Fear City, Cop City and Other Tales, a Call for Police Research

Abstract

It has been noted that crime and enforcement are likely a defining part of an evolving leisure experience. The aims of this manuscript were to call for research to focus on this phenomenon of the shooting and killing of people, particularly Black citizenry, by law enforcement. State sanctioned violence has been consistently wrought in leisure spaces and settings since those 2014–2015 deaths that were noted previously in the Leisure Sciences article, “The Case of the 12-year-old Boy: Or, the Silence of and Relevance to Leisure Research”. An understanding of policing, not police officers, and an understanding of society, not social behavior are the needs in the research of a legitimate phenomenon that occurs within the space, time, and activities of leisure, sport, and tourism.

Keywords:

• Abolition
• community control
• defund
• police
• policing
• state-sanctioned violence

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Correction

Introduction

The intention of this manuscript is to spark concern and interest in making policing a focus of study in research, and by doing so, aiding the field to think further and deeper about the role and function of police in society, here specifically within leisure contexts. While material and structural changes must occur, it is argued within this call for research that it is the very lack of a body of knowledge that is paramount in any role as an academic. While some may see their role as scholar-activist, the oldest role that academia has played in any just material change has been as knowledge provider to the most able and on-the-ground who are waging the type of struggles against oppressive regimes, their ever-evolving and efficient systems to surveil, and their instruments of death-dealing within supposed life-affirming locations of leisure, recreation, sport, or tourism. As Pendleton (2000) warned leisure researchers and practitioners, “as the Millennium approaches it seems possible that crime and enforcement may become a defining part of an evolving leisure experience” (p. 111).

While Black citizenry in the United States only account for 13% of the total populations, they are 3 times more likely to meet a fatal end to encounter with law enforcement (Lett et al., 2021). Only indigenous populations in the U.S. have a higher rate, far worse likelihood of death, and over total of death disproportionate to their overall population than Black citizens (Lett et al., 2021). While data is lacking, these totals do not account for the numbers (estimates are a little over 1500 people per year) of non-fatal shootings or deaths by other means (everything from being ran over by a police car, police car chase collision, asphyxiation in a police transport vehicle, falling out of moving police car while handcuffed, neglect in a holding cell, or heart attack from a sudden arrest/questioning/appearance) (Fryer, 2019). Death, injury, and trauma are but by-products of a State-apparatus of surveillance and social control that appears to manifest quite acutely in leisure settings (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. A U.S. Park service police officer takes video of spectators observing an incident in which the USPP had kettled a group of people at 12th and L NW in Washington, D.C., on inauguration day. The USPP officer has his back to the kettled in this photo, 2017. (Mobilus in mobili, Wiki Commons).

With the advent of the camera phone and the 2008 inauguration of the 44^th President Barack Obama, the killing of 22-year-old Oscar Grant after New Year’s Eve revelries pulled from a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train, handcuffed, and shot in the back while down on the ground on January 1, 2009 is reflected upon as a turning point or conjuncture in the heightened awareness of these deaths. While the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice who was shot in the Cudell Commons public park, near the municipal recreation center of the same name during afterschool programming on November 22, 2014 represented what should have been a signal to leisure researchers and parks and recreation practitioners that spaces of leisure are not free of these incidents. 2020 ushered what was to be a reckoning. Calls for reform that resulted in “police diversity training, the hiring of officers of color, police body cameras, oversight, accountability, community policing, police-community approximation, police education” merely exacerbated “the number of people under state surveillance and control” and increased the number of people who have lost their life to premature death (Seigel, 2018b, pp. 17–18). Lethality is most assuredly linked to any system that employs surveillance technologies. In leisure settings specifically, the surveilled death of Grant and Rice were joined by,

36-year-old Miguel Espinal in Tibbetts Brook Park in the Bronx (Fenton & Cohen, 2015) and 29-year-old Jason Moland in Beyer Park in Modesto, CA (Recede, 2015) by law enforcement officers…Choking death of 39-year-old Jonathan Sanders after being detained while driving a horse drawn buggy (exercising the horse) in Clarke County, Mississippi (Swaine, 2015); 3) Death of 26-year-old Jordan Baker was apparently simply riding a bike and window shopping in Houston, TX; 4) Death of 20-year-old D’Andre Berghardt Jr. at hands of the Bureau of Land Management agents after he asked several passerby’s for water near Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area (Goldtsein, 2014); and lastly, 5) Death of 22-year-old Darren Nathaniel Hunt while engaged in Anime Cosplay with a toy sword (Hathaway, 2014). (Mowatt, 2018, p. 61)

In addition, whether as African Americans, African immigrants, African tourists, Africans as American citizens, Caribbean Americans, or any other socio-political ethnic identity of the greater African diaspora, and whether as Black men, Black women, Black queer, Black trans, Black gender nonconforming individuals or any other socio-political sexual identity, Black people’s rate of death by the hands of the police is only out-matched by death of Indigenous populations within the United States by law enforcement (Smith, 2017). As an extended accounting, the deaths of: 47-year-old Albert Lee Hughes of Lawrence, Georgia on January 16, 2020 as he was drinking a beer at a Wendy’s; 17-year-old Alvin Cole of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin on February 2, 2020 while at the mall; 27-year-old Barry Gedeus of Fort Lauderdale, Florida on March 8, 2020 as he was riding his bike; 24-year-old Shaun Fuhr of Seattle, Washington on April 29, 2020 as he was holding his 1-year-old; 69-year-old Wilbon Woodard of Tallahassee, Florida on May 19, 2020 outside of a Chinese buffet.

