‘The biggest gang in Oakland’: re-thinking police legitimacy

Abstract

Literature defining ‘police legitimacy’ lacks qualitative research on those populations most often targeted by law enforcement agencies, including people of color in urban areas. This same literature defines police legitimacy as something unquestionable and automatic. Exploration of this concept is limited to strategies to increase public ‘trust’ in police, and public compliance to their authority. We address these limitations in the available scholarship through an analysis of interviews with a diverse sample of Oakland (CA) residents on their experiences with the Oakland Police Department (OPD). Their narratives are presented in the historical context of controversy, budget problems, federal investigations, and racialized violence that help to define the relationship between OPD and Oakland communities. Those interviewed, universally observed OPD’s failure to address the most common crime problems in the city, while others, particularly people of color, found them to be a personal or public threat to safety. Their narratives fly in the face of the manifest functions of municipal police forces, are fully supported by the contemporary empirical history of the OPD, and suggest the illegitimate authority – including the monopoly on the use of force – of organizations like OPD in a democratic society.

Keywords:

• police
• policing
• police state
• community policing
• police legitimacy
• Oakland
• police shootings
• race
• racism
• segregation
• Oscar Grant
• Occupy Oakland
• gangs

Acknowledgments

The authors recognize the hard work of our graduate research coordinators for this project: Damian Bramlett, Amy Tracy, and Eduardo Bautista. We also thank our organizational partners and the many SJSU students and Oakland residents who shared their time and energy to make this research possible. Our anonymous interview participants deserve most of the credit for this work. Hopefully it honors their contributions. This research was made possible in part by an internal incentive grant from the SJSU College of Applied Sciences and Arts in 2010.

Notes

1. It is important to note that this is a conceptual framework meant to take the state at its word, so to speak. It is NOT a statement of our political or professional positions on the actual ‘role of police in the US’.

2. When we refer to the OPD we refer to an institution – a coercive arm of the state— not to the particular behavior, ideas, or beliefs of individual officers, though these things are unquestionably related. Such an approach is well in line with modern, sophisticated theoretical approaches to critical political economy, critical race theory, and feminisms critical of the state.

3. See: http://ellabakercenter.org/, http://criticalresistance.org/, http://www.youthuprising.org/.

4. Please see http://openjurist.org/2/f3d/870/united-states-v-reese for the full transcripts.

5. YouthUprising, an interview site for this research, was one of these centers.

6. See Appendix 1: Interview Sample.

7. All interviews were conducted, translated, and transcribed by graduate research assistants and the two primary investigators. All interviews were conducted by a pair of interviewers – at times to aid in translation, and at times for the comfort and training of graduate research assistants in interview research methods.

8. We certainly understand that some original intent and/or meaning are lost in such textual translation. We were willing to live with this risk in order to provide greater comfort for research participants who preferred to speak in a language other than English. Further, we decided to present the data in English here for the sake of simplicity and consistency.

9. To be clear, it is our policy in this project to not share raw interview data with anyone, including state agencies, for any reason whatsoever.

10. To aid in clarity, we’ve added participants’ age and self-identified racial category: AA = African-American, LA = Lain@ American, CA = Chinese American, W = constructed as ‘white.’