one that comes under strain

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once we look to the bottom where involvement with government is not the unalloyed good.

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Supposed by liberal framings. One of the most common narratives in portal's conversations is what we call distorted responsiveness.

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Instead of responsive government agents, people experience state agents as both everywhere and nowhere.

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Police authority was most energetic where it did not matter for their lives, busting people for selling loose squares, cigarettes and [INAUDIBLE].

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You call them here or other minor transgressions.

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But withholding and out of reach when they were steady diet and aggressive patrol was yoked with ambivalence.

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This meant participants saw the police as both useless and harmful, and they saw themselves as vulnerable to police on both flanks to abandonment.

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As one person said, they give you time to die and aggressive intervention not being heard,

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not being cared for when you're a victim, not being taken seriously is a form of non responsiveness and disregard by the state.

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It is painful in its own right, but being treated harshly in the company of perceived abandonment is what we mean by distorted responsiveness.

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These framings of the police occurred in the same breath among participants who saw

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the police as they [INAUDIBLE] to those who had a relatively positive view of police.

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A few examples will show what I mean.

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Now, with that being said, when they don't have nothing else to do, they'll go to certain neighbourhoods and just pick at you.

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You know what I'm saying? Now, when you really are needed in that neighbourhood, they might not never come.

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But if you go to places like crimes being committed or committed in Beverly Hills,

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who's naming the rich areas and the western part of L.A., something happened there.

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They immediately are there. And the reason for that is because those neighbourhoods is a very rich, you know what I'm saying?

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And it caters to the rich. A poor man wouldn't have a chance concerning the law in L.A., you know what I'm saying?

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The police where I live at, they just take a long time to get there.

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Like you can call them for anything no matter what it is.

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And they be talking like like they don't got enough force out here to come and help you when you really need them.

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But they be harassing people who ain't got nothing. Absolutely nothing.

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Yeah, they do [INAUDIBLE] when they ready to do it, when it's beneficial to them. They really don't give a [INAUDIBLE] about how you ask.

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I really don't like the police. Like they don't respond fast enough when you really need them.

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They rude as ever. They stop you for no apparent reason at all. Like they just.

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I feel like they do too much. That particular locution comes up a lot.

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Your mission is to serve and protect. But we see you as threats now. Me and my son, we scared to walk down the street.

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We go home. We shut all the doors, let all the blinds down, we go to bed. And finally, a man in Baltimore compares policing to an abusive father.

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That's like when you were a child. Your dad tell you, son, I got your back. Anything happened to you, son?

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I'm here. But instead, your father is the one that's abusing you and beating you.

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Why is you protecting me? You're the one harming me.

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You know what I'm saying? It's the same way with the police and the higher authority here, you know?

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And we go through this every day. I just got pulled over by the police last week, and then he goes on to say, I'm not a felon.

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I have my degree in an attempt at kind of re redefinition.

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And I'll come back to that later with this.

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In view, it seems awkward to theorise uneven democracy,

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unequal democracy as just about once preferences not being heard by officials or political exclusion as my political science colleagues would have it.

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But the dual position of being next, being not heard and crushed on a lark, we tend to think that people want greater connection to government.

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Troves of theses in academia have been penned on how to make that connection tighter,

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how to bring government more full fully into the lives of citizens and citizens voices more fully into the halls of power.

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But live inside these stories for a moment and a theory of the logic of the state and governance that is altogether different emerges.

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Government was vigilant, penetrating Johnny on the spot for slip ups, but oblivious, reticent and unheeded to their victimisation.

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Police get out, they body with it. Their government did too little and too much, which meant that they saw it both as an obstacle and an adversary.

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It was neither a public good that can be had in times of duress or an appropriately

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accountable representative of the state in its capacity to surveil and maim and kill.

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They were suspended between state less and state full.

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Police didn't defend them, but they put the hurt on them.

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Portals participants reasoned that police didn't view them as principles that could direct government action,

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but as subjects were supplicants, distorted responsiveness was their lived experience, and it stems from much the same source.

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People who are easy to abandon are easy to abuse,

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but it was also designed by policy and soon have institutional supports and theoretical justification.

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On the heels of one of our nation's biggest challenges to police power during the resistance of the 1960s,

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a few pages by two academics in a literary magazine would utterly transform the logic of policing in our nation and more,

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more importantly, warrant a vast expansion of state authority into race, class, subjugated communities.

