Race and policing in historical context: Dehumanization and the policing of Black people in the 21st century
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480616677493 |
| Published date | 01 February 2017 |
| Author | Akwasi Owusu-Bempah |
| Date | 01 February 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
677493TCR0010.1177/1362480616677493Theoretical CriminologyOwusu-Bempah
research-article2016
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2017, Vol. 21(1) 23 –34
Race and policing in historical
© The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:
context: Dehumanization and sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480616677493
DOI: 10.1177/1362480616677493
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
the policing of Black people in
the 21st century
Akwasi Owusu-Bempah
University of Toronto, Canada
Abstract
Too little consideration has been given to conceptualizing race within mainstream
criminological scholarship. One consequence of this oversight is the existence of a stale
debate over the causes of racial disparities in crime and criminal justice outcomes. This
article draws upon intersectionality to present an historical analysis of the policing of
African Americans. The article argues that the concept of dehumanization helps explain
the structural inequalities that produce crime within African American communities and
the presence of racism within law enforcement agencies. The discipline may advance
research in this area by adopting a constructionist racialization framework.
Keywords
African American, dehumanization, policing, race, racialization
Introduction
Criminologists have devoted considerable effort to understanding Black Americans’ rela-
tionship with the police over the last half-century. Yet, despite the voluminous research
produced, there remains no consensus over what causes Blacks to be disproportionately
stopped, searched, processed, and in some cases killed by law enforcement agencies. In
this article, I argue that the debate over underlying causes—whether increased participation
Corresponding author:
Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, 725 Spadina Avenue, Toronto,
ON M5S 2J4, Canada.
Email: a.o.bempah@utoronto.ca
24
Theoretical Criminology 21(1)
in crime on the part of African Americans or racial discrimination on the part of police
officers and police agencies—persists because criminologists have largely failed to recog-
nize that these are mutually reinforcing phenomena both rooted in the history of American
race-relations.
To better capture how this mutually reinforcing phenomenon arose and manifests, I
take an historical approach similar to Wacquant (2002) to examine African Americans’
contemporary experiences with crime and criminal justice. In doing so I argue that dehu-
manization, an enduring feature of the African American experience, continues to influ-
ence their experiences with crime and the law enforcement agencies charged with
tackling it. Here, intersectionality provides a useful theoretical lens through which to
examine these connections, namely by encouraging a constructionist approach, attentive
to the interplay between different forms of oppression—in the present context, primarily
race and class. This approach highlights the role that ideas about race and racial differ-
ence have played in producing the socioeconomic conditions that increase participation
in crime (and vice-versa) (Omi and Winant, 2015; Potter, 2015).
The article proceeds as follows. The first section provides some recent background on
race and policing while the second identifies several theoretical shortcomings in most
criminological research in the area. The third part outlines how the historical develop-
ment of race, racial inequality and the process of racialization are crucial to understand-
ing contemporary police-race-relations while the fourth section of the article applies the
concept to dehumanization to an analysis of Black Americans’ experiences with the
police, the broader justice system, and society at large. The article concludes with a short
summary and suggestions for future research.
Background
The recent deaths of African Americans at the hands of the police and the social unrest
that has followed have propelled issues of race, justice, and policing to the forefront of
the American conscience in a manner not seen since the beating of the late Rodney King
by the LAPD in the early 1990s. Undoubtedly, the coercive role that law enforcement has
played in the lives of Black people in the USA over the past two centuries is well docu-
mented and well remembered (Alexander, 2012; Jones-Brown, 2007; Tonry, 2011).
Blacks, irrespective of gender and sexual orientation, are generally more likely to be
stopped, searched and arrested by the police, are more likely to be the victims of police
use of force, and are more likely to report negative police experiences than are members
of other racial groups (Engel and Calnon, 2004; Harris, 1999; Kochel et al., 2011; Potter,
2015; Walker et al., 2009; Warren, 2011). As a result, a majority of African Americans
fear unjust treatment by the police (Weitzer, 2010; Weitzer and Tuch, 2006). Social psy-
chological research demonstrates subconscious mental associations between race and
crime (Eberhardt et al., 2004) and suggests that police officers hold more racially biased
and xenophobic attitudes than members of the general public (Sidanius et al., 2003).
Nevertheless, debate surrounding the causes of racial disparities persists (Engel and
Swartz, 2014) while commentators continue to reject the idea that the police and other
justice agencies are racially biased (Beaver et al., 2013).1
Owusu-Bempah
25
Theoretical shortcomings
Over two decades ago, in calling for a “Black criminology”, Russell (1992) noted that
the discipline had done much to illuminate the over-representation of Black people in
crime statistics but had done little to explain it (for more recent articulations, see Penn,
2003; Unnever and Gabbidon, 2011). As Chan (2004) acknowledges, a major barrier to
explaining the complexities of racial disparity and racial discrimination within the justice
system is a general acceptance of race and racial categories as fixed and immutable.
Likewise, Holdaway (1997) argues far too little attention has been given to how race is
conceptualized or to the theoretical foundations upon which most studies on race in
criminology are based (see also Bolton and Feagin, 2004). These trends are increasingly
troublesome when we consider the role that criminology and other social sciences have
played in the criminalization of Blackness (Muhammad, 2010). As Muhammad (2010)
convincingly demonstrates, social science has been integral in shaping modern concep-
tions of race, and by linking Blackness with crime, has constituted the former as an
important marker of oppression in present day American society (see also Rowe, 2012
and Williams, 2015 for other contexts).
As Ward (2014: 12) duly notes, criminologists have largely failed to consider how the
discipline is implicated in the maintenance of racial schemas associating race and crime,
in fueling racialized crime fears that justify stop-and-frisk tactics, the school to prison
pipeline and public support for punitive policies. In accounting for the over-representa-
tion of Blacks in police and other justice statistics, and in attempting to uncover racial
bias, we have also largely ignored what Ward (2014: 2) (drawing on Nixon, 2011)
describes as “slow violence”, the structural violence of deprivation that serves to estab-
lish economic inequalities and maintain relations of racial domination and subordination.
These include physical violence, property destruction, and dispossession over the past
two centuries that continue to foster generational poverty, poor work prospects, neigh-
borhood change, racial resentment, and distrust of police—all factors that Unnever and
Gabbidon (2011) include in their theory of African American offending.2 In questioning
whether increased participation in crime or police discrimination accounts for the over-
representation of Blacks in police statistics, we ignore the fact that both have a common
genesis rooted in the history of American race-relations.
It is no surprise, then, that an historical perspective is integral to the “Black criminol-
ogy” called for by Russell (1992) or the “minority perspective” advocated by Phillips
and Bowling (2003). What these scholars are calling for is a more inclusive research
agenda within criminology that is informed, at least implicitly, by an understanding of
the emergence of race as a meaningful social category and an appreciation of how both
historical and contemporary racial schemas influence minority experiences with the
justice system and its representatives, especially the police (Hirschman, 2004). As
Paulhamus et al. (2010: 250) contend:
considering the...
To continue reading
Request your trial