While Winter and Spring brought an onslaught to our senses with the deaths listed above, the Summer 2020 brought no reprieve for the racially surveilled who lost their life to law enforcement. While many of us thought a change was on a horizon based on the rhetoric within intellectual circles and punditry in news outlets. The list of the dead continued to add more names to its roster with: 53-year-old David McAtee of Louisville, Kentucky on June 1, 2020 cooking food as a vender during protests in Louisville; 61-year-old Chester Jenkins of Stockton, California in July 23, 2020 at a Days Inn Hotel; 31-year-old Trayford Pellerin of Lafayette, Louisiana in August 21, 2020 in a Circle K parking lot; 25-year-old Naytasia Williams of Indianapolis, Indiana on August 28, 2020 sitting in her car listening to music; 42-year-old Kurt Reinhold of San Clemente, California on September 23, 2020 on suspicion of jaywalking; 19-year-old Marcellis Stinette of Waukegan, Illinois on October 20, 2020 on a date with his girlfriend, Tafarra Williams, who also sustained wounds from the same shooting; 25-year-old Reginald Alexander of El Centro, Texas on November 5, 2020 outside of a 7-Eleven; and 23-year-old Casey Christopher Godson of Columbus, Ohio on December 4, 2020 while returning home with a sandwich, highlight just some of the ways that state sanctioned violence has been consistently wrought in leisure spaces and settings since those 2014–2015 deaths that were noted previously in the Leisure Sciences article, “The Case of the 12-year-old Boy: Or, the Silence of and Relevance to Leisure Research” (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Memorial for Tamir Rice at the North lawn of the Stony Island arts Bank, 6760 South Stony Island Ave., Chicago, 2020. (nick number, Wiki Commons).

Where that article attempted to present the need to tackle such deaths as areas of study in the fields of leisure studies, tourism studies, and urban geography while also introducing Blalock’s (1967) racial threat theory (economic, political, and symbolic threats) and Neville et al. (2013) colorblind racial ideology (color-evasion and power-evasion) as theoretical expansions of our repertoire of theories for the study of Race, this manuscript is calling for something entirely different. As it was discussed, racial threat theory (also referred to as power threat theory) took on the tasks of distinguishing the ways in which the sheer presence of a racialized “Other”, individual or collective, initiates a defensive-offensive response to protect a social order through elimination of said threat. In some ways we can think of fear as the initial reaction to the threat, and the field of leisure studies has identified that “fear of crime is among the most frequently reported reasons why many poorer Americans do not make greater use of community leisure facilities near where they live” if we also expound that crime is often times associated with a criminalized racial “Other” (Scott, 2013, p. 7). And while fear may be justified, it is often the actions thereafter that have evaded any scrutiny or study. The main thrust of racial threat theory is to eliminate said threat for it challenges one’s position or the position of a group’s social standing when the “Other” appears to be taking over just by appearing or existing.

A call for research on policing

The galvanizing power of fear increases the “intensity of crime control and surveillance” in order to “clear the area of potential offenders…whose looks, bearing, demeanour could be construed as law-breaking” (Hall et al., 1978, p. 182). Where racial threat theory is typically focused on responses to and against the identified threat through elimination, colorblind racial ideology looks to finds ways to response by removal. Removal here is more associated with the removal of Race from one’s consciousness and vocabulary; it can be extended to a material reality in which calling for response to crime without considering Race could still result in unimaginable lethality. For example, calling 911 on a noise disturbance of your neighbor of color without considering the racial disparities in history and record of the rate and frequency of police shootings. As a society, 911 callers are given the sanctity of little scrutiny (Pinckney et al., 2018), although they are rife with issues of deception, exaggeration, and manipulation (Burns & Moffitt, 2014). But this particular ideology also situates a failure of thinking about crime as personal failings and individual behaviors, failing to grasp that not only do we maintain a narrow view of what crime is (drug dealing, murder, robbery, rape) but then associate that narrow view as a judgment on those most often arrested for those crimes. Colorblind ideology, through color-evasion and power-evasion, lays the groundwork for both a reductionist and myopic understanding of (phenomenon in) society. Although leisure has always been policed, as Pendleton (2000) noted, “data on policing and leisure is even more scant” (p. 112), and it has continued to remain so across all leisure-related journals and books up to present (Mowatt, 2018).

As a matter of clarity, this focus is not to view this call or potential line of research from the perspective of those who survive or do not survive such encounters like the 2018 article by Mowatt on Tamir Rice. Instead, this focus is calling for research, discussions, and publications on policing from the entities that create it in leisure-based settings, spaces, and sites. As a set of guiding questions to consider:

1. What is policing?

2. What is crime?

3. Why are there cops in parks (or any other public sector-related recreation space), or why do park systems sometimes have their own police departments?

4. And most, importantly, what role does research play in surveilling?

This particular call and line of questioning has very little to do with research on police officers, police officer conduct, and any specificity in/of the role of law enforcement, although outside of the work of Pendleton very little research has been undertaken even within that realm of study (the Pendleton articles are respectively titled, [1996] “Crime, Criminals and Guns in ‘Natural Settings’: [1997] “Exploring the basis for Disarming Federal Rangers”; [1997] “Beyond the Threshold”; [1998] “Policing the Park”; [2000] with others, “Outdoor Recreation”; [2007] with Chavez et al., “Knowledge Management in Policing”; [2002] “Leisure, Crime and Cops”; and [2007] “The Social Basis of Illegal Logging and Forestry Law Enforcement in North America”. In addition to Pendleton’s body of work, the scant other articles appear chronologically in Leisure Sciences, Journal of Parks and Recreation Administration, and the Journal of Leisure Research. Rothman et al. (1979) discuss the pressure placed on police departments in dealing with “transients” at resort destinations by tourists. Iwasaki et al. (2002) examined the coping practices and needs of police (and emergency responders) through a recreational therapy lens. And Murrell et al. (1998) reported on the need to strengthen liability protection for law enforcement officers in parks and the units they work with due to civil rights litigation. However, Rojek’s (2005) focus on early illegal online downloading and accessing of music and other forms of art in Leisure Studies appears as the only published work that provided a measure of nuance and criticality that did not result in the call for more policing and more surveillance, that unbeknownst to these authors, would have likely resulted in more lethality.

