Doctoral Dissertation Research: Residential Segregation and Policing Styles

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

Residential Segregation and Policing Styles This project explores the processes by which different places, and thus people, come to experience fundamentally different styles of policing. It uses the case of a police department's project of redrawing its district boundaries in the context of a highly segregated Rust Belt city. In contrast to many redistricting efforts that aim to more evenly distribute urban service provision across a jurisdiction, this redistricting intended to concentrate distinct policing problems within the new districts. In so doing, it created more racially homogenous districts and opened the door for divergence in policing practices. This study examines the motivations for and consequences of this reform. It aims to expand our understanding of the varied roles that the police play in projects of social control and service provision by identifying the relational and socially constructed nature of policing priorities across the city. The research has the potential to inform policing and to improve relationships between police and the policed. The researcher describes the motivations for and consequences of the redistricting through a multi-method design that links the structural context of racial residential segregation to institutional priorities that in turn shape on-the-ground policing. First, the researcher will interview 80 stakeholders involved in or affected by the redistricting in order to identify the networks and interests that structured the redistricting process. Next, the researcher explores the current social organization of police work at the district-level through a year of ethnographic observation of two of the most affected districts. Finally, the researcher describes the intended and unintended consequences of the change through longitudinal analysis of calls for service data, arrest and citation data, crime data, and demographic data. In examining the relationship between residential segregation and policing styles, the researcher identifies the dynamics of policing that not only re-inscribe and maintain segregation boundaries, but reconstitute the nature of segregation by actively creating different kinds of spaces in the city. Thus, this research both contributes to sociology of crime, criminology and community studies but it also contributes to strengthening the relationship between police and the policed. It contributes to understanding how to change the processes that lead to the material and symbolic racial disparities that characterizes these relationships and attends to broader historical and institutional processes as well as mandates at the institutional level.