Trust, Legitimacy, and Discretion: Narratives of Asymmetrical Interactions between Police
and Black Citizens
Waverly Duck---(Draft—Please do not cite without permission)
This paper argues that overlapping surveillance systems—police, schools, creditors, social
workers, public housing officials, landlords, probation and parole officers—place multiple,
contradictory demands on the residents of poor Black neighborhoods that are often impossible to
satisfy. Reporting on an ethnographic study of residents’ interactions with police and other
agents of surveillance, the study surveys a range of problems that residents face as they try to
meet conflicting demands while avoiding sanctions. The analysis shows that issues of trust,
legitimacy, and the discretionary authority of police and other “outsiders” in the neighborhood
pervade these interactions. Further, it highlights the complex ways in which family dynamics,
unemployment, debt, and drug dealing intersect with the activities of law enforcement and the
threat of imprisonment that is woven into the fabric of residents’ lives.
Introduction
This article examines residents’ perspectives on law enforcement in a predominately poor and
working class African American neighborhood. The neighborhood, which I call Lyford Street, is
located in a city I call Bristol Hill.1 The article focuses on residents’ reports of their interactions
with law enforcement, particularly the practices and sense-making strategies used in these
interactions. The analysis starts from a simple fact: In this heavily policed community, everyone,
regardless of who they are, is affected by law enforcement practices. Thus, in order to manage
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their lives on a daily basis, everyone must pay close attention to the particular ways law
enforcement functions in neighborhood settings, as well as in schools and other institutions.
In what follows, I present several accounts by African Americans, including myself,2 of
encounters with law enforcement, and examine the various activities of law enforcers by way of
an interaction order approach. I argue that a local cultural order—which, following Erving
Goffman (1983), I call an “interaction order” because it governs how people relate to one
another—makes daily existence on Lyford Street possible. In Goffman’s (1983, 2) words, “the
interaction order can easily be viewed as the consequences of a system of enabling conventions,
in the sense of the ground rules for a game, the provisions of a traffic code or the rules of syntax
of a language.” The concept of interaction order provides important insights into how people
creatively adapt to policy changes that negatively affect their life chances, and do so in a manner
that provides them with some degree of control over outcomes.
I show that law enforcement officers’ discretionary use of authority shapes a
community’s perception of that authority’s legitimacy in both negative and positive ways. Such
perceived legitimacy is always context- and situation- specific, especially with regard to
accountability. Through the narratives presented in this article, we gain a sense of how recurrent
everyday interactions with law enforcement shape not only a community’s sense of justice, but
also the underlying tensions that exist between residents and those whose job is to serve and
protect them. As we will see, the interactions between residents and law enforcement officials
are powerfully shaped by an underlying asymmetry rooted in the power of the police to sanction
the people.
Several scholars have touched upon various kinds of embedded surveillance systems,
especially the ways they shape interactions. For example, Patricia Fernández-Kelly (2015)
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examines the state by way of its liminal institutions, such as prisons, schools, child protective
services, and public housing officials. Fernández-Kelly argues that the United States’ liminal
institutions interfere with the lives of Americans in precarious circumstances, and that
governments should reconsider public institutions that contribute to the maintenance of irregular
conditions in American cities. Relatedly, Michelle Alexander (2012) describes a neo-caste
system, “the new Jim Crow,” created by the criminal justice system via prisons, probation,
parole, and the mark of a criminal record. This system exercises punitive control over African
Americans, compromising their basic human rights to such goods as housing, education,
employment, and voting.
In his research on juvenile justice, Victor Rios (2011) developed the concept of the
“youth control complex,” a ubiquitous system that functions to monitor, stigmatize, criminalize,
and collectively punish young people of color. Rios examines how this complex operates in
schools, where local police and school officials provide security, and where even those in
positions of power have little discretion once a zero-tolerance policy is invoked. Reuben Miller
and Amanda Alexander (2016) coin the concept “carceral citizenship” to describe the legal and
extralegal sanctions imposed on the criminalized poor, their families, and the communities to
which they return post-incarceration. This new form of citizenship, produced and sustained by a
host of actors with the power to sanction, the effects of legal exclusion, and stigma, shapes the
everyday lives of the Black and Brown poor.