This manuscript may, indeed, appear to be overly critical of these works and the field as a whole, but the context of policing within the context of the various deaths at the hands of law enforcement in leisure settings does solicit a need to move beyond seemingly pro-police surveillance and control stances without any consideration of the context presented here as well as thinking of policing beyond the actions and activities of those designated as police officer. This manuscript will begin with a philosophical discussion of policing as to establish a way to think of the broader intent of policies, decrees, and ordinances of state government in utilizing surveillance to deploy any form of police representation as well as thinking of why and how such exposure to police tactics and practices is selectively experienced as violence rather than service or assistance. Following this discussion of a philosophical outlook on policing, two cases of policing in the city and its broader implications will be briefly introduced to highlight the problematic ways that policing and surveillance has become entrenched as forms of acceptable repression of and ideology on certain populations.

A philosophy of policing

What is policing? The functionality of policing and functionary role of police are both in service to an elite class beyond the working class. The availability of a 911 operator, a call box, a marked car on the street that can be hailed, or the uniformed person that can be motioned over obscures the historical realities that belie a consistent service to property, profit, and (certain) people. Police are often presented as servants of civil society, but instead exist as officers of state government with the job of managing space in opposition to that civil society. The imposition of punishment that leads to privation highlights the Althusserian twin state apparati of repression and ideology (Althusser, 2001). One apparatus uses violence as coercion through the possibilities of threat and as fact through a variety of tools within an expanding arsenal. While the other apparatus uses influence as education through the disciplining power of schools and prisons and as information through mediated forms of news and entertainment. The police officer is an example of the physical form of repression and repressive state apparatus. And surveillance, like the police officer, is ideology (and the ideological apparatus) given material form.

This materiality of surveillance then aids actions of repression in precision (the right targets, the right populations to punish), scope (the appropriate space, the appropriate locations to operate), and scale (the necessary size, the necessary degrees of violence). So, with this focus and these questions, I am challenging the field of leisure studies and its respective subfields to also consider that the work and leisure dichotomy (De Grazia, 1962; Mead, 1966) has not been the true dichotomy of debate, but instead a work, violence, and leisure dichotomy that is reflected by the divisions of labor in society reflected in the great classificatory systems of difference that organizes human society: class, Race, gender, sexuality, and age, as noted by Stuart Hall in the seminal lecture, “Race, the Floating Signifier” (2021). Work and leisure have been depoliticized, and with that act any form of deeper of political critique has also been removed (Weeks, 2011). And so, policing, by its practice in society is political, yet if it enters the spaces of leisure, it has remained uncharted, hardly discussed, and abhorrently neglected in research.

And this socio-political reality of the commonly reference work-leisure dichotomy has long been a reality, as Marx (2007) indicated that “in capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time” (p. 581). Rojek (1984) further interprets Marx’s stance on leisure as providing “an illusory sense of self-determination for the worker and a specialized market for capitalist production…that work and leisure are interdependent, historically created forms” (p. 165). The police are thus employed, “to accelerate the accumulation of capital by increasing the degree of exploitation of labour” (Marx, 1906, p. 814). The violence is thus the force of the police baton at workplace to get back to work, the “‘small thefts’ of capital from the labourer’s meal and recreation” (Marx, 1906, p. 267), the police in the public space to get back inside the house until work time, and the social system that has ensured work as the only way any people can meet their own needs.

But in order to have the things (activities, commodities) and places of leisure (destinations, sites) they require a social class to serve another. This understanding sets up leisure’s explicable dependency on a class structure (i.e. Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899). With this class structure, a force must be created to preserve the divisions of society, and ultimately, Race as one of the great “classificatory systems of difference” for these purposes transforms “race [as] the modality in which class is lived” (Hall et al., 1978, p. 394). Besides one’s role in labor, one’s ownership of property distinguishes their positionality with regard to laws and law enforcement. Neighborhoods are to be protected for their property value and extensive neighborhood parks are to be protected as well. “Fear of crime” as a galvanizing call to order and arms, has opened the doorway for residents across racialized categories to call for greater police presence, even privatized police if needed, to protect the sanctity of their neighborhoods, streets, parks, and property values (Forman, 2017). “Fear of crime” has also led to many neighborhoods retaining a classification of “bad” until urban planned gentrification has designated the area as “under development” (Marquet et al., 2020). Pendleton (2000) continued, “yet crime is a part of the leisure setting” (p. 112), and depending on our philosophy of what crime is as well as our philosophy on what policing actually is, the role that crime serves in society can be quite obscured and myopic.

Of moral panics and crises

What is crime? Émile Durkheim’s (2006) seminal text, On Suicide, established that crime exists 1) as it is fundamentally related to poverty; 2) serves as a moral boundary for behavior; and, 3) as a social force that facilities social change. While Durkheim’s overall views of crime can be debated and even more, the usage of Dukheim’s views (1953) has also led to legislation and social consciousness that has remained harmful to Black populations (e.g. Daniel P. Moynihan’s [1993] argument in the 1960s that socially accepting broken Black families that produce the uneducated and criminal elements is harmful to the broader society). In reverse order of Durkheim’s explanation for the existence of crime, the third reason is most affiliated with the so-called Durkheim Constant that indicates that there is a limit to the amount of deviant behavior (particularly, crime) a society can afford to accept and recognize through systems of surveillance, since deviant behavior (and deviants) causes chaos in society. While the second explanation for crime in society is related to the concept of anomie (most noted in Ruth Russell’s [2020] text, Pastimes, and the scores of foundational courses in leisure studies) is not the only theoretical explanation of the causes of crime that Durkheim presents, he saw anomie being a sign of social disintegration. But anomie also clarifies what are and what are not the acceptable social norms (moral boundaries). The excess of deviance (crime) is the real issue since divisions of labor create differentiation amongst the social classes that leaves many without. Sufficient regulation is then needed to maintain order within the acceptable levels (locations and amounts of people) of deviance.