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Under the broken windows theory, policing pivoted sharply toward minor violations of order targeting not serious threats to public safety,

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but rather seeking out the possibility of crime by enforce it, enforcing codes against disordered people and places.

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As a result,

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high volume stops and petty arrests and profligate citations for misdemeanours were weakly correlated social scientists would tell us with crime,

378
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but showed a very strong connection to race,

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poverty and place policing also had a friend in our nation's highest court landmark policing cases like Terry,

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which have encouraged police stops of citizens based on the thinnest of reasons, reasons that can include furtive movements.

381
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They just didn't look right to me at the time or simply being in a high crime area.

382
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It was also bolstered by the hundreds of civil ordinances that invite police to make contact with Americans

383
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for virtually any reason or no reason at all based on the criminalisation of ordinary behaviours.

384
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After all, Michael Brown of Ferguson was violating a manner of walking law, a law making a crime out of the gate of black Americans.

385
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In due course, police training manuals began to take advantage of their new discretion.

386
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One read thus developed suspicion or typically merely curiosity about a driver to discover a legal justification to stop the driver.

387
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Typically, this justification is some minor violation of the traffic laws and make the stop.

388
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Three Decide after making the stop whether to seek to search the vehicle.

389
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Well based on the close observation of the vehicle so and it goes on 7/7 seek bonus benefits,

390
00:42:45,120 --> 00:42:49,380
forfeiture of vehicles, cash information about additional criminal offences.

391
00:42:50,850 --> 00:42:53,910
But on the other side of this expanded discretion,

392
00:42:54,090 --> 00:42:59,219
when you're looking at a map of of New York City where I thought it where police stops were

393
00:42:59,220 --> 00:43:06,690
happening on the other side of this expanded discretion to and is a collapsing of citizen rights

394
00:43:06,690 --> 00:43:12,719
to claim police protection in ruling on a case when police ignored calls for hours by a brown

395
00:43:12,720 --> 00:43:17,430
woman that reported that her spouse had kidnapped four children who ultimately were murdered,

396
00:43:17,700 --> 00:43:25,890
the court ruled in town of Castle Rock the Gonzalez, that not responding to calls for help does not violate the due process clause.

397
00:43:26,550 --> 00:43:32,700
And studies began to show that calls to police from these communities to twice as long to generate a police response.

398
00:43:34,590 --> 00:43:37,649
I'm not the first to talk about over and under policing.

399
00:43:37,650 --> 00:43:43,979
It has echoes elsewhere in writing of the twinned abuse of legal power and the withholding of laws to protect blacks.

400
00:43:43,980 --> 00:43:47,400
Wendy Brown Scott has called this state lawlessness.

401
00:43:48,450 --> 00:43:53,550
Lisa Miller The political scientist describes black as live blacks as living in a failed state.

402
00:43:54,060 --> 00:44:01,770
More recently, the sociologist Monica Bell on why I Keep Looking at you when I say sociologist has theorised it as legal estrangement,

403
00:44:01,770 --> 00:44:08,760
describing race, class subjugated communities as quote, essentially stateless, unprotected by the law and its enforcers.

404
00:44:09,060 --> 00:44:18,630
And long before her, James Baldwin said that the police certainly do not protect the lives or property of Negroes in fear of police in 1964.

405
00:44:19,230 --> 00:44:25,020
But I think stateless isn't exactly right. Stateless implies an absence of the state.

406
00:44:25,590 --> 00:44:27,809
Instead, I think it's more akin to the term.

407
00:44:27,810 --> 00:44:37,860
Political scientist Rob McKee uses authoritarian enclaves, areas within a federal polity that are marked by the absence of free assembly,

408
00:44:38,130 --> 00:44:47,280
association and speech, distorted responsiveness and the broken windows theory of policing had a result that few have noticed.

409
00:44:51,950 --> 00:44:55,490
The wide berth given to police to ask people where they were going,

410
00:44:55,700 --> 00:45:03,440
etc. began to register in a rising share of Americans having contact with criminal justice who were innocent.

411
00:45:04,040 --> 00:45:11,120
Criminal justice scholars have well documented the rising exposure to criminal justice interventions of all sorts in the United States.

412
00:45:11,360 --> 00:45:19,700
Terms like mass incarceration, which was once controversial as I started out as a young grad student, are now the term of choice.

