Policing the Racial Divide
Daanika Gordon
Abstract
Abstract For thirteen months, Daanika Gordon shadowed police officers in two districts in River City, a profoundly segregated Rust Belt metropolis. She found officers in predominantly white neighborhoods providing responsive service and engaged in community problem-solving. Meanwhile, officers in predominantly Black communities reproduced long-standing patterns of overpolicing and underprotection. While such differences have marked US policing throughout its history, racial divides in River City widened through strategic innovations in policing that many people would see as progressive. How did this happen? In Policing the Segregated City, Gordon offers a behind-the-scenes look into how the police are reconfiguring segregated landscapes, through in-depth interviews and hundreds of hours of ethnographic observation. She illuminates an underexplored source of racially disparate policing: the role of the police in urban growth politics. Growth coalitions in postindustrial cities are increasing the divides of segregation by investing in downtowns, gentrified neighborhoods, and entertainment corridors, while framing marginalized central-city neighborhoods as sources of criminal and civic threat that must be contained and controlled. These ideas enter into policing through strategic innovations that focus on the specificities of place. As police executives and officers seek to further craft neighborhoods to encourage urban revitalization, they amplify the race- and class-based inequalities of uneven economic development. The ties between policing, urban governance, and segregation reveal new sources of racial and spatial differentiation, at a time when questions around race and policing are of pressing importance.