The racialized patterns of police violence: The critical importance of research as praxis

The tragic killing of George Floyd at the hands of the police resulted in hundreds of thousands of protestors marching in the streets demanding change. The call for change criticized the killing of Blacks by law enforcement and challenged White supremacy as an institution of social control and racial violence. A key component of the marches and protests was a message to the residents of the United States: “Black Lives Matter.” As society grapples with a reckoning, researchers studying police violence for the past 6 decades have been empirically and theoretically debating the reasons why use of force by law enforcement continues to have a higher proportion of Black and Brown victims compared to Whites. Although the research on fatal police killings was studied by only a small number of individuals prior to 2014, after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri the research in different areas of the country increased rapidly as did the forms of analysis and research disciplines making their own contributions. The Washington Post and Guardian news agencies established that deaths at the hands of the police were occurring for at least 900 to 1100 individual deaths per year for which firearms resulted in the greatest cause of death. As US government agencies failed to produce a national data source on police involved killings, the media took a leading role in providing greater national understanding. The authors examine what role academic researchers contribute to the discussion for solutions, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds. As protestors march, lawyers sue and defend, and politicians create new forms of legislation, researchers need to play a more important role initiating critical studies, making sense of the data, and providing a theoretical framework for which police violence can be understood. This article will provide an overview of the literature on racialized police violence, point out key patterns involving racial and ethnic disparities, and emphasize how researchers can play a more important role in advocating for change.     

Policing Disaster: An Analytical Review of the Literature on Policing,Disaster, and Post‐traumatic Stress Disorder

A large body of research findings suggests that law‐enforcement officers are confronted with erratic, periodic, and unpredictable high‐stress experiences in the line of duty. There is also an increasing amount of research on police as first responders to disasters and their mental health. Recent high‐stress events, like the social disorder generated by Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina, the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and the violence at Newtown, created a unique matrix for stressors on police officers who may not have had much training to deal with the associated disorder or much social support to draw upon when confronting the residual emotional and mental traumas that they experienced as a result. In this context, we conduct an analytical review of the literature on police stress in instances in which officers have responded to disasters. Moreover we discuss the extant research related to rates of post‐traumatic stress disorder, the effects of PTSD and related diagnoses on the personal and professional lives of officers, and the sources of social support available to them in the aftermath of trauma‐inducing events. We conclude with a summary of current research and a critique of what is missing in the literature including attention to subclinical PTSD, proper training, the lack of attention to institutional screening for PTSD vulnerability, and the dearth of evaluation research on “what works” in disaster preparedness for police officers.     

Police Crime: The Criminal Behavior of Sworn Law Enforcement Officers

This essay examines the criminological conceptualizations and research on police crime, that is, the criminal behavior of sworn law enforcement officers. It starts with an overview of the conceptualization of police crime as it relates to organizational and scholarly perspectives of social deviance. Police deviance is often conceptualized to include various misconduct, corruption, and/or crime committed by police organizations and police officers. This essay focuses on police crime resulting in the arrest of a sworn law enforcement officer and is organized within a conceptual framework that incorporates five types of police crime: sex‐related police crime, alcohol‐related police crime, drug‐related police crime, violence‐related police crime, and profit‐motivated police crime.     

The Social Construction of Local School Violence Threats by the News Media and Professional Organizations

The research presented here examines the social construction of local school violence threats in the context of national claims-making about school violence, particularly school shootings. In light of the news media glare surrounding other school shootings, school and police officials in Burlington, Wisconsin assessed the threat posed by five high-school youth who allegedly plotted to carry out a school attack in November 1998. Social constructionist scholarship has shown that claims made about a problem and the way it is framed in the news media and other informational contexts shape an audience's perception of a social problem's seriousness, prevalence, setting, and causes. But as William Gamson and others have pointed out, "readers" are not passive recipients of media messages; rather, they actively interact with those messages to construct meaning. This research project involved two components: (1) content analysis of the print media (in two periods 1992–1993 and 1997–1998) and law enforcement and school administrator publications and conference materials; and (2) in-depth, semistructured interviews with 13 respondents, including the 11 Burlington school and police officials who assessed and acted on this case. In this paper, I examine how the (Racine) Journal Times and professional organizations constructed (and reconstructed) school violence and how local decision-makers interpreted their own school violence threat in the context of the news media's and professional organizations' constructions.     

