Doctoral Dissertation Research: Race Matters-- Ideologies of Race in Police Personnel Decisions

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project explores the evolving ideologies of race in police personnel decisions from the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the present. Against the background of the societal forces behind the changing face of metropolitan policing, the project analyzes how police officials, past and present, perceive race to matter in law enforcement. The project involves two phases. The first is historical: the researchers investigate whether and how ideologies of race in policing have changed over time. The second is contemporary: the researchers examine conceptions of the appropriate use of race in police personnel decisions. In both phases, the primary focus is on the official justifications used by police commissioners, police chiefs and higher level officers and officials for taking race into account in making personnel decisions, e.g., recruiting, hiring, promoting and making assignments. These justifications are discernible from EEO lawsuits and consent decrees against urban police departments as well as other archival data, including newspaper interviews and testimony before government bodies. This research is supplemented by interviews and observational data from a case study involving one urban police department in order to explore whether there is a gap between what contemporary law enforcement management is willing to endorse as an appropriate use of race-conscious policies and what street-level officers deem to be an acceptable law enforcement resource. This research has important implications both for the sociology of law with regard to race and criminal justice and for policy considerations regarding the balance between protecting individual rights and achieving societal benefits. This research explores issues of race and policing that have received little scholarly attention and makes significant contributions to several areas of law and social science scholarship, including organizational theory and legal consciousness and ideology.