Where are the police in urban governance? Three investigations of police, planning, and governance in central Atlanta

ABSTRACT

Urban governance theories frequently overlook policing, despite current controversies surrounding police. To help fill this gap, I investigate how urban governance institutions may influence police work. My intervention centers around the crucial point that “the police” are a diverse multiplicity of agencies, whereas previous studies on the relationship between urban governance institutions and police institutions focus on one or two agencies, usually municipal police. I direct attention to the diversity of police in central Atlanta: 11 fully sworn agencies, two private security forces employed by community improvement districts, and the common regulatory practices that are fundamentally police though not commonly discussed as such in urban studies. I use frameworks from Law & Society research on jurisdiction to analyze data from roughly one year of fieldwork on three commonly studied urban governance institutions: neighborhood planning units, community improvement districts, and university-led “anchor institution” development partnerships. I show how these agencies coordinate the public and police(s), convene diverse police elites, or foster the expectation of police caretaking. Governance institutions provide legitimate forums for police communications. This activity helps the complicated and contradictory multiplicity of police seem coherent and obscures policing’s violent contradictions, ultimately helping define the bounds of a community.

KEYWORDS:

• Policing
• urban governance
• Atlanta

Acknowledgments

The author extends his thanks to Marc Doussard, Jeffrey Martin, Stacy Harwood, and Mei-Po Kwan for evaluating the earlier forms of this research, and to the two anonymous reviewers. Any shortcoming is mine, not theirs.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Drawing from Crang (2003), I aim to share feelings and emotions, and personal history, in my qualitative research.

2. Scout identified as gender non-binary and used they/them pronouns.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephen Averill Sherman

Stephen Averill Sherman is currently a research scientist at Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, having recently earned a PhD in Regional Planning from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He investigates policing, housing, and community development. His other research has been published in Journal of the American Planning Association, Planning Theory & Practice, Journal of Planning Education & Research, numerous Kinder Institute reports, and in these pages.