413
00:45:21,700 --> 00:45:25,900
Books abound with titles like Misdemeanour Land Governing Through Crime.

414
00:45:26,920 --> 00:45:36,580
But what actually happened over time was not only an expansion in exposure to the state's coercive apparatus, but what I'm going to call a decoupling.

415
00:45:37,360 --> 00:45:45,820
Imagine a two by two like this. One side is having run afoul of the law and the other is having an involuntary contact with police.

416
00:45:46,330 --> 00:45:52,380
Yes or no on either side of those? We examined my colleague Andy Proffer, Christos and I,

417
00:45:52,390 --> 00:45:57,790
a longitudinal survey of youth and found that exposure to arrest is conditioned

418
00:45:57,790 --> 00:46:03,850
less on patterns of behaviour and criminality than in prior generations.

419
00:46:05,260 --> 00:46:09,129
You're looking and so we're theorising that what happened over time, right?

420
00:46:09,130 --> 00:46:14,410
You would want for a good criminal justice system for most people to fall in the shade diagonals.

421
00:46:14,410 --> 00:46:17,680
And that's exactly where they fell in the late seventies.

422
00:46:18,070 --> 00:46:23,500
Over time, what happened was this people moved to the off diagonals.

423
00:46:26,790 --> 00:46:29,850
You're looking at predicted. Oh, this is very light.

424
00:46:30,240 --> 00:46:36,780
You're looking at predicted probabilities of arrest for different levels of criminal offending.

425
00:46:37,620 --> 00:46:43,769
And what you can see is that our system slipped from one where criminal justice involvement was a relatively good

426
00:46:43,770 --> 00:46:52,740
proxy for offending to one where a bigger share of Americans were located in the quadrant that we call arrest,

427
00:46:53,400 --> 00:47:00,240
no crime. And this transformation further in the relationship between criminal offending

428
00:47:00,240 --> 00:47:06,090
and criminal justice contact changed dramatically in just one generation.

429
00:47:06,750 --> 00:47:15,510
For example, committing few to no crimes. In 1979, one has close to a 0% probability of arrest in 1979.

430
00:47:16,680 --> 00:47:20,100
In 22, it is a 20% probability.

431
00:47:22,110 --> 00:47:28,080
And when you look at it by race, there's no difference for blacks and whites in the 79 cohort.

432
00:47:28,770 --> 00:47:40,170
But this is what happens by the 22 cohort. Blacks pull away and for every level of criminality are much more likely to experience an arrest.

433
00:47:41,280 --> 00:47:50,220
So think about that for a second. My child has a much higher risk of arrest than I did just by dint of when I happened to be born.

434
00:47:50,850 --> 00:47:57,990
And my child has an even higher risk because he's black and male and this relationship became racially inflected over time.

435
00:48:00,060 --> 00:48:07,830
Blacks had a much higher probability of arrest than both blacks of prior generations and whites of the same generation.

436
00:48:08,160 --> 00:48:18,300
That's new, and we rarely talk about it. The logic of policing flows easily from the nature of policing and government.

437
00:48:19,050 --> 00:48:23,790
Academic and legal scholarship has mostly taken as its starting point that policing

438
00:48:24,150 --> 00:48:29,700
is an outcome to be explained or merely described what predicts police violence,

439
00:48:29,700 --> 00:48:36,150
what share of police encounters are unconstitutional, how police stops are correlated with social context and so on.

440
00:48:36,720 --> 00:48:39,240
These are important, to be sure, and a natural starting point,

441
00:48:39,240 --> 00:48:44,370
given that some of these academic disciplines are more focussed on interpersonal violence than state violence,

442
00:48:44,760 --> 00:48:52,319
more on social relations than state citizen relations, and more attuned to bureaucratic procedure than state power.

443
00:48:52,320 --> 00:49:01,320
But positioned as an outcome, we deny its ability to be a crucial input to political life, racial order and lived citizenship.

444
00:49:02,550 --> 00:49:08,610
Portals. Testimonies, I would argue, demand that we also conceive of policing as a mechanism.

445
00:49:09,210 --> 00:49:12,780
Its stated function was to control crime and ensure safety of the public.

446
00:49:13,110 --> 00:49:16,500
But most saw it as a means to achieve something else.

447
00:49:17,070 --> 00:49:21,930
Narratives conceive of police as loyal foot soldiers of a racialised state.

