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