#LSANOLA16 Preview: Critical Police Studies I

Student Mobilization—Building a Youth Centered Critique of Police in Schools
Analicia Mejia Mesinas, University of California, Irvine

This paper begins to examine the ways in which Black and Latino students experience, understand, and mobilize against the growing use of police in American public schools. The preliminary research presented in this paper is part of a larger ethnographic dissertation project which follows the work of community activists in Southern California, and the growing movement against the militarization of police in schools. In schools, the incorporation of zero tolerance policies, use of police, and other technologies of the criminal justice system-alongside the unparalleled growth of America’s prison system- has sparked new conversations around school climate, educational outcomes, and school criminalization. It is not uncommon for police officers, or school resource officers, to permanently occupy authority and space within American public schools. As a result, student misbehavior now commonly triggers contact with a school police officer, which also often leads to citation and/or arrest in school. Given the growing focus on schools policies, practices, and outcomes in both academic and educational reform arenas, this paper seeks to explore the following questions: What is the public school experience like for a non-white student of color today?; How do students understand and make sense of these policies?; What do students find to be problematic about these practices?; How do students mobilize against these policies?; How do these practices interact with the ways in which students also see themselves? To answer these questions, the current paper will present results from six months of preliminary ethnographic field work conducted for the larger dissertation project. Field work consists of participant observations at a local grassroots and activist community organization, in Southern California. The goal of the community organization is to work within the larger community to bring awareness to, and advocate for, current pressing community issues. The organization has a long history of working and organizing with local high school students in order to advocate for change and reform within schools. The current campaign of the organization is focused specifically around the increased use of police in schools, the growing budget of the local school police department, and the school police’s acquisition of military-grade weapons from the Federal 1033 program. Previous work has documented the ways in which school disciplinary policies and practices subjugate students to a variety of experiences that symbolically, and often overtly, treat students like criminals. Importantly, activists and scholars have called attention to the formal, and informal, ways in which Black and Latino students have become disproportionately affected by these policies. Parallel to current discussions of race and punishment within society at large, this paper argues that interrogations of race must also be central to exploring student experiences in schools. Through preliminary ethnographic work with Black and Latino high school student organizers, including participant observations at “Taking Action” club meetings and semi-structured interviews, the paper also seeks to uncover the anti-black logic deeply integrated within school policing, school discipline and school punishment (Wun 2014). My participant observations followed the activities of the organization with lead staff and student organizers. To do this I became an official volunteer for the organization and worked in the office of the organization on a weekly basis. While in the office I primarily assisted with administrative tasks, which allowed for strong rapport to develop with key organizational staff members. In addition, I shadowed lead staff organizers and followed their leadership in organizing with students directly in the schools. This student organizing took place across five local high schools in Southern California through “Taking Action” campus clubs. These clubs met once a week during lunch and after school, at each respective school. At each campus club meeting organizational staff and students came together to discuss, examine, and critique issues around school policing. In addition, clubs worked to develop strategies for community mobilization against growing police in schools, and the militarization of police more generally. Students also worked to organize larger community rallies and protests. These events often took place at schools, within the larger community, and at larger school board district meetings. Finally, students also organized formal meetings with community stakeholders and district board members to advance their perspectives and seek support for their campaign. In addition to organizing, during my participant observations, I was able to talk with students, and listen to their personal stories, perspectives, and opinions. Because of my regular and ongoing visits to each school I was able to get to know each student personally and discuss issues around the current school climate, school police, and race, through both formal and informal conversations with students. Students often discussed sensitive but critical issues around race, violence, and punishment. Conversations with students also revealed deep insight about their understandings of current issues, as well as strategies for change. Despite the growing empirical research on school discipline and punishment, there is much less work that connects school policies and practices to Black and Latino students’ day to day experiences in schools, and student mobilization against these practices. Current qualitative examinations of school discipline do include some observations and interviews with students, yet critical discussion of race and gender are often lacking. In addition, the majority of narratives used to demonstrate school criminalization are of individuals in positions of assigning and enforcing discipline (this includes staff and administrators, school police and security, and teachers), with much less known about subjective student experience. Finally, current work on school security and school criminalization has focused much less on student mobilization and resistance (Monahan and Torres 2010). Because of this, a youth-centered understanding (Morrill et al. 2000) of the complicated ways students experience, understand, and respond to school criminalization is lacking. This paper also utilizes a youth-centered approach to critically examine the criminalization and mobilization of Black and Latino students in schools. This approach, advanced by Morrill et al. (2000) seeks to build a more complete understanding to the lives of young people. Rather than reducing discussions of youth issues to behavior, it explicitly seeks to understand the values, perspectives, and actions of young people. In this way, young people are more than just trouble makers in need of control and order. Rather, they are active agents, with complicated sets of social understandings and values that must be understood.