It is Dukheim’s first explanation of crime that is often forgotten, disregarded, or never attended to: poverty as the basis for crime. This is of course discounting the myriad of crimes that are committed beyond what is socially unacceptable by the socially unacceptable classes (drug dealing, murder, robbery, rape): crime is fundamentally attached to poverty as it is an act of gain (“redistributive class justice”). This discounting is not to be ignored as what is deemed as “index crimes” (willful homicide, forcible rape, robbery, burglary, aggravated assault, larceny over $50, motor vehicle theft, and arson) are also termed as the property and violent crime index and serve as the basis of all crime statistics. Yet based on federal statutes alone, there are 5,199 actions that constitute a crime. Populations that are arrested for those index crimes are brandished as criminals. Reducing their presence in society and their actions is what lowers the crime rate, which is only known by their arrest rate (we have no ability to know how many crimes are ever committed at any point in time).

Pendleton (2000) also cautioned that “in the absence of a leisure setting model of crime and enforcement” the response to crime in leisure settings is “shaped by conventional views of crime and police” (p. 112). Cities, states, and parks and protected areas in the U.S. have only increased their respective police footprint by increasing their own law enforcement ranks and granting greater access to other law enforcement entities such as the Federal Bureau of Investigations and Border Patrol to their spaces and visitation data (Hicks et al., 2020; Pendleton, 1996; Pennaz, 2017; Philley & McCool, 1981; Stadler et al., 2021). What is crime and who are the criminals have skillfully been cultivated over centuries and distilled into the tactics that were employed in the 1970s and 1980s in response to the moral panic of the political protestor (Walker, 1968), and most especially the Black mugger (Hall et al., 1978). Public sentiment was shaped by mediated framing that was instigated by a collaboration of state government, private interests, and media entities.

Hall et al.’s (1978) seminal work, Policing the Crisis, skillfully framed the ways in which what we know now as index crimes and the “criminals” that commit them are the necessary subject matter in constructing a moral panic. Hall et al. (1978) stated,

Societies appear to be subject…to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereo-typical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible. (p. 16)

Agencies of signification (news outlets, private schools, universities, social media, and advertisement firms) along with agencies of control (legislative bodies, law enforcement, public schools, surveillance apparati, and location services and facial recognition applications) define all forms of life situations and select targets for specific definition through meaning making and social control. The processes of these agencies are the

initiating ‘campaigns’…selectively signifying their actions to the public at large, in legitimating their actions through the accounts of situations which they produce. They do not simply respond to ‘moral panics’. They form part of the circle out of which ‘moral panics’ develop. It is part of the paradox that they also, advertently and inadvertently, amplify the deviancy they seem so absolutely committed to controlling. (p. 52)

But these are outcomes of “clear historical and structural forces” that do the work in any period in “shaping, so to speak, from the outside, the immediate transactions on the ground between “muggers”, potential muggers, their victims and their apprehenders” (Hall et al., 1978, p. 185). Hall et al. argued that across many studies, those historical and structural forces are merely background issues, somethings that may receive citation but never consideration in discussion. But those forces are the very thing that create the “mugger”, not individual deviancy, not individual prejudice heaped upon the individual deviant that become a collective trait across a population, and not even poverty. It is capitalism that produces the divisions of labor, the lower wage, the dependency on the wage, and the accumulation of wealth that then creates the mass surplus of poverty. So, a moral panic is necessary to drastically increase that accumulation, when necessary through dispossession by way of arresting, incarcerating, or executing and the extraction of monies from taxes, income, and natural resources.

Moral panic is “one of the principal forms of ideological consciousness” that a “silent majority” (dominant, elite, ruling class) is seduced into supporting “increasingly coercive measures on the part of the state, and lends its legitimacy to a more than usual” exercise of control (p. 221). And so,

one of the principal forms of ideological consciousness by means of which a ‘silent majority’ is won over to the support of increasingly coercive measures on the part of the state, and lends its legitimacy to a ‘more than usual’ exercise of control. (p. 221)

So, the removal of anything that produces fear is necessary for park and entertainment professionals and other recreation providers to maintain the appeal to visitors.

Of violence, of work

Why are there police in parks? Police violence is truly only known to those most likely to be exposed to it, and if you are to experience it, the question is what did you do to necessitate that exposure (Jackson et al., 2020)? Whether it is “hard” or “soft enforcement,” it is still enforcement with the highly visible hallmarks of policing: badges, uniforms, guns, and patrol vehicles (Pendleton, 1998), that manifest the threat of violence in their “softness” during their surveillance duties before repression is deployed. These are all a welcome sign, to certain populations, to those away at a resort, in a swanky hotel, on a secluded campground, sitting on a favorite bench, and enjoying an outdoor performance.

Scholarship beyond leisure research has been firm in establishing that enforcement was never applied softly even if it was operating from a “soft” enforcement model as compliance in abiding by the law was never sought through Pendleton’s symbolic expressions of “encouraging, bluffing, avoiding, and bargaining” for all populations (Correia & Wall, 2021; Seigel, 2018a, 2018b). After all, Derek Chauvin used and killed with his knee, not with pistol shot or extensive taser firing. This actually was soft enforcement in operation. Further, policing has a far older history than our contemporary, preferred perspectives that has hid its anti-labor movement, slave insurrection suppression, and colonial administrational roots (Muhammad, 2010; Vitale, 2017). While the slogan of Black Lives Matter has also been taken up by inverse surveillance groups like Data 4 Black Lives, Campaign Zero, and others to point to widespread examples of Black disparities and predisposition to harm in public housing, job employment, and over exposure to environmental racism, policing remains the primary issue on-hand.