“White Men Are This Nation:” Right‐Wing Militias and the Restoration of Rural American Masculinity*

Abstract The appearance of right‐wing militias was a much‐discussed phenomenon during the past decade. Commentators rightly pointed out their rural origins, their lower‐middle‐class and middle‐class composition, and their ideology rooted in racism, sexism, anti‐Semitism, and homophobia, but few, if any, have commented on the most salient aspect of all: that these are movements of men, who use narratives about masculinity as an analytic prism through which to understand their own situation and to problematize the identities of “others,” and as a rhetorical strategy to recruit and sustain their own membership. In this paper we undertake this analysis, exploring the rural origins of the militia movement, its social composition, ideology, and organization, and its articulation with other white supremacist groups. We argue that their vision of masculinity, particularly a self‐reliant, self‐made masculinity endemic to American history, is the theme unifying both the ideology and the organization of rural militias with the militant right‐wing continuum of which they are only a part.     

Violence,Networks, and International Migration from Colombia

Although Colombia is a major country of emigration, little is known about its citizens' motivations for migration. Social and economic conditions have been studied as determinants of migration, but violence has received less attention. We examine how social networks and violence function to promote emigration from Colombia by linking event‐history data from the Latin American Migration Project to external data on violence and economic conditions. We show that emigration is more likely to be initiated by those with higher education, those with network connections to migrants, and during periods of greater violence and increased police presence. Although violence acts powerfully to determine when people migrate, the geographic distribution of social capital determines where they go. Not surprisingly, migrants go to locations where people in their social networks are currently living or have been earlier.     

Who Cares If Police Become Violent? Explaining Approval of Police Use of Force Using a National Sample

Understanding police violence is important in part because police violence, if generally tolerated, could transform a society based on law into one governed by political and personal whim. This research asks whether the conflict perspective can explain which groups are more likely to approve of police use of force, and whether several dimensions of power are at issue or just a few. Previous studies have found that race is the most important factor in determining approval of police use of force. Gender, age, class, and other variables have shown mixed results. Using a national sample (1998 General Social Survey), this paper contributes a more comprehensive examination of this issue to the small body of literature in this area. We look at approval of police use of force in five scenarios. Our findings show that minorities and women are more likely to disapprove of police use of force. Supporting a narrow application of conflict theory, other dimensions of power appear not to affect attitudes toward police hitting citizens. Context of violence matters too. When situations are not actively threatening for officers, by near consensus, violence is unacceptable. Disagreement comes from less clear-cut circumstances.     

Being black and non-citizen in South Africa: Intersecting race,white privilege and afrophobic violence in contemporary South Africa

Post-apartheid South Africa is characterized by growing feelings of pain, anger and frustration amongst black communities triggered by pervasive social inequalities. This has given birth to a new form of political and social activism shaped by crude violence, vandalism, destruction, brutal killings of women and children as well as thuggery in different black communities. It has also led to an upsurge in violence particularly on Africans from other parts of the continent. In this article, I attempt to examine how racial politics and resilient white privilege intersect to trigger afrophobic violence in South Africa. I draw on existing literature on broad conceptions of race and xenophobia to make a set of assertions about racial valuations, the resilience of white supremacy and black on black violence. In the article, I argue that black South Africans' pain, anger and the performance of violence on African migrants are on one level a consequence of resilient structural racism and racial practices, which continue to marginalize, emasculate and dispossess blacks. These racial practices force black South Africans to look elsewhere to express their anger, pains and frustrations.     

Can social workers and police be partners when dealing with bikie-gang related domestic violence and sexual assault?

Welfare and criminal justice systems manifest different goals, cultures, values and working methods. In Australia, the welfare sector has a culture of empowerment and concern for victims’ rights, within which social workers focus on social justice and social change. In contrast, the criminal justice sector (police) is patriarchal and para-military in structure, focusing on enforcing and maintaining community order and safety. These differences can create tension when social workers and police need to work as partners in response to violence against women, in particular violence against women from bikie gangs. This article addresses the issue of partnerships between social workers and police when working with abused bikie-gang women. It presents the findings of recent research into social work practice with such women in South Australia, in conjunction with a brief exploration of the international literature on social work and police cultures, and partnerships. It concludes that whilst there is a great need for genuine collaboration and partnership between social workers and police in the complex context of domestic violence with links to organised crime, the cultures and mandates of these different professions make this difficult.     

Who killed whom?: victimization and culpability in the social construction of murder

Based on in-depth interviews with relatives of people convicted of murder, this article examines the ways in which everyday understandings of 'murder' are socially constructed, as revealed by the narratives of murderers' relatives. To this end, interviewees' explanations of the killings are analysed and a distinction is drawn between interviewees who understood the killings committed by their relatives as manslaughter and those who accepted the murder verdict. In defining the offences in this way, interviewee s identified the significance of victimization and culpability to understandings of interpersonal violence. Through the analysis of interview data, it is possible to examine the ways in which 'murder' is seen to have occurred only when particular criteria of victimization and culpability are met.     

