Theorizing Racial Discord over Policing Before and After Ferguson

Abstract

Drawing on two theses from the race relations literature, this article presents a foundational perspective on core relationships between the police and racial groups in the United States. The theses—group position and minority threat—are described and expanded upon, applied to long-standing group relations with the police, and further illustrated with material on the racial politics surrounding recent incidents of police misconduct. Findings from surveys and other research methods are presented in support of the theoretical framework.

Keywords:

• group position
• minority threat
• racialized policing
• racial politics

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Gallup (2017) compared averages for polls taken in 2012–2014 and 2015–2017, and reports that the percentage of respondents who have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the police increased slightly for whites (58–61%) and decreased for blacks (35–30%) and Hispanics (59–45%).

² Examples include theoretical work on police subculture, implicit bias, procedural justice, social dominance, neighborhood social disorganization, etc.

³ The two theses are clearly evidenced in profoundly unequal and ethnically polarized societies, such as apartheid-era South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe and contemporary Israel, Iraq, and Northern Ireland (Brewer, 1994; Brogden & Shearing, 1993; Hasisi, 2008; Weitzer, 1990, 1995). On Britain and France, see Jackson, Bradford, Stanko, and Hohl (2013) and Fassin (2013).

⁴ The proportion of Hispanics who hold any given attitude toward the police consistently places them intermediate (often equidistant) between blacks and whites, as shown in this article and other sources (Weitzer, 2014). Relations between the police and Asian Americans are under-researched and most surveys lack sufficient numbers of Asians to compare them to other racial groups. But, overall, they tend to align with whites in their attitudes toward and experiences with the police.

⁵ Linked racial fate across classes is the prevailing pattern, but its degree varies by context. For example, racial profiling stops cross-cut social classes, whereas street crime is concentrated in poor communities and middle-class individuals tend to draw a sharp distinction between these offenders and themselves (Forman, 2017, p. 243).

⁶ A group’s “affinity” with state institutions can be measured in different ways. One is a survey question probing the extent to which the police can be “trusted to do the right thing for you and your community”: 72% of whites responded “always” or “often” to this question, compared to 33% of blacks and 45% of Hispanics (AP/NORC, 2015). Respondents may interpret “your community” racially or geographically.

⁷ Comparing the anti-egalitarian social-dominance scores of a sample of police officers, public defenders, jurors, and university students, researchers found that police were the most and public defenders the least social-dominance oriented (Sidanius et al., 2004).

⁸ One-third of the officers thought that an additional cause of the demonstrations was “a genuine desire to hold officers accountable for their actions.”

⁹ One deficiency in minority-threat studies is that they almost never measure a crucial stage in the process: citizen or police threat perceptions and the mechanisms whereby those perceptions shape criminal justice outcomes. Instead, macro-level factors such as percent minority or racial segregation are typically correlated with outcomes such as arrest rates. One exception is a study that found whites’ fear of crime and perceived minority economic threat to be predictors of police force size across U.S. counties (Stults & Baumer, 2007).

¹⁰ For a history of black support for robust crime control, see Forman (2017). Today, blacks are much more likely than whites (61 vs. 28%) to say that the police who work in their community do only a fair or poor job in controlling crime (CBS News, 2014). Other surveys report that large proportions of African Americans support an increase in officers patrolling city streets, more police surveillance of high-crime areas, and harsher court sentences for criminals.

¹¹ Each of these patterns is well-documented in opinion polls and academic surveys, some of which are included below.

¹² The scripts presented here reflect recurrent themes in the recent racial politics of policing, but I make no assumptions regarding their validity with respect to particular incidents.

¹³ Research on the effect of social class on individuals’ perceptions of the police has produced mixed results, but the socioeconomic status of one’s residential neighborhood is a robust predictor in many studies. Residents of middle-class or affluent black neighborhoods may have much better relations with the police in their neighborhood than when they travel outside their neighborhood and encounter an officer, demonstrating the importance of individual characteristics vs. neighborhood context (e.g. Meehan & Ponder, 2002; Weitzer, 1999).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ronald Weitzer

Ronald Weitzer is a professor of sociology at George Washington University. He has conducted research on policing in the United States, Israel, South Africa, and Northern Ireland, and is the author of Policing Under Fire: Ethnic Conflict and Police-Community Relations in Northern Ireland and co-author of Race and Policing in America: Conflict and Reform.