As 2020 continued, protest calls for “defunding” and “abolishing” the police became more prominent, especially after the release of the video of Elijah McClain’s (23) death on August 30, 2019, in which the young violinist went into cardiac arrest while forcibly held to the ground, face down, and could not be revived in the hospital after being surveilled as “law-breaking”. In his honor, violin vigils in 2020 were held in a number of leisure spaces. Despite the peacefulness of those events, some of whom were officially sponsored by corporate and state government entities (like the New York Environmental Protection Fund, Park & Trails New York, and New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation), many were met with tactical units of “hard” law enforcement in riot gear and forcibly removed from parks and squares that they were held within. Meanwhile, so-called “soft” enforcement led to event attendees and organizers to be fined. Who to remove, who to fine, and who to leave alone could only be determined through surveillance systems of body cameras, accessing private cameras attached to buildings, and aerial drones flying over U.S. cities without citizen approval or awareness.

This work that some have argued that policing actually does, in the words of Seigel (2018a, 2018b), is violence work. For,

Policing is so difficult to grasp and reform because its legitimacy is defended by powerful political arguments. These arguments shield policing from challenge, obscuring…the violence it inflicts in the interests of capital. Racism also morphs in the face of these effective arguments, appearing to be an incidental error or the fault of individual people or a throwback that time will soon resolve, instead of what it really is, the fundamental technology of differentiation inextricable from the work of contemporary states. To pull policing and its labour into focus − to reveal police work as the brick-level labour of racial capitalism. (Seigel, 2018a, p. 16)

Just as Hall et al. (1978) framed policing as first and foremost the process of meaning-making through signification and meaning-producing for control, Seigel (2018a, 2018b) situated the enactment of that process by various actors of law enforcement as violence workers. This is hard for people to fathom due to meaning-making and meaning-producing mechanism and apparatuses of film and television, in particular. Research, typically then, works to legitimize police officers because, it relies

on a dichotomy between good and bad police (police are independent of the market except when corrupt, police are benign when behaving themselves), and others that back the populace into postures of grateful deference (police are public servants; their work is terribly dangerous). (Seigel, 2018b, p. 17)

Further, Seigel (2018b) unrelentingly then challenges the myths we create in the,

self-evident alibis for superficial reform are individualising denials (the former) or saviour fantasies (the latter). Plus, they’re inaccurate: police work is not actually very dangerous. Federal occupational health statistics show US police work to be relatively safe, nowhere near the top 3 fatality-prone occupations: agriculture, transportation and mining. Police aren’t even the occupation most at risk of violent death. That honour falls to ‘first-line supervisors of retail sales workers’

Other [potent and complex] arguments…revolve around concepts of safety or security (police keep us ‘safe’ or are anchors of public ‘security’), or take the concepts of legality and its inverse, criminality, as transparent (police uphold the law, police fight crime). Interestingly, if you ask what really makes people feel safe, very few will list ‘police’ among the answers. (p. 17)

To deconstruct the trope of “security”, Seigel instead of asking “why are there police?”, asked instead, “what is crime?” for as when we dig into the data and counter the narratives that we create, police do not ever fight crime, have never succeed in fighting crime, and have never shown evidence of fighting crime. They, at best, occasionally (rarely) investigate, but at worst, they mainly (often) just arrest. Across the history of policing in Britain that established modern policing that transitioned to the U.S. that expanded its scope and function, the fighting of crime is the most legitimizing myth that in reality is merely selective arresting. So, in the U.S., 43 of the 50 most populated cities in 30 states have prioritized funding for policing over any services and programming for public well-being, including only 7 cities of those 50 spending more on health care and social support rather incarceration (Charlotte, North Carolina was the highest in funding for police and San Francisco was the highest in spending for health care; Skaathun et al., 2022). With municipal funding for public recreation has been on a steady decline for decades (Crompton & Kaczynski, 2003; Pitas et al., 2017), except in spending on building their own police departments, paying overtime to city/county/state/federal law enforcement for specific work in recreation sites, and littering surveillance cameras throughout parks and inside facilities. But the size of the city does not reduce the fear nor the actions in the name or on behalf of that fear as the Vallejo Police Department is one of the deadliest in the U.S. with the killing per person per arrest than 97% of all departments of similar size. However, across cities of all sizes 2022 was by far the deadliest year on record for police killings with 1176 deaths, with only 12 days throughout the year in which one death was not logged (since 2013, there has been an average of 1000 deaths per year; Campaign Zero, 2022).

A fear city, a cop city

What is policing? It is important for us to understand that leisure has always been policed. In fact, the question that arises here is whether leisure is a third apparatus of the state alongside the repressive state apparatus and ideological state apparatus? The history of youth development and play is one of policing. The unruly urban youth, Black, Brown, and immigrant would be dealt with by the police. The history of city parks is one of policing. The poor, destitute, and homeless would be dealt with by the police. Policing is not this rude interloper on leisure, it is a fundamental part of leisure. The long sought after call for community-minded policing is often grounded in the myth of a time of beat patrols. What is deemed as “weak police-minority community relationships” when certain racialized neighborhoods are over-policed for crime control and under-policed for crime protection (Braga et al., 2019), either rewrite the history of policing or fail to understand the philosophical driver of policing that is well beyond the discretion of the officer.