448
00:49:22,710 --> 00:49:24,900
Gentrification projects in their cities.

449
00:49:25,260 --> 00:49:33,810
Of racial capitalism, of keeping them poor and others rich and as central to the reproduction of violence and control against blacks.

450
00:49:34,920 --> 00:49:40,050
The state had broad warrants to approach them, demand from them, police them, assault them.

451
00:49:40,410 --> 00:49:46,590
And this was easily accomplished because the point was not public safety but control of groups and resources.

452
00:49:47,820 --> 00:49:53,820
This logic was especially pronounced in conversations where people described being positioned

453
00:49:54,090 --> 00:49:59,400
as potential profit sources and the redistribution of resources away from their communities.

454
00:49:59,850 --> 00:50:03,330
Participants commonly articulated how the system made money off of them,

455
00:50:03,690 --> 00:50:10,860
that their communities endured disproportionate taxation and financial drain, and how their limited resources were often seized.

456
00:50:11,250 --> 00:50:15,160
Phrases like We're nothing but a check by them. They they lock people up to make money.

457
00:50:15,180 --> 00:50:18,690
Jailing is big business here, and we're cheaper to imprison than educate.

458
00:50:19,050 --> 00:50:24,000
Littered the conversation. Many dialogues describe the system as functioning,

459
00:50:24,000 --> 00:50:30,480
primarily to generate profits and revenue that flowed out of their communities and into the coffers of government agencies.

460
00:50:30,750 --> 00:50:34,230
But the costs they paid were no investment in their communities.

461
00:50:34,260 --> 00:50:38,160
Let me give you a sense of some of these framings.

462
00:50:43,980 --> 00:50:49,440
You black man. And you, young. They don't care about you, you dig? They want to keep you behind the walls so they can get paid.

463
00:50:49,770 --> 00:50:54,809
So they get paid from you. Good money, man, you know, good money. That's how they sending their kids to college and all that stuff.

464
00:50:54,810 --> 00:50:58,320
Man buying houses and Mercedes Benz, you know, see, we can't have that.

465
00:50:58,320 --> 00:51:01,890
They don't want us to have have it. So they kill us. They kill up all our blacks.

466
00:51:04,470 --> 00:51:09,750
Financial extraction of the poor has become central to many municipal budgets.

467
00:51:10,440 --> 00:51:19,980
Ferguson generated an average of three arrest warrants per household and fees enough to support one fifth of the municipal municipal budget.

468
00:51:20,670 --> 00:51:27,060
Beyond policing, most jail systems charge their wards user fees for room and board,

469
00:51:27,450 --> 00:51:32,640
and then not paying these fees becomes justification for a revocation of parole or probation.

470
00:51:33,090 --> 00:51:37,650
And in some states, one is ineligible to vote until the fees are paid,

471
00:51:38,340 --> 00:51:45,000
leading to large swaths of black men who can't cast a ballot, who are no longer under supervision.

472
00:51:46,260 --> 00:51:48,660
I'm talking about the fact that when a man is sent to prison,

473
00:51:48,960 --> 00:51:55,920
he is considered voluntarily unemployed and must continue to make child support payments or have the debt accrue.

474
00:51:56,520 --> 00:52:03,959
I'm talking about the fact that the average black man leaves prison $17,000 in debt, and that's the same.

475
00:52:03,960 --> 00:52:06,660
Oh, you can't even see it. $17,000 in debt.

476
00:52:08,490 --> 00:52:15,210
In other words, the system is not only characterised by expanded oversight across a dizzying array of institutions,

477
00:52:15,570 --> 00:52:20,550
but by financial seizure of the assets of justice involved families.

478
00:52:21,300 --> 00:52:25,560
We don't even know how extensive these are or what the cumulative extraction or

479
00:52:25,560 --> 00:52:34,500
redistribution from poor families to the state is more evidence that we have mis specified.

480
00:52:34,500 --> 00:52:40,050
The American state comes in exploring the political knowledge of race, class, subjugated communities.

481
00:52:41,160 --> 00:52:48,030
Now, for most Americans, there's one political system, one legal system, one set of rules to abide,

482
00:52:48,690 --> 00:52:55,650
and they need only concern themselves with basic, widely accepted understandings of the law, the formal law as written.

483
00:52:56,520 --> 00:53:05,820
Even then, political scientists show that the average citizen is pretty ill informed about politics and government and pays little attention to it.

