Abstract
In 1955, Emmett Till’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie river, Mississippi. He was a 14-year-old Black boy tortured and ultimately killed by two white males after allegations that he flirted with a white woman. The news of his murder, and in particular the images documenting the horrific violence that marked his final moments, helped to galvanize the Civil Rights movement across the United States. But Emmett’s story did not end there: in 2007 a memorial was placed along the river, 50-odd years after the fact. It was not a particularly impressive structure—a placard with a bare statement about the aftermath of the killing, not of the killing itself (the six sentences affixed began by duly stating “This is the site where Till’s body was removed from the river”). For all we know (age-less and race-less Emmett) Till could have drowned while swimming on a hot summer day, as the marker omitted the fact that a murdered Black boy had been found. Back at the site there were no other displays calling for dialogue, reflection, or reconciliation. Despite its poignant, unpretentious allure, the sign was stolen a year after its dedication. The new placard fared worse: it was promptly riddled with bullets and discarded. In 2018, a third sign went up eventually and a month later it was shot again multiple times. And then again in early 2019. Last fall, a new memorial was put in place featuring flowers and lighting and an expanded set of posted remarks. It was also made out of a 500-pound steel plate and bullet-proof glass.
In Hands Up, Don’t Shoot, Jennifer Cobbina’s first book, we are given an account of two cities with a “deep history of racial segregation and economic inequality” (p. 8)—Ferguson and Baltimore—that highlights continuities and discontinuities in forms of violence and strategies of mobilization shortly after the murders of Michael Brown (2014) and Freddie Gray (2015). The author links these events and the demonstrations that ensued to the lived experience of aggressive policing conveyed by local residents and protesters. In particular, she shows how cumulative routines of citizen harassment and abuse “set the stage” (p. 53) for subsequent individual and collective reactions to the killings. Importantly, Cobbina also sees the modern-day shootings of Black men and women by the police as reflective of a pattern of “racial hostility” with “deep historical forces” (p. 5) connecting the old slave patrols in rural areas of Mississippi or Georgia to the new vertical patrols in the projects of New York or Chicago. Then and now, victims are mostly male, young, and Black, in an arch that links Emmett Till to Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, but also Laura Nelson to Atatiana Jefferson and Miriam Carey. And while there is more apparent variation on the perpetrator-side of these crimes—from old plantation owners to new Broken Windows taskforces—Hands Up sketches a model that identifies common elements of terror and control, and relates them to an evolving repertoire of state-sanctioned violence(s). For Cobbina, the killings of Bown, Gray and counteless others are not simply a product of random acts of violence, but the “poisonous legacy of racism [. . .] visible on America’s criminal justice system” (p. 5).
To ground this perspective, Cobbina combines a review of police organizations and protocols in Ferguson and Baltimore with an impressive array of primary data in the form of in-depth semi-structured interviews and fieldwork visits. Specifically, she and her small team of collaborators used purposive sampling to interview nearly 200 local residents and protesters, most of whom recalled direct and vicarious negative interactions with the police before and during the uprisings. They found that Black participants were more likely to reference these encounters, many of which were coded as signaling racial profiling or aggressive policing. The individual accounts compiled by the research not only helped to configure a general sense of mistrust toward law enforcement; they also fueled more specific sentiments toward mobilization and resistance after the high-profile killings mentioned above, shaping varying forms of involvement classified by Cobbina as “revolutionary”, “intermittent”, or “tourist” (p. 120). But as noted in Hands Up, the dynamics of personal and collective experiences with police, and their subsequent projection into local mobilizations are far from linear or homogenous: many residents interviewed acknowledged having positive interactions with the police, particularly in Baltimore relative to Ferguson. Similarly, Baltimore residents had a more favorable perspective of how the police handled the aftermath of Freddy Gray’s killing, and reported fewer instances of repressive protest tactics by local law enforcement. For some participants, Black cops were “courteous and understanding” (p. 57) whereas other participants thought that they were “aggressive” (p. 60) or otherwise coopted by a professional subculture emphasizing cohesion and solidarity (the “blue wall”) (p. 64). Cobbina navigates this nuance and complexity skillfully across both method and theory: in her chapter on Public Disorder, for example, she integrates the specifics of individuals’ experience and interaction with the police with features of the two social settings considered in her research, including structural factors and other markers of local ideology, culture, and institutions/organizations. This strategy delivers an effective, systematic contrast of the context and dynamics surrounding the uprisings across actors, actions, and ambitions.
As a project that takes on the challenge of building a history of the present, Hands Up is a timely contribution: its empirical foundation and framework can strengthen local conversations about police reform, social justice, and civic engagement, in a way that supplement more national-level efforts and ambitions often weakened by generalization and federalism. Hands Up is also essential because it adds a comparative, police-focused perspective to the growing toolkit of approaches geared toward exposing and explaining the ubiquity of racialized punishment in modern America. “The continuity of past and present”, says Cobbina, has remained relatively “unchallenged” (p. 6) by method or theory, particularly in the otherwise White/Male-dominated world of policing. The author’s dual role as “outsider”/“insider” (p. 168) makes for a powerful vantage point: as described in the book, she is on the one hand, a middle-class, out-of-state professor/researcher, and on the other hand, a Black female and former resident of St Louis—a city minutes away from Ferguson. Beyond her own biography, Cobbina’s attention to the historical legacies of racial violence is also helpful because as implied throughout Hands Up, collective memory is a key vector of social identity that helps to bridge individuals’ stories of police abuse with other past or present vicarious experiences. At the convergence of these narratives, the author finds critical cues to rethink police legitimacy and mobilization for reform. In this way, the book is not only a text that applies an intersectional approach to the study of policing across race or gender, but also one that seeks to extend this perspective by including context—neighborhood and city—and other markers of collective identity—shared lived experience and common history.
Hands Up also provides a solid foundation to deepen our understanding of social movements such as Black Lives Matter (BLM) that embody their own set of continuities and discontinuities with the past. As Cobbina notes, social media helped to grow the organization quickly, building up advocacy and public education efforts. But in what ways are these outreach efforts and their underlying fuel and resulting action reminiscent of the more distal mobilizations of the 1960s? To what extent are they different from other contemporary social movements? From the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, we have witnessed tremendous energy and collective power in demonstrations that just like BLM seek change but tend to resist conventional structure and formality. Does that help or hinder the settling of grievances? Can more diffuse social movements help with the implementation of reforms as much as they contribute to making problems visible and rallying support for change? Away from Ferguson and Baltimore, widespread mobilizations with ambitious agendas of social reform in Egypt, Turkey, or Brazil were unable to sustain momentum, leading to more authoritarian regimes.
Cobbina’s book also invites us to think more systematically about police violence in urban contexts. Its rich grounding in fieldwork and interviews illustrates the breadth of the particular ceremonies of degradation embedded in routine citizen–police encounters. While some of them involve explicit markers of force or threat, others are more diffuse in targets or instruments—e.g. second-guessing witnesses, mocking suspects, neglecting victims. How do these specific exchanges accommodate recent changes in law and policy aimed at reducing the opacity of encounters and their potential deleterious consequences? More broadly, to what extent could the book’s focus on the racialized consequences of over-policing be supplemented with a similar approach to the making and impact of under-policing?
Hopefully, these are questions that others in the field will pick up soon. Cobbina certainly got us off to a good start.