Where the police officer and the surveillance camera are respectively physical manifestations of the repressive and ideological state apparati, the park, the resort, the trail, and many other sites, locations, settings, and destinations are a physical manifestation of a (social) control state apparatus. The park, or at least the presence of the “law-breaker” in the park, triggers the action of repression and provides the literal tree as a mount for the surveillance camera. At least in the U.S, U.K., and Canada, the home of the “law-breaker” is not the site for consistent enforcement activity unlike Brazil. But once the “law-breaker” enters the movie theater, the cameras are on and the recording commences. Once the “law-breaker” enters the mall, the security forces begin monitoring and following. Two cases aid in the logics that form this line of thinking: 1) the Fear City Campaigns of New York and Boston in the 1970s and 1980s; and, 2) the construction of a “Cop City” in Atlanta in the 2010s and 2020s.

Fear city

What is crime? Leisure (settings, activities) have a seeming stranglehold on force delivery over other sectors in a city. The serenity, quaint, animated, whimsical, and pleasure-filled leisure setting cannot be unsettled by the presence of the “law-breaker” thus public support to suppress the growth of a “moral panic” may present a likely robust area of study. Mayor Koch of the 1980s New York, The New York Post, and others seized the opportunity to call for greater policing in the city despite the level of abandonment (defunding) of Central Park that has been going on since the 1970s. This was yet another olive branch by a mayor to the police unions that were still recovering from their own defunding as well as real estate developers who were still too concerned with investing into property within the city of New York (Phillips-Fein, 2017). As a result, Black and Brown children were sacrificed to project a sense of safety and calm, and that parks were safe after all (Johnson, 2005) (see Figure 3). It is just that the history of leisure has been researched and studied by those least likely to be policed.

Figure 3. A full Page advertisement from the May 1, 1989 issue of the daily news. (public domain).

The Fear City campaigns of New York City and Boston warned tourists from coming to either city, not due to the out-of-control levels of crime but as a tactic against their defunding by city governments seeking to implement austerity measures, pay off billions in debt, and use of public funds away from public services and toward privatized development (see Figure 4). If you arrived at the airport of either city in the mid-1970s you would be handed fliers with a list of warnings and cautions. “Never venture outside of downtown,” “never leave your valuables in the hotel,” “do not take public transportation where within the nine points articulated on the flier.” And while off-duty police officers failed the public trust they were within their first amendment rights to free speech. Convention and visitor bureaus had to proactively travel to cities throughout the world in order to alleviate growing concerns for safety. One million fliers produced by the Council for Public Safety, an umbrella organization of over 28 unions, did the work of ending the ongoing defunding of policing (a reality that the $10 billion budget of the NYPD no longer experiences). The Fear City campaigns were a victory of the police union, the Fraternal Order of Police that forced their cities to re-fund police department budgets, and nationwide increased the salaries of police officers. But the Fear City campaigns were also a victory for the cities and private real estate developers that sought to take advantage of the low costs of property and land that were depressed due to their proximity to “crime”,

Figure 4. Fear City Survival guide campaign pamphlet, 1975. (public domain).

if a buyer agreed to purchase the Commodore [one of many condemned hotels in NYC] and redevelop it into something new, the city would waive a portion of the site’s real estate taxes for years to come…the developer who won that [specific] deal was the young [29-year-old, 45^th President]. (Phillips-Fein, 2017, pp. 256–257)

From this point, convention centers, private parks, restaurants, etc. sprung up as the infrastructure of opulence that are now facets of the modern NYC landscape, erected by using crime to move a public out a fiscal crisis that diverted public funds from parks, schools, hospitals, social services, and low-income neighborhood recovery efforts. Ironically, what has consistently trumped “fear of crime” has been the fear of police, and justifiably so, as 1 in every 3 people killed by police were running or driving away (Campaign Zero, 2022). The commonality with all cases of police killings is that since 2013, 98% have occurred without an officer having been charged. Yet the role of police as “fear reducers” was solidified during the Fear City Campaigns of New York City and Boston through the possible disruption of one’s leisure (tourism). Further, the strength that the Fraternal Order of Police wields in the present was also solidified in the ways that they were able to rally public support to pressure city officials to not only resume previous levels of funding but initiated the increases that we see in the present. NYPD’s 2023 budget is currently at $10.8 billion, that is roughly $83 million less than the 2022 budget. Additionally, NYPD also spent a little over $3 billion on surveillance technology over a ten-year period, with $750,000 three-year contract with American Science and Engineering for just x-ray machines, $6.8 million to Idemia Solutions for biometric facial recognition, an unknown amount to KeyW Corporation for cell-site simulators (also known as “stingrays”), and the initiation and expansion of Domain Awareness Systems, the world’s largest surveillance system that connects 18,000 CCTV cameras. The 2019 release of over 140 h of footage, particularly of protests, from the defunct NYPD Photography unit just prior to, and during the Fear City Campaign. The current structure and systems of mass surveillance, at least in NYC, shows just how important this era was in laying the foundation for the intensely repressive and ideological apparati in the present. But it also shows just how successful leisure as a concept, experience, and space will be defended as something to keep pristine unintentionally or intentionally by a broader public.

Cop city

Why are there cops in the park? Leisure sites can also be used to play out and simulate repressive techniques and strategies while also working through ideological structures like media (social media) to affirm sanctity or confirm fears. Historically, the National Park Ranger was first and foremost a military occupier of Indigenous territory and served as police for those parks in response to those who wished to continue to occupy their ancestral lands. This is why the celebration of the African American Buffalo Soldiers in the efforts of a more diverse and inclusive history simultaneously holds a problematic place in their creation and function (Mason, 2019). The 2014 killing of Tamir Rice in the Cudell Commons obscured the sheer amount of surveillance cameras that had been installed in the park, willingly by the Cudell Recreation Center of the City of Cleveland, with “a total of 10 cameras were operational at all times” (Mowatt, 2018, p. 61), but not enough programming to engage a 12-year-old boy. Yet, it is the construction of simulated sites of “cop play” that reflect a new trend. A tactical scenario village in Chicago, IL with mock neighborhood features, a public safety complex in Austin, TX mimicking local communities, and the simulated city in Gravesend, Kent with fake pubs, parks, and pizzerias. Each have been presented as a preparatory staging ground for urban unrest and strength law enforcement’s ability to reduce fear by tackling “increasing crime”.