484
00:53:06,300 --> 00:53:13,140
Scholars bemoan the lack of citizen competence, saying that they lack political knowledge necessary to form preferences.

485
00:53:13,140 --> 00:53:19,290
Political preferences. The public, it could be said, has too little knowledge and too much power.

486
00:53:20,400 --> 00:53:26,190
But in race, class, subjugated communities, the political world is not some distant or abstract picture.

487
00:53:26,460 --> 00:53:30,570
Formed in grade school by reciting the Bill of Rights of the American Constitution.

488
00:53:30,960 --> 00:53:34,230
It's a vivid image borne of experience.

489
00:53:35,190 --> 00:53:43,050
Portals exchanges show that people had extraordinary stores of political knowledge and sophisticated theories of power and local democracy.

490
00:53:43,440 --> 00:53:46,890
They exhibited high level reasoning about state actions and their meaning.

491
00:53:47,400 --> 00:53:53,640
They didn't have to imagine the political world. They could simply recall it from the last time they were in handcuffs.

492
00:53:55,080 --> 00:53:58,530
But political knowledge was inherently contradictory.

493
00:53:58,890 --> 00:54:02,430
I imagine them walking around with two sets of constitutions in their head.

494
00:54:02,430 --> 00:54:08,640
Always one. That was the official the law on the books, the law in the land, and one that was for them.

495
00:54:09,300 --> 00:54:13,200
What my co-author, Tracing Years has termed the hidden curriculum.

496
00:54:13,950 --> 00:54:20,250
The official law said that they had Miranda rights, couldn't be arbitrarily beaten or killed by the state,

497
00:54:20,670 --> 00:54:25,320
told them that they would be tried by a jury of their peers and that they were equal before the law.

498
00:54:26,160 --> 00:54:33,660
They knew that was somebody's reality in America, but the unofficial constitution was what they actually lived by,

499
00:54:34,470 --> 00:54:42,780
that they would never see a jury of their peers that riding in your car for deep constituted probable cause to be stopped and searched and handcuffed.

500
00:54:43,110 --> 00:54:47,940
The police shoot first and ask questions later that if they had money they could get better adjudication,

501
00:54:48,210 --> 00:54:53,460
that certain mundane behaviours were forbidden, like not having your ID on you at all times.

502
00:54:54,660 --> 00:54:58,750
It may be written policy, one said, but that it may not be written policy.

503
00:54:58,770 --> 00:55:07,920
But that's what they do. Many remarked things like But let a brother do that and then would go on to say what would befall them.

504
00:55:08,730 --> 00:55:16,320
At the same time as they held these two contradictory sets of rules, they patently knew that there was no mechanism of redress.

505
00:55:16,680 --> 00:55:19,350
Another layer of distorted responsiveness.

506
00:55:19,890 --> 00:55:26,430
One says, In all black communities, you find the same policing issues where officers come in and they treat our neighbourhood,

507
00:55:26,670 --> 00:55:32,850
our communities as an armed camp, where they can come in and storm troop, do whatever they want to do because nobody is able to complain.

508
00:55:33,240 --> 00:55:36,360
And if you complain, there's no one there to listen to you.

509
00:55:36,840 --> 00:55:40,530
Many times people simply walk away from the matter and take the abuse and move on.

510
00:55:41,160 --> 00:55:46,530
We're above the law. You're our subjects. And we can do whatever we want to do, whatever we want to do with you.

511
00:55:48,780 --> 00:55:54,030
They had, I would argue, too much knowledge and too little power.

512
00:55:55,260 --> 00:56:00,720
In the conversations we see, both engaging the state was like playing an elaborate board game,

513
00:56:01,020 --> 00:56:06,670
but we're officials not only cheat or deviate from the rule. Occasionally they operated by a separate rulebook.

514
00:56:07,220 --> 00:56:11,360
Justice, they quipped to me, means just for us.

515
00:56:12,410 --> 00:56:17,660
They saw the state constantly as both what it did and what it actually was capable of.

516
00:56:18,200 --> 00:56:28,489
Contradictory, yes, but also essential. I was reading and found that F Scott Fitzgerald famously called intelligence, quote,

517
00:56:28,490 --> 00:56:37,880
The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

518
00:56:39,990 --> 00:56:45,630
Race class, subjugated communities have this knowledge in order to function,

519
00:56:46,350 --> 00:56:53,790
and the utility of such knowledge was not in order to obtain a tighter link between what the State does and your preferences.

