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This paper expands our understanding of the lived experience of policing by exploring how people describe and analyze one of its salient aspects: its economic consequences. Despite growing scholarship on predatory policing strategies in the aftermath of the Justice Department's investigation of Ferguson, Missouri, we lack an understanding of how these practices are experienced, theorized, and resisted by policed, race-class subjugated (RCS) communities. How do people narrate, make meaning from, or theorize their material relationship to policing? Do policed publics understand such practices as part of broader processes of racialized governance, political power, and community inequality? Utilizing the Portals Policing Project, we collected the largest contemporary database of narratives about policing, including over 850 dialogues that were qualitatively coded. Using a grounded theory approach we analyzed a subset of dialogues that focus on financial aspects of police, court, and carceral encounters to examine how people discussed their experiences with monetary sanctions and their broader meanings and relationships to racialized political economy and geography. When people analyzed the material dimensions of policing and incarceration, four prominent discursive theorizations emerged: (1) Police and courts deploy a variety of techniques (criminalizing public space, strategic application of child support fees, unfair taxation, among others) to structurally control the flow of RCS resources, often toward the state and non-policed White communities. (2) Such resource flows occur in the broader context of municipal prioritization of police and carceral institutions over schools and social services, which permit and sustain RCS community criminalization, extraction, and reproduction of marginalization. (3) Police construct racialized urban spaces and markets, marking informal RCS economic activity as transgressive and delimiting their expansion. (4) Police surveillance is racially embodied and permeates daily life to restrict individual activity and, indirectly, economic potential. Overall, these narratives center the police and carceral state in processes of materialized race-making—the active reproduction of racial economic inequality and dispossession that goes beyond basic racial disparities in state punishment and revenue generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dark-skinned blacks in the United States have lower socioeconomic status, more punitive relationships with the criminal justice system, diminished prestige, and less likelihood of holding elective office compared with their lighter counterparts. This phenomenon of "colorism" both occurs within the African American community and is expressed by outsiders, and most blacks are aware of it. Nevertheless, blacks' perceptions of discrimination, belief that their fates are linked, or attachment to their race almost never vary by skin color. We identify this disparity between treatment and political attitudes as "the skin color paradox," and use it as a window into the politics of race in the United States over the past half-century. Using national surveys, we explain the skin color paradox as follows: Blacks' commitment to racial identity overrides the potential for skin color discrimination to have political significance. That is, because most blacks see the fight against racial hierarchy as requiring their primary allegiance, they do not see or do not choose to express concern about the internal hierarchy of skin tone. Thus dark-skinned blacks' widespread experience of harm has no political outlet--which generates the skin color paradox. The article concludes by asking how much concern the skin color paradox really warrants. Without fully resolving that question, we note that policies designed to solve the problem of racial hierarchy are not helpful to and may even make worse the problem of skin color hierarchy within the black population. (Contains 5 tables, 3 figures and 13 notes.)

Political scientist Hakeem Jefferson (Stanford University) facilitated a discussion about race, policing, and the state of American democracy with fellow political scientists Cathy J. Cohen (University of Chicago), Yanilda M. González (Harvard Kennedy School), Rebecca U. Thorpe (University of Washington), and Vesla M. Weaver (Johns Hopkins University) on May 26, 2021. The conversation occurred a year after George Perry Floyd Jr., a 46-year-old Black man, was murdered by a White police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Moving beyond common notions of democracy that focus primarily on voting and electoral participation, the panelists discussed how American policing and the criminal justice system, more broadly, redefine citizenship, redistribute power, and shape marginalized people's understanding of their place in society. Closing remarks addressed the potential for change in how criminal justice institutions treat marginalized people and how political scientists can more usefully contribute to efforts that strengthen democracy for all. This is an edited transcript of the conversation and includes a bibliography of the sources mentioned. A video of the conversation is available online at https://www.annualreviews.org/r/BeyondtheBallotBox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: We examine discourse from highly policed communities to understand how people employ ideas and practices in everyday life that resonate with abolitionism. Methods: Using a civic infrastructure that connects people across cities, Portals, we draw from an archive of 415 dialogues centered on policing in five cities collected between 2016 and 2018. Using grounded theory, we identified and analyzed dialogues conveying an abolitionist perspective. Results: This article identifies three abolitionist themes in the dialogues: (1) A broad critique of safety rhetoric and ideology that participants believe is deployed to sanctify and expand policing; (2) An argument for existing communal structures as critical anchors in the broader transformation of their neighborhoods away from policing and toward alternative systems of justice grounded in relationality and reciprocity; and (3) Material and cultural autonomy as essential to futurist visioning and, ultimately, police abolition. Beyond documenting an abolitionist politic across the full set of dialogues, we analyze three conversations in‐depth to locate these themes in their full conversational complexity. Conclusion: The Portals dialogues expand our understanding of police abolition by grounding it in everyday conversation and in the people and places most impacted by policing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses a new technology, "Portals," to initiate conversations about policing between individuals in communities where this form of state action is concentrated. Based on more than 800 recorded and transcribed conversations across 12 neighborhoods in five cities, the largest collection of policing narratives to date, we analyze patterns in discourse around policing. Our goal in closely analyzing these conversations is to uncover how people who experience state authority through policing characterize democratic governance by mapping citizens' experiences with and views of the state, how they judge the responsiveness of authorities, and their experience-informed critiques of democracy. Methodologically, we argue that observing through Portals real conversations of ordinary people largely unmediated by the researcher allows us to transcend certain limitations of traditional, survey-based techniques and to study politics in beneficially recursive ways. Theoretically, we demonstrate that Portals participants characterize police as contradictory—everywhere when surveilling people's everyday activity and nowhere if called upon to respond to serious harm. We call this Janus-faced interaction with the state "distorted responsiveness," and we demonstrate the organic connection of this characterization of police to our participants' theorization of their broader relationship with the state. We argue that their understandings of their own relationships with the key state institutions in their lives are foundational to developing a fuller understanding of democracy in action. In short, by focusing on how individuals experience citizenship in the city through ordinary experiences with municipal bureaucrats who figure prominently in their lives, we can develop a theory of the state from below. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]