Abstract
Policing the Racial Divide focuses on the redrawing of police districts in River City, a postindustrial Rust Belt metropolis. Daanika Gordon comprehensively documents the logic of the redistricting, which reinscribed existing lines of race and class segregation within the city. She also cogently demonstrates how officers’ orientations to their jobs and daily practices function to reproduce—indeed, to broaden—racial and class inequalities, as the on-the-ground workforce responsible for enacting redistricting-linked policing strategies.
As Gordon notes, this is a compelling case of literal boundary work in the contemporary city. She focuses specifically on two new districts created through the redistricting: the disproportionately White and affluent East District, and the disproportionately Black and disadvantaged West District. Gordon’s analysis of the marked differences in people’s experiences and outcomes across these districts draws on rich ethnographic data on both the discourse of the redistricting process itself and the lived reality of policing within the redrawn district lines.
In a certain sense, Policing the Racial Divide is about the “where” of policing: the delineation of urban space for criminal justice purposes. The book truly shines, however, in its use of “where” to address “who,” “how,” and “why” questions. Gordon’s account shows what redistricting means for different populations, law enforcement officers’ day-to-day actions, and ultimately both abstract conceptions and concrete manifestations of the police department’s guiding purposes.
The book is a remarkable achievement. As well as any policing book in recent memory, it spans macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis, deftly weaving empirical data and drawing analytical connections that link the structural, the organizational, and the interactional. It is well organized, clearly written, and a joy to read. It takes a lot of effort to make writing appear this effortless.
Gordon’s work offers numerous important and timely findings. For good reason, many criminal justice ethnographies focus on the most marginalized and overpoliced parts of cities (like River City’s West District). Policing the Racial Divide certainly attends to police practices in the West District; it does so, however, through a relational analysis that juxtaposes how things work in the West with how they work in the Whiter and wealthier East. In the West, crime control is the mission, with a heavy focus on proactive policing methods like investigatory stops. In the East, however, the focus is on providing services in support of businesses and protecting comparatively advantaged residents’ quality of life.
It is unsurprising that policing styles and resources vary widely between the two districts. But Policing the Racial Divide stands out in demonstrating that these disparities are the intentional products of a redistricting plan that divided the city based on perceptions of differences in local populations and neighborhoods’ characteristic problems. The redistricting consciously created one district that would receive more calls for service—the West—and another that would receive fewer—the East. As Gordon’s fieldwork vividly captures, this means that officers working in the East have far more time to dedicate to responding to requests from citizens, while officers in the West find themselves running around “like chickens with their heads cut off” (p. 197).
The analysis of River City’s East-West disparities constitutes an outstanding account of how policing serves to protect capital in contemporary cities. In part, this is about protecting the better-off residents of the East District (and thus, in theory, protecting their contributions to the city’s tax base). But it is also about supporting the entertainment areas that the redistricting plan deliberately concentrated in the East.
In dealing with East District residents and businesses, River City police seem to aspire to “protect and serve.” West District residents have a decidedly different experience. Although police departments are noteworthy for their status as generalists, tackling a wide variety of problems, Gordon shows how locally specialized they can be, occupying strikingly different roles in different districts. Among the evidence she marshals is a discussion of the distinct organizational structures in place in the different districts. In the East, the Entertainment Corridor Deployment serves to facilitate commerce, addressing what officers call “East District problems” like inebriated bar patrons and the placement of food carts. In the West, on the other hand, the antiviolence unit pursues an aggressive proactive policing campaign of patrol and investigatory stops without a parallel in the East.
Complementing a long line of research on “deservingness” in the allocation of public resources, Policing the Racial Divide reveals how race- and class-driven perceptions shape how and to what degree police resources are deployed in different neighborhoods. Officers in the West say that they have no time for “stupid stuff” and that they need to focus their attention on more serious crimes (p. 134). Gordon’s work shows how such triage is not just the result of street-level bureaucrats’ discretionary action, but the outgrowth of an intentional strategy of concentrating calls for service in a particular district. In turn, officers working in the lower call volume East District have more time to deal with “stupid stuff”—indeed, Entertainment Corridor Deployment officers work directly with businesses to address relatively minor problems that might disrupt commerce. Moreover, Gordon shows how these officers tend to see Black people in these predominantly White spaces as likely sources of such disruption, and accordingly police in racialized ways that serve to reassert White supremacy and segregation.
Policing the Racial Divide is a landmark study that will prove a touchstone for much research to come. It is essential reading for urban sociologists, race scholars, and anyone interested in contemporary strategies and tactics of policing cities. It also contributes significantly to social scientific literatures on bureaucracy, organizations, and local politics. I recommend its consideration for undergraduate or graduate courses dealing with any of these topics. Its careful and sophisticated methodology also makes it an excellent candidate for graduate courses on research design and qualitative methods.