520
00:56:54,240 --> 00:57:02,400
It's to have relief from state intrusion. Failing to know it, to know the hidden curriculum could be the difference between life and death.

521
00:57:03,120 --> 00:57:09,330
Because of this, some communities, I would argue, could be said to have extraordinarily developed citizen competence.

522
00:57:10,020 --> 00:57:15,660
But this knowledge was not liberating. It was labour. It meant looking through the eyes of others.

523
00:57:15,690 --> 00:57:22,350
What W.E.B. Dubois called double consciousness, except that it was through the eyes of state authorities.

524
00:57:22,890 --> 00:57:30,690
And it meant that one had to assimilate into what the state demanded a whole different program than what was expected of other Americans.

525
00:57:31,020 --> 00:57:35,340
Citizenship was a matter of navigating this fact on a constant basis.

526
00:57:36,150 --> 00:57:41,490
In this way, police were acting as messengers for the doubled up rules of a racialized class system.

527
00:57:41,820 --> 00:57:47,370
Teaching people what to wear and how to comport themselves, which spaces to avoid, and what actions were forbidden.

528
00:57:48,420 --> 00:57:52,110
As the legal scholar Bennett Capers argues, these performances become, quote,

529
00:57:52,110 --> 00:57:59,340
analogous to a trial where people must take the stand to demonstrate innocence before stepping foot in a court.

530
00:58:03,120 --> 00:58:14,010
In my remaining 2 minutes of time, I wanted to talk briefly about the responses to state action that we see in these dialogues.

531
00:58:15,870 --> 00:58:21,660
As I've said before, criminal justice encounters are productive in shaping political responses to the state.

532
00:58:22,710 --> 00:58:29,820
But one response in particular is alarming in a democracy predicated on free speech and association.

533
00:58:30,360 --> 00:58:39,060
And that is what I'm calling retreat. In many of the conversations, regardless of city, regardless of gender,

534
00:58:39,930 --> 00:58:47,880
what people said again and again and again is I try to say to myself, given the rights and rituals of police encounters.

535
00:58:48,240 --> 00:58:51,540
I'm just going to lay low. I'm going to stay below the radar.

536
00:58:51,600 --> 00:58:58,259
You can read some of that here. So one says, I'm doing what I'm doing out here in the streets of Chicago.

537
00:58:58,260 --> 00:59:03,420
Little Bro is saying to myself, minding my own business and doing what I got to do to survive in the streets as a black man.

538
00:59:04,320 --> 00:59:12,570
This woman recounts a police experience being asked for ID and she doesn't have her I.D. and she says, That's why I don't even hang out no more.

539
00:59:12,870 --> 00:59:16,050
There's no point in hanging out. I stay in my house every day.

540
00:59:17,400 --> 00:59:22,440
That was the first response. But the second response was something I'm calling redefinition.

541
00:59:24,360 --> 00:59:34,200
A major anchor in the conversations was how people perceived authorities and the media depicting them and parading them as thugs disordered,

542
00:59:34,500 --> 00:59:36,090
destructive and wild.

543
00:59:36,750 --> 00:59:44,940
Some even said media was more violent than police because it enabled police actions so viewed instead of being principles and rights,

544
00:59:44,940 --> 00:59:56,129
fearing they were problems. They often recounted this how they were seen by others and how they really were, how their communities really were.

545
00:59:56,130 --> 00:59:59,040
God loving people walked their children to school.

546
01:00:02,670 --> 01:00:08,760
They followed with a significant attempt to shift and correct the portrayals and recapture a positive image.

547
01:00:08,760 --> 01:00:18,690
But not just that they wanted to redirect blame. Recall the image I began with of, you know, the rough ride.

548
01:00:19,320 --> 01:00:23,790
And the bottom says The whole damn system who's guilty, the whole damn system.

549
01:00:24,930 --> 01:00:29,040
That was an effort to of redefinition and redirection of blame.

550
01:00:31,400 --> 01:00:37,070
One person says, you do have those individuals who look at us and look at the news and say their animals, look at them, how they behave.

551
01:00:37,070 --> 01:00:40,160
They're obscene individuals. They don't know me. I've went to school.

