Special Issue: Policing and Minority Communities

The first criminal justice topic I became interested in was police. As a high school student, I read all of Joseph Wambaugh’s novels, which invariably featured a “what it’s like on the inside” perspective on the police subculture. I interviewed detectives for a high school project, and planned on following my oldest brother into police work myself. My career goals changed, but I still began graduate school in Penn State’s sociology program interested in the occupational sociology of police, prison guards, and other criminal justice actors. I devoured policing classics such as Jerome Skolnick’s (1966) Justice Without Trial, Arthur Niederhoffer’s (Niederhoffer, 1967) Behind the Shield, Jonathan Rubenstein’s (1973) City Police, and of course Egon Bittner’s (1967) “The Police on Skid Row.” I did my master’s thesis on prison guard cynicism, using a version of Niederhoffer’s (1967) police cynicism scale adapted for corrections officers.

As it turns out, since my student days I never have done any empirical research on policing, pursuing instead studies of courts, sentencing, corrections, and criminal behavior itself. But in studying things like racial disparities in punishment, for example, I have always been acutely aware of the selection processes by which defendants enter the court system. Those selection processes start with police, and racial/ethnic disparities in criminal justice outcomes are born in the police-minority community relationship.

There is a well-recognized societal dilemma of policing. We need police: policing serves essential functions of community safety and order, crime control and prevention, response to citizen needs, and first response in emergencies and disasters. Yet American police have had troubled relations with minority communities—especially African American communities—for most of US history. From enforcing runaway slave laws and serving as foot soldiers of Jim Crow oppression in the South, to less open but often just as harsh brutality and discrimination in the twentieth century Northern and Western U.S. (Campbell & Schoenfeld, 2013; Muller, 2012; Ward, 2012), to high profile police killings of black men today, American police have often been the face of racialized criminal justice. Thus, an essential American institution has also often been a racialized institution (Bonilla-Silva, 2014). I do not think it is an exaggeration to speak of a contemporary crisis of legitimacy for the criminal justice system in the eyes of many minority communities, especially African Americans.

This issue features seven articles that further our understanding of this dilemma of policing. The articles range from the theoretical to the experimental. Two articles focus on police, race, and procedural justice (Nix, Pickett, Wolfe, and Campbell; and Johnson, Wilson, Maguire, and Lowrey). Weitzer’s article places the events surrounding the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO in theoretical and temporal context. Two articles delve into traditional police culture, role perceptions, and cynicism in connection with officer and citizen race (Silver, Roche, Bilach, Bontrager Ryon; and Gau and Paoline III). Dabney, Teasdale, Ishoy and Gann demonstrate the role of Hip Hop Cultural appearance and demeanor in triggering different police decision paths, while Kearns explains variation in officer support for community policing among minorities.

Police are vital to social order, yet police have power and discretion over law and life—power and discretion that can save or oppress. These seven articles help us better understand this perennial dilemma as it manifests in contemporary policing in minority communities.

Jeffery T. Ulmer
Department of Sociology and Criminology, Penn State University
[email protected]