The ways in which a broader public accepts the entrenchment of surveillance comes from the ways in which public support has been garnered in viewing certain populations as “law-breakers” and certain behaviors as “law-breaking”. Certain types of crime categorization increased during the era of global deindustrialization in the 1970s of cities like Birmingham (UK), Detroit (Michigan), Melbourne (Australia), Oakland (California), Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), and Youngstown (Ohio), as people sought illegal forms of business to work when legal forms left their cities (Linkon, 2018). It is also during part of this decade that riots, rebellions, and street warfare did ensue in cities across the U.S. and parts of the U.K linked to lowered wages, widespread layoffs, increased rents, closure of health clinics, and other cuts in social services, another factor that made the Fear City Campaigns so successful. The combined assault of deindustrialization and neoliberalism brought in an era of intensified forms of policing as a mechanism to revanchist ideals and reclamations of the city as gentrification in the 1990s (Mitchell, 2003).

The right to the city was not deemed for everyone, and the ways that policing is selectively applied to parks and public spaces resemble the vagrancy laws of the 1300s to 1800s of the United Kingdom where it was virtually illegal to be poor. Poor was surveilled as law-breaking. People were arrested and jailed for begging, for looking like a beggar, for being unemployed thereby needing to beg, for being unhoused, and for being unable to pay for one’s fine of being jailed. Vagrancy laws kept the poor from all other folk, but also made poverty invisible. The Black Codes, laws that returned formally the enslaved back to a form of legal enslavement with the 13^th Amendment, identified people as violators of a wide range of social violations and norms. These laws that emerged after the Civil War and Emancipation merely racialized those vagrancy laws that were adopted from British law into the British colonies and eventual United States of America. Now, Black was surveilled as law-breaking while simultaneously making Black synonymous with poor, thereby doubling the connotation of law-breaking. And with those Codes, the carcerality of Blackness began.

Advancements in social mobility, educational attainment, and the leniency or elimination of restrictive civil rights only marginally reduced carcerality (but not lethality) until the 1970s in the U.S. But the influx of Black representation in leadership position in state government as well as elected officials have not curbed this tide. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2016) warned,

When a Black mayor [Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms], governing a largely Black city [Atlanta, Georgia], aids in the mobilization of a military unit led by a Black woman [Chief Erika Shields] to suppress a Black rebellion, we are in a new period of the black freedom struggle. (p. 80)

The calls for defunding police made in 2020, were often absent of the clarity of past calls by groups like the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in New York for the community control of police that would have placed community groups in direct authority over police action and police budgets in their neighborhoods. Public “fear of crime” (i.e. poor, Black, and immigrant as “law-breakers”) that has been conjoined with State “fear of crime” (i.e. protester, rioter, and strikers as “laws-breakers”) brings us to the present. In 2022, Atlanta began building the $90 million-dollar, 85-acre “Cop City” training complex on the historic publicly deeded Weelaunee forest (once stewarded by the Muscogee Creek people is also referred to as the South River Forest) and the yet to be nationally registered historic grounds of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm (also known as Honor Farm in the 1950s) that once held as many as 1,000 security incarcerated people from 1920 to 1990 and produced 880 tons of food per year (see Figure 5; Atlanta DSA, 2022). With the city council’s approval, the project will destroy this forest. Although plans for it date back to 2015, the project was announced in 2017 from a closed session of the city council, yet the site was initially hidden within a larger park development plan that would convert a public forest (without citizen approval). While the $282 million budgeted Atlanta Police Department are the principal custodians of the site, but police departments and units from around the world will have access to it as an urban training facility complete with a Blackhawk helicopter launching and a reconstructed urban warfare simulated environment.

Figure 5. Forest Defenders occupy trees at the old Atlanta prison farm to protect the area from destruction, 2020. (Crowina, Wiki Commons).

But the magnitude of “Cop City” is demonstrated not only by the initial mayor and mayor administration who ushered it forward, but the Atlanta Police Foundation Board that is comprised of chief executives from Arthur Blank, Bank of America, Blackhall Studies/Shadowbox Studies, Carter Accenture, CNN, Chick-Fil-A, Coca-Cola Company, Cox Enterprises, Cushman & Wakefield, Delta, Equifax, Georgia Pacific, Georgia Power, Home Depot, Inspire Brands, Koch Brothers, KPMG International Limited, the Loudermilk Family, McKesson, Norfolk Southern, United Parcel Service, Waffle House, Wells Fargo who are the primary funders of the project, with the city using public funds to pay for a third of the total costs. Despite the pressure from neighborhood residents, anti-police protest groups, environmental organizations, and social justice public safety advocates, a new mayoral administration along with 10-4 voting city council have upheld continuing construction of “Cop City”. And on January 18, 2023, Manuel Paez Teran (who was also known as Tortuguita) was the first forest defender of the Stop Cop City campaign that has been killed while holding an occupying protest that has been going on since the Fall of 2021 (see Figure 6). Now with RICO Racketeer Influences and Corrupt Organizations Act) charges looming over the heads of several activists as well as outside supporters who have merely raised funds for bail (61 indictments in 2023; see Lennard, 2023), even the very act of protesting for environmental protection could be considered a crime (or, considered a threat if coupled with the protection of life from state violence). The driver for “Cop City” has been the fear and control of crime even though the City of Atlanta has reported a steady drop by 45% in crime since 2009. The issue of “Cop City” is at the precipice of the intersections of racism, mass surveillance, “militarization” of police, and climate change. Just as fear can be exploited to marshal law enforcement for the sake of preserving leisure, leisure spaces can also serve as veritable training grounds by leveraging that fear once again. (Atlanta Democratic Socialists of America, 2022)

Figure 6. Protesters marching in Minneapolis near Hennepin/lake remembering Manuel Teran (tort), who was shot and killed by officers at a prolonged protest in an Atlanta forest after they say he fired upon them. They stopped at lake/Girard where protester Deona Marie was killed on 06/13/21 and outside the ramp Winston Smith was killed by law enforcement 10 days earlier., 2023. (Chad Davis from Minneapolis, United States, Wiki Commons).