“The First Mark of Pain”: Toward a child-centered methodological reorientation of social theory,race and corporal punishment in American life

The current white supremacist racial order in America fundamentally relies on fear and pain to shape the subjectivities of Black people in childhood. This violence is most visible when enacted by police officers against unarmed Black youth. A less visible yet more pernicious form of racist violence against Black children is exercised by community proxies such as Black teachers and parents. Annual government reports reveal that Black children are more likely to be injured or killed by their parents than by police. In this paper we inquire as to why, despite the many Black writers who have described parental violence as an intergenerational re-enactment of the violence of slavery, and despite decades of research on the harms of hitting children, social theorists have not analyzed how Black parents can serve as proxies for white supremacist violence. We argue that Black parenting culture has in many ways internalized the white supremacist view that corporal punishment is required to instill the discipline necessary to spare Black youth from police violence and incarceration. We conclude that until social scientists foreground the voices of Black youth in their studies, rather than adults, our ability to understand and confront the reproduction of white supremacist violence will be impeded. We argue that the physical punishment of children in Black families is an aspect of the legacy or “afterlife” of slavery. We contend that this omission persists because Black youth voices are absent from social analysis on the issue of physical punishment, existing only in clinical studies divorced from macro-sociological analysis, and we discuss how this omission occurred as a matter of scholarly history.     

#BlackLivesMatter: Innovative Black Resistance

Since 2013, extrajudicial police killings of black people have captured the attention of U.S. and international media, substantially because of the work of leaders in the Black Lives Matter (#BLM) movement. #BLM is simultaneously a group of localized organizations and a broad online social movement. In this article, we examine the #BLM movement in detail, with particular emphasis on the following aspects of the movement: (1) its innovative organizational practices and social media use; (2) its accent on black perspectives (counterframing) of systemic racial oppression, heteronormativity, and capitalism; and (3) its broad emphasis on oppressed Americans, including black women and LGBTQ people. We also situate the #BLM movement within the surrounding system of racial oppression, including the historical role of racialized policing in maintaining social control of blacks. We detail the long tradition of black social movements, especially black feminist organizing, against systemic racial oppression. In doing so, we intend to contribute social movement theorizing that more fully considers powerful counterframed perspectives of black activists in U.S. social movements. Although the #BLM movement reflects black feminism and past civil rights movement struggles, it is a uniquely twenty‐first‐century social movement that uses new technologies for innovative social protest.     

On deaf ears: anti-black police terror,multiracial protest and white loyalty to the state

In this essay, we explore the racialised dimensions of policing practices in Brazil. To do so, we look not at the police, their administrative organisation, and practices, but rather we examine the modes of sociality reflected in and produced by police violence. Drawing from a statistics-based analysis of the social and political outcomes produced by the state in its preparation of mega-sports events – evictions, incarceration, and police violence, for example – we identify a nexus between, on the one hand, racialised violence against black bodies and, on the other hand, white loyalty to the state, despite, or precisely because of, a specific type of violence perpetrated by the state on white bodies. Our primary contention is that we cannot understand white victimisation by the police – and the outrage it produces – without taking into consideration two foundational, dialectical aspects of the regime of rights: complicity and disavowal. White vulnerability to this specific form of state violence – a form of violence that is contingent and produces collective horror – reflects not only the disavowal of black suffering, but also the strengthening of the white public sphere.     

Black,Blue, and Blow: The Effect of Race and Criminal History on Perceptions of Police Violence

This research aims to determine the situational and individual factors that shape perceptions of whether police violence against citizens is justified. Drawing on research on the racialization of crime, modern racism, and the stigma associated with a criminal history, we hypothesize that individuals will view police violence as more justified when targeted at black citizens and those with criminal histories. We further hypothesize that individuals who have higher levels of racial prejudice will view police violence as more justified. Results from a survey experiment using a sample of 595 white respondents show a consistent effect of criminal history, with individuals viewing violence as more justified against a citizen with a previous criminal background. Further, interaction effects indicate that only white respondents who score highly on racial prejudice view violence against a black citizen as more justified compared to violence against a white citizen. These results underscore the importance of how a criminal record serves as an enduring stigma that shapes how individuals are perceived. Additionally, our results are consistent with theories of contemporary racism and show that negative evaluations of black Americans are limited to whites with high levels of racial prejudice.     