“The Sense of Law is Lost”: Car Impoundments and the Racial Naturalization of Mexican Immigrants
Samuel Prieto, University of San Diego

R: Because in reality, the Latino is being treated like a child right now, intimidated and punished. If you do something, we will arrest you. And the Latino believes what the police say: they are all going to be taken to jail and ICE will be at the jail. It is like telling them, “If you eat that candy, not only will I punish you, I will hit you.” That is how the have us right now. They say, “If you drive I will arrest you and take you and deliver you to ICE.” Ok? If you don’t cooperate with the police you become a criminal and will be taken and delivered to ICE. “You want that?” “No, we don’t want that.” “Then stay put and behave.” You get me? G: Like a child. R: Yes. I mean they don’t let us do anything. –Edgardo Police represent one of the greatest threats to Mexican immigrants in their daily lives. They readily understand the growing overlap between immigration enforcement and law enforcement that imperils their physical and socioeconomic mobility in the U.S.: a legal and social transformation that scholars refer to as “crimmigration.” This paper examines immigrant interactions with local police as both peace officers and as proxies for a growing deportation regime. It is also about the ways in which police work is about more than strictly enforce law. They participate in the racial naturalization of Mexican immigrants to American hierarchy. As Edgardo demonstrates, Mexican immigrants recognize this eminently social process enacted in these routine interactions. Consequently, I am interested in immigrants’ experience of police as it is situated at the nexus of law and politics. The enforcement of law is always-already the enactment of politics. If we define politics broadly as the contestation of power in any arena, then we can conceptualize policing as more than simply enforcing law on the books, to use the oft-used phrase of Law and Society scholars. Police are inextricably involved in the political work of undermining or reinscribing the social hierarchies of race and class that are both reflected and reproduced in the laws that police are charged with upholding. In this case, the infantilization that Edgardo describes above is about more than the risk of deportation and the humiliation immanent to interactions with police themselves. If, for instance, the message that law enforcement communicates to Mexican immigrants is to “stay put and behave,” then we are certainly talking about more than compliance with the letter of the law. At issue is “racial naturalization” (Carbado 2002, 2005): a kind of naturalization not to formal citizenship, but to U.S. racial hierarchy and the street level processes of subordination required to maintain it. The consequence of immigrants’ recognition of the many excesses of enforcement is that the “sense of law is lost.” Immigrants mistrust the police and, consequently, lose faith in potential for justice that law contains. Drawing on 61 interviews with Mexican immigrants in two California cities and three years of participant observation with one immigrant rights social movement organization, I present a variety of interactions between Mexican immigrants and police. Unsurprisingly, many are negative, though some are resoundingly positive, including in the case of domestic violence. Many of these perspectives were formed not on the basis of direct interaction with police, but through second hand accounts and rumor trafficked across immigrants’ personal networks. Interestingly, even among those immigrants who are most intensely critical of police, they still demonstrate ambivalence about whether police can be trusted. Mistrust is widespread, but they rely on police to respond to crime and in emergency situations. This ambivalence can be read in two ways, both of which, I argue, are simultaneously plausible. On the one hand, mistrust signals the deteriorating relationship between racialized, low-income immigrant communities and police: a pattern that resonates with historical and contemporary relations between African Americans and police. On the other hand, this ambivalence suggests immigrants still basically rely on police as a bulwark against the chaos they fear might reign in the absence of police. Their abiding faith in police as an abstract institution chafes against their first and second hand experiences with actual police in their daily lives. While relations between Mexican immigrants and police are imperiled by the institutionalized practice of the car impoundment and the broader trend toward crimmigration by local police, this ambivalence may also be read as a generative opening-an invitation-to develop effective community-police relations premised on interventions on serious social harms and not immigration violations. Such an expansive view of the role of police in the racialization of Mexican immigrants takes us beyond a narrow consideration of devolution or deportation per se. While I provide examples of both direct experiences with immigration enforcement and police acting, often unwittingly, on their behalf, I focus in particular on the car impoundment as an informal mechanism of immigrant enforcement. While deportation is the most consequential form of immigration enforcement, deportations represent the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the many forms of risk that immigrants confront daily. The car impoundment deserves closer inspection because it is an understudied feature of the immigration enforcement regime, it creates a serious financial burden for immigrant families, and because it constitutes a ritual of humiliation and subordination, of racial naturalization. To return to the excerpt that opens this chapter, Edgardo, originally from Guererro, Mexico, crossed the border without authorization in 2000. After one unsuccessful attempt, he crossed and settled on the largely Mexican westside of South County where he now runs a small party supply company. While he has moved several times within the city, South County was his first and only U.S. destination. Striking about his comment is not simply that he regards police negatively, but he makes a distinction between being “intimidated and punished,” “punished and hit.” The function of police is not simply to address crime but to make sure that immigrants “stay put and behave.” To use Foucault’s (1975) formulation, beyond strictly enforcing law, police inculcate docility in Mexican immigrants in order to sustain their utility as low-wage laborers. This racializing process, the unique vulnerability of undocumented immigrants to law enforcement, is a form of naturalization. Racial naturalization for Mexican immigrants, especially those without documentation, is to be put in one’s place: immigrants tentative incorporation into a segmented American labor market where their social location as mobile laborers and socioeconomically immobile denizens is sustained through street level processes of humiliation and control that mark them as undocumented and as Mexican.