552
01:00:40,160 --> 01:00:43,160
I have my degree and I cherish my job. I love working with children.

553
01:00:43,460 --> 01:00:44,690
I love working in the community.

554
01:00:44,690 --> 01:00:49,880
I think at the end of the day, I'm still going to be that one third of a human being because of what society and what the history has written on.

555
01:00:52,200 --> 01:00:57,260
And this is my favourite. She says, When you ask for my I.D.,

556
01:00:58,590 --> 01:01:05,250
can I see your badge that says You ain't beat a [INAUDIBLE] in the last couple of days or the last couple of months?

557
01:01:05,280 --> 01:01:07,680
Redefinition redraw direction of blame.

558
01:01:11,190 --> 01:01:19,460
Audre Lorde once asked, How does a system bent upon our ultimate destruction make the unacceptable gradually tolerable?

559
01:01:20,460 --> 01:01:27,300
A necessary step, I would think, is to misidentify what a group experiences as fundamentally democratic,

560
01:01:27,990 --> 01:01:34,260
even as black people tell you otherwise, even as you enjoy the art of childish Gambino's this is America.

561
01:01:34,980 --> 01:01:40,320
Even though I've spent my time here with you today emphasising modes of state action from bottom up perspective,

562
01:01:40,680 --> 01:01:45,570
distorted responsiveness, custodial socialisation that flows from it, and hidden curriculum.

563
01:01:46,020 --> 01:01:49,620
These potent new story lines borrow from the past.

564
01:01:50,340 --> 01:01:57,570
The country that is black has been in theorising the American state in their sermons, memoirs, reporting and poetry.

565
01:01:58,020 --> 01:02:03,900
But those who grew up on Teach Marshall I'm not just picking picking on him because he's British.

566
01:02:04,920 --> 01:02:10,560
Robert Doyle and others saw everywhere pluralism and political equality.

567
01:02:11,310 --> 01:02:17,160
They seemed to discover threats to democracy that were the state of play in race, class, subjugated communities.

568
01:02:17,610 --> 01:02:21,630
Those of us who grew up on Dubois and Baldwin and Malcolm X knew better.

569
01:02:22,140 --> 01:02:27,990
Black intellectual traditions have been contesting and reframing this view of America for at least a century.

570
01:02:29,730 --> 01:02:34,379
I hope to unsettle framings of American democracy and inequality and to show from

571
01:02:34,380 --> 01:02:39,690
portals that we have a distorted portrait of democracy and governance in America.

572
01:02:40,170 --> 01:02:45,000
These narratives unsettle framings that we've long held to be true.

573
01:02:45,630 --> 01:02:55,680
Marginalisation or unequal citizenship is not simply a story of inequality differently concentrated in communities,

574
01:02:56,100 --> 01:03:05,520
the distance between the haves and the have nots. Instead, I argue that it's a broad difference in the way the government,

575
01:03:05,520 --> 01:03:14,310
from schools to halfway houses to the welfare system and especially the police, orients itself towards its residents.

576
01:03:15,090 --> 01:03:21,870
It's not only that people in communities like the low end in Milwaukee are exposed to a different set of material deficits,

577
01:03:21,870 --> 01:03:24,780
concentrated in particular spaces that make them vulnerable.

578
01:03:25,200 --> 01:03:31,080
People in these locales experienced distorted responsiveness from the state's most present authority,

579
01:03:31,740 --> 01:03:38,610
seeing protection as a hoax and reprisals by police as a mainstay of life and innocence as no protection.

580
01:03:39,030 --> 01:03:46,950
They needed to thread a tight needle where matters of government were concern, developing extraordinary stores of political knowledge.

581
01:03:48,090 --> 01:03:57,270
I also, in embarking in this portals project, wanted to upend the conventional doctrinaire approaches in my field by creating a

582
01:03:57,270 --> 01:04:02,400
digital physical meeting space and learn about each other through the news media,

583
01:04:02,760 --> 01:04:06,840
a medium that more often exacerbates our stereotypes of distant communities.

584
01:04:07,320 --> 01:04:13,950
Or we can learn from each other through interaction. We can try to understand what Ferguson meant to its residents and beyond by asking

585
01:04:13,950 --> 01:04:17,340
people neat dichotomous survey items on whether they disagree with this or that.