Violence against women—social services support during legal proceedings

Social workers and social work have been criticized for failing to address violence against women in adequate ways, of blaming the victim and failing to recognize domestic violence as a problem. At the same time, it is the social services that are responsible for support to abused women, according to amendments in the Social Services Act (2001). This article examines abused women’s own experiences of support in connection with the police investigation of domestic violence. It is a qualitative study with six women who all have received support from the Relationship Violence Center (RVC) in Stockholm. The main findings in the article suggest that support in connection with the judicial process is important. Women’s earlier experiences or preconceptions of the social services might prevent them from accepting support or turning to the social services for help.     

"Calling a state a state": feminist politics and the policing of violence against women in Brazil

This document reports on a 1990 case study of one of Brazil's 80 police stations established for the protection of women in response to feminist pressure to address excessively high levels of violence against women. These police stations, staffed by women to respond exclusively to complaints lodged by women, are an unusual institutional response to such violence. The study examines the station established in Salvador in 1986 to reveal which interests were served by the creation of the specialized stations. The first section of the article addresses the fact that Salvador's policewomen have gained little from the creation of the specialized stations and continue to suffer job-related sexual discrimination. Next, conceptions of gender identity among policewomen are analyzed, and the ideologies of "femininity" and "feminism" in the Brazilian context are discussed. The final section compares views on the abuse of women with views on police brutality and relays incidences when the policewomen beat male prisoners. It is argued that certain forms of violence are actually considered necessary to maintain social order and enact justice. It is concluded that all of the involved parties, the state, the feminists, the female citizenry, and Salvador's female police, benefit in part from the existence of the specialized police stations but that there are serious problems also, especially the fact that the policewomen involved are given little or no special training and no career incentives.     

Religion,male violence,and the control of women: Pakistani Muslim men in Bradford,UK

This paper examines Pakistani Muslim male violence in the public and private spheres in Bradford, UK. The article also explores the relationship between male violence and ideas of culture and religion. The material used was collected over a 4-year period from students and staff in further and higher education institutions; working women (prostitutes); survivors of domestic violence; police personnel who work with Asian women fleeing domestic violence or forced marriages; and staff of a children's society working with teenage prostitutes. Methodologies included lectures, seminars, focus groups, and interviews. Findings reveal that there is a difference between male and female attitudes towards Islam. Some men are using it to justify violence against women, while women of all ages and backgrounds are using it as a source of strength and to negotiate (with ingenuity and humor) the cultural and religious requirements which men try to impose upon them.     

EU ideology

The idea of Europe was radically transformed after the accomplishment of the idea of European unification. The European Union (EU) and Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century were defined by a broad common ideology that consists of ideologies such as antinationalism, social democracy, pacificism and environmentalism. These ideologies are presented by pro-EU scholars and politicians as ideologies rooted in European history and parts of European identity and as being mostly absent in the American policies. The emergence of EU ideology is traced in the relaunch of European integration in the mid-1980s and in Delors’ conflict with Thatcher. It is argued that the emergence of EU ideology is the result of two long-term historical developments: the deepening and enlargement of European integration; and the changing relations between the USA and Europe. It is concluded that the emergence of EU ideology resembles the emergence of nationalism and national ideologies.     

Community organization moderates the effect of alcohol outlet density on violence

There is growing evidence from multiple disciplines that alcohol outlet density is associated with community levels of assault. Based on the theoretical and empirical literatures on social organization and crime, we tested the hypothesis that the association between alcohol outlet density and neighbourhood violence rates is moderated by social organization. Using geocoded police data on assaults, geocoded data on the location of alcohol outlets, and controlling for several structural factors thought to be associated with violence rates, we tested this hypothesis employing negative binomial regression with our sample of 298 block groups in Cincinnati. Our results revealed direct effects of alcohol outlet density and social organization on assault density, and these effects held for different outlet types (i.e., off‐premise, bars, restaurants) and levels of harm (i.e., simple and aggravated assaults). More importantly, we found that the strength of the outlet‐assault association was significantly weaker in more socially organized communities. Subsequent analyses by level of organization revealed no effects of alcohol outlet density on aggravated assaults in organized block groups, but significant effects in disorganized block groups. We found no association between social (dis)organization and outlet density. These results clarify the community‐level relationship between alcohol outlets and violence and have important implications for municipal‐level alcohol policies.     

Economic Migration and Communal Violence in Pakistan

Overseas employment provides multiple socioeconomic benefits for families and communities in sending countries. But communal violence can potentially disrupt these flows, causing lasting damage to local and national economic development. Under what conditions does political violence – and particularly low‐intensity sectarian conflict – increase or decrease economic migration? This article argues that the level of militant control over local political and social institutions conditions whether individuals emigrate for work. Using statistical analysis of Pakistani data on overseas employment and political violence, it finds that attacks by transnational/Islamist militants on local political institutions substantially reduce economic migration. Attacks against non‐political targets have no significant effect, further emphasizing the importance of these bodies.