“What are you doing here?” Policing Race, Controlling Space
Sebastian Sclofsky, University of Florida

A simple question, sometimes asked in a very polite tone, means so much to so many people. From the aggressive way in which police officers in São Paulo ask “tu tá fazendo o que aquí?” or the generally polite way in which Los Angeles Police officers ask “what are you doing here?” millions of non-white residents in São Paulo and Los Angeles are taught what their place in the city is. For these non-white residents of low-income communities in São Paulo and Los Angeles, the police are both a source of fear and a central institution in defining their place in society. The regular encounters these residents have with the police, most of them violent, shape their racial, class, spatial and civic identity. Moreover, residents of these communities have learned the hard way, which areas of the city they are excluded from. Both Los Angeles and São Paulo have erected physical and virtual walls that separate the different areas of the city as Caldeira (2000) and Davis (1990) show. From gated communities to hyper securitized condominiums and apartments, these cities have created reserved places in which access depends on class and race. Those marginalized from these spaces gain access to them only to provide services – domestic services generally speaking – in a city that needs them but does not see them. Policing is territorial in its core; it is the assertion of state power in a defined territory, a competence which, while bounded by law, has almost a Hobbesian sense in that, by potentially having the authority of using deadly force, can determine life and dead. However, policing is more than the expression of the sovereign power in a specific territory; it involves direct, even coercive governance on behalf of the community (Seri, 2012); it is about guiding and giving shape to individual and collective behavior. From the outset, Neocleous (2000) reminds us, the police was for the most part concerned not with criminal activity but with activities potentially damaging to communal good order. Yet, “communal good order” does not really represent the democratic collective expression of the people, especially when many are excluded from the definition of “people”. Defining who the “people” are is in many ways a policing activity, determined by the differential ways in which the police act toward different people and in different spaces. When low-income, non-white dwellers of the periphery dare to wander into certain spaces, the police will “teach” them that these areas are out of bounds, defining the place these individuals occupy in society, reminding them that the city is excluded for them. In this sense, understanding the way police discretion is exercised becomes crucial because it defines who is deviant and how deviance is controlled; and, as mentioned above, it dictates who people are and who are not. By defining who the people are, they also define who has rights and who has not. While the level of violence in São Paulo is more intense than in Los Angeles, non-white residents of both cities’ “periphery” share similar experiences with law enforcement that very much define their civic identity. Furthermore, the contrasting way in which policing is conducted in the different neighborhoods constructs spatial identities determining what is the city and what is the “periphery”. In this sense, the police have a strong symbolic power determining spatial and individual identities. Aristotle’s famous expression, which states that only beasts or gods live outside the city, takes real life in today’s police governance; to be excluded from the city means to be excluded from citizenship, and those excluded are definitely not portrayed as gods. The images of the periphery or inner-city ghettoes are one of lawlessness and violence, a place that needs to be under constant surveillance for the threat it poses to the city and to its social order. As Neocleous (2000) contends, policing poverty is regarded as a necessity because of the perceived connection between forms of disorderly behavior and poverty. In his ethnographic study of urban policing in Paris suburbs, French anthropologist Didier Fassin argues that the police and the residents cannot be held solely responsible for the tensions between them; there is a history and a context that defines this encounter. The socio-economic and racial structure that developed in Brazil and the United States defines the context in which police activity takes place. The process of deindustrialization brought by neoliberalism reinforced a class structure that required stronger methods of control. In these neoliberal regimes of control, the police play a crucial role in keeping this marginalized population under surveillance and, as much as possible, invisible to society. Even when residents of these communities move up in the socio-economic scale, encounters with the police will remind them what their place in society is, indicating the important role race plays in the class structure. As orderly as modern society seems to be, it is founded on profound insecurities caused by an economic system that creates “disposable” people who need to be controlled; it is a deliberate effort to maintain individuals and societies in an orderly fashion, recreating through new means the existing economic and racial order (Seri, 2000). Based on in-depth interviews with residents of São Paulo’s periphery and Los Angeles southern neighborhoods, this paper document the ways in which this “educational” performance of the police work and how it defines race, class and space. It shows how freedom of movement, a basic democratic right guaranteed in the Constitution of both countries, has almost no meaning for the millions of black and brown residents of the “periphery”, to the point that many residents have internalized the spatial seclusion imposed through policing. Residents are afraid of venturing into richer or whiter neighborhoods. By exploring this process, this paper contributes to the understanding of the role the police play in constructing identities and governing citizenship, how it poses a serious challenge to democracy, and undermines equal access to and exercise of rights and citizenship.