Conclusion

Throughout this discussion, the questions of “what is policing?”, “what is crime?”, and “why are there cops in parks”? has been addressed within the context of this special issue on surveillance. However, one question remains, “what role does research play in surveilling?”. This is a question to leave you as the reader with to consider why such a call for research on policing is important and what could drive the choice to take up that line of research. The time of leisure is not impenetrable to the occurrence of harm from repression and ideology. The space of leisure is not protected from the actions that result in such harms. The setting of leisure is not invulnerable to behaviors being perceived as criminal and thus justifying these harms. When we think of the creation of the BLM hashtag in 2013 in response to the surveilled/neighborhood watch shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, and then its growth in 2015 after the Rice and Brown incidents of 2014 to a full fledge network/foundation along with a loose coalition of local chapters, it is important to think of it as a response to overwhelming effects of the post-racial ideologies that began to circulate after the 2008 election of former U.S. President Barack Obama. The twin state apparati of repression and ideology are fully formed in the post-Obama era, as the efforts of diversity, equity, and inclusion to emphasize and celebrate increased representation have obscured the increasing carceral population and deployment of lethality. But what comes to bear here is the possibility of leisure as a third apparatus that aids and augments the other two.

Racism, as articulated by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) in the seminal book, The Golden Gulag, is “the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (p. 247). It is both state violence and extra judicial actions that systematically result in the sanctioned death of the Black racialized “Other.” So, what we must most fundamentally need to reckon with is the elimination of the most lethal and violent aspects of our society before we can move to obstructions of comfort (bird watching in a park, being respected as a leisure researcher) and skill development (having the opportunity to hike or camp, earning a position as the head of a parks department).Ultimately, successful policing means trauma production and the reshaping of one’s sense of their place in the city they dwell within or visit (Haldipur, 2018). And just as worldviews have been shaped by policing practices, spaces like urban parks and open spaces have been racialized (disposition to harm, provisions of lower quality, restrictions to access, segregated construction) even more during and after 2020 (Hoover & Lim, 2021), across the globe but most notably in the Canada (Royal Canadian Mounted Police, RCMP of Ontario), Nigeria (Special Anti-Robbery Unit, SARS of Lagos), and the U.S. (various major crimes, task forces, and tactical units).

This definition of racism as “vulnerability to premature death” introduces a radically different outlook on what we really mean by racism (or at least what we should think it to mean). To situate it as a history of racial discrimination and slights, the consistent racial closure of opportunity and financial upward mobility, and the continuing remnants of a slavery and colonial past fails to understand the function of racism by emphasizing the emotional experiences of living under it. However, there is a material reality of racism, or rather racism is a material reality that ushers in living an adjacent life and all that comes with that. Police shootings are then a public health crisis only to those shot, killed, or have witnessed (The Lancet, 2021; Lett et al., 2021; Mowatt, 2019). What role does research play in surveilling? Some parts of this question can be tackled in a second part to this discussion but others can be tackled by research that examines the public health ramifications on individuals and communities that have experienced a police shooting; the implications of shifting budget and funding priorities of municipal/county/state/federal government away from culture, nature, and tourism and toward law enforcement; the attitudes of neighborhood residents or tourists on profiled “law-breakers” in leisure spaces; or the use of leisure spaces for training grounds by law enforcement.

The aims of this manuscript were to call for research on policing due to its ability to focus on the phenomenon of the shooting and killing of people, particularly Black citizenry, by law enforcement. This aim was guided by questions of:

1. What is policing?

2. What is crime?

3. Why are there cops in parks?

4. And most, importantly, what role does research play in surveilling?

These questions should continue as a clear follow-up from this call for research is to summarize some of the police research in the disciplines and fields of sociology, criminology/criminal justice, and political science along with examining the ways that the “moral panic” of a “fear of crime” in neighborhoods guides much of the likely encounters and incidents in parks and recreation spaces. However, there is a concluding caution against any form of advocacy interspliced with such research. A caution against any form of advocacy is placed here guided by the philosophies of Hall et al. (1978) and Seigel (2018a), raises an uncertainty about the future of policing that is based on the rising calls for social change in policing tactics and has resulted in the increased usage of body cameras with discernable change in fatality, in the increased presence of automated policing with its rapid ability to surveil, store, and categorize faces, and the deployment of ground drones armed with weaponry (see Figure 7). These are just some of the ways that a deeper philosophical foundation is so necessary. This is thus, not a call for advocacy, but a call for research of a legitimate phenomenon that occurs within the space, time, and activities of leisure, sport, and tourism. An understanding of policing, not police officers, as tool for surveillance and control along with an understanding of society, not on individualized or small group social behavior are the needs in the research of a legitimate lethal and trauma-inducing phenomenon that occurs within the space, time, and activities of leisure, sport, and tourism.

Figure 7. KnightScope Security robots patrolling an area, Mountain view, California, 2016. (Alison Chaiken from Mountain view, CA, United States, Wiki Commons).

Ethics statement

This manuscript is a presentation of a comprehensive theories and thus falls outside of the parameters of a research study and study involving humans. This manuscript is exempt from IRB.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2023.2281903).