586
01:04:17,820 --> 01:04:22,559
Or we can actually hear people describe their own ideas and dreams for reform

587
01:04:22,560 --> 01:04:26,940
and see what policing is to the eyes of those who have firsthand experience.

588
01:04:27,540 --> 01:04:34,770
We can try to promote understanding and accountability between police and residents for mandating new codes of conduct, new trainings, body cameras.

589
01:04:35,070 --> 01:04:40,110
But we can also promote understanding by coming to know the communities so policed.

590
01:04:43,330 --> 01:04:47,750
We can disengage, feeling the politics of our time or a futile endeavour.

591
01:04:47,770 --> 01:04:51,909
Or we can build a space where people and groups across cities can employ their

592
01:04:51,910 --> 01:04:56,830
local wisdom to strengthen intra and international black and brown liberation.

593
01:04:57,820 --> 01:05:03,820
Midway through our data collection, something interesting occurred that wasn't part of the plan.

594
01:05:04,780 --> 01:05:10,990
The portal had become a spark. In Milwaukee, the portal had ignited bottom led projects.

595
01:05:11,380 --> 01:05:17,860
The rival gangs in the neighbourhood dropped their colours and had formed a single group to keep the area the area safe.

596
01:05:18,610 --> 01:05:27,610
A new neighbourhood council was formed. The district attorney, the local sheriff and the alderman were all regularly making visits to the portal,

597
01:05:28,090 --> 01:05:31,480
an area they had rarely come to or even noticed before.

598
01:05:32,140 --> 01:05:36,850
It had become a rallying point for groups in the community, even those that normally opposed each other.

599
01:05:37,240 --> 01:05:40,330
Police officers and the police people began to say.

600
01:05:40,570 --> 01:05:44,950
Our portal and community led projects were happening every day.

601
01:05:45,580 --> 01:05:54,460
They lobbied the city government to get it to remain. They used the portal to reclaim space that had been in severe decline and devastation.

602
01:05:54,790 --> 01:06:01,750
And when the portal had to go to another place on its journey, they took over an abandoned building, rehabbed it and brought it back.

603
01:06:02,530 --> 01:06:05,710
Alongside political action around silversmiths, murder.

604
01:06:05,740 --> 01:06:09,190
Something felt different to Lewis Lee, our curator there.

605
01:06:09,520 --> 01:06:13,180
He said, This portal has changed my community. Violence had ebbed.

606
01:06:14,140 --> 01:06:17,230
Local officials were visiting. Who never passed through.

607
01:06:17,230 --> 01:06:21,370
The community pulsed with a new sense of opportunity and connectedness.

608
01:06:21,370 --> 01:06:24,640
Kids without passports were travelling to distant places.

609
01:06:25,090 --> 01:06:32,260
Residents explored their neighbourhoods. Mass loss of men to gun violence, police violence and incarceration with Tutsis.

610
01:06:32,860 --> 01:06:41,890
Speaking about their mass loss during the genocidal state campaigns in Kigali, Rwanda, they were creating a rap album in 15 different cities.

611
01:06:42,370 --> 01:06:46,110
The portal wasn't just a medium for listening, as we had originally thought.

612
01:06:46,120 --> 01:06:53,890
It had become a platform to build power, to collaborate, to transform the status quo, and to enact the redefine redefinition.

613
01:06:54,370 --> 01:06:59,290
I just spoke about an unlocking of agency through trauma,

614
01:06:59,830 --> 01:07:04,630
and it had done all of this in an area that was not only some suffering government disinvestment,

615
01:07:04,930 --> 01:07:13,330
but where no Black Lives Matter chapters had opened up because the civic power of the poor here was low, even in comparison to other neighbourhoods.

616
01:07:13,780 --> 01:07:21,040
It had become a global clubhouse. Portals participants talk about wanting voice.

617
01:07:22,390 --> 01:07:28,480
When the man I began with spoke about bail as a ransom, his partner asked,

618
01:07:28,480 --> 01:07:31,840
What would you like to see changed with the interaction with the police department?

619
01:07:32,320 --> 01:07:36,430
He said, That's a tough one. I would want them to try to give.

620
01:07:37,180 --> 01:07:44,380
Instead of just believing everything that the police say. Give people a chance to be heard because we live this.

621
01:07:45,130 --> 01:07:49,420
What if we hurt American citizens this time? Thank you very much.

622
01:08:04,860 --> 01:08:06,260
I love your question. Oh.