First I describe how outsiders—including myself—view law enforcement in the Lyford
Street community. Next, I examine a range of narratives by neighborhood residents concerning
their interactions with law enforcement. Finally, I conclude with reflections on the system of
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collective punishment that increasingly affects poor neighborhoods, leaving residents with very
little recourse in the face of injustice.
Policing Poor and Working Class Black Neighborhoods
Residents in poor, racially segregated neighborhoods tend to live out their lives without access to
jobs that pay livable wages, attend failing schools that have been condemned by state boards of
education and, all too often, find themselves and their relatives imprisoned. In the popular
imagination, urban areas inhabited largely by impoverished African Americans and other
marginalized people of color are typically viewed as chaotic places where drug dealing, street
crime, and random violence make daily life dangerous for everyone. The physical dilapidation of
rental housing, vacant storefronts, and empty lots reinforces the perception of social disorder that
is assumed to characterize these neighborhoods. Indeed, many Americans simply block out these
places in their mental maps of the city and take care to avoid them.
Contrary to such misconceptions, I argue that conditions in these communities do not
indicate a lack of social order or morality, but rather a highly developed social organization that
enables people to survive under increasingly desperate circumstances. William Julius Wilson
(1987) contends that the concentrated disadvantage in these communities has been intensified by
the war on drugs, the criminalization of school children for minor offences, the elimination of
welfare programs, and the deterioration of schools. All this, combined with a lack of awareness
on the part of many Americans that such conditions even exist, has forged profoundly isolated,
oppressed, and volatile communities. Arguing against the common tendency to blame these
people for being poor because of their “culture of poverty,” Wilson insists that poverty, not
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culture, is the primary cause of these conditions. Building on Wilson’s insights, I find that the
culture of these places is directly responsive to the poverty and isolation against which people
have organized for survival. Poverty is indeed a primary culprit. But so are the divisions of race
and class that create the forces of isolation.
While poverty and race are significant in this space, overlapping surveillance systems—
police, schools, lenders, social workers, public housing officials, landlords, probation and parole
officers—impose multiple, contradictory expectations on residents, such that interactional
commitments between residents and those with a surveillance mandate, such as the police, can be
impossible to satisfy. This is because such interactions require, at minimum, a basic level of trust
and reciprocity between participants; each must recognize and support the self that the other
projects (Goffman 1961). All too often, however, police act arbitrarily, undermining trust
conditions and, with them, the security of residents’ selves. In a situation where trust is
precarious at best, residents improvise a set of interactional strategies that, in combination, give
the local interaction order characteristics that differ from the middle class norm. These strategies,
I argue, are rational adaptations to otherwise impossible circumstances. This paper identifies two
such strategies, which I term defensive civility (see Duck and Rawls 2016) and nonrecognition:
1. Defensive civility: One strategy employed by residents to deal with police and other
powerful outsiders is deliberate overconformity with social norms, a means of avoiding sanctions
by those positioned to administer them. Crucially, however, while this conformity is often
necessary to avoid trouble, it arises only in situations where trust is lacking, such that the
reciprocity and cooperation necessary for achieving mutuality in interaction is already missing.3
2. Nonrecognition: Another strategy is the refusal to recognize the legitimacy of negative
responses to the self. When one party, in this case a police officer, demeans the self of the other
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(i.e., the citizen), and thereby reflects back to him or her—per Cooley’s looking-glass
metaphor—a “fractured (self)-reflection” (Rawls and Duck 2016), the citizen can refuse to
accept that reflection. In police-citizen interactions, this would involve noncompliance with
directives. This strategy can increase problems with the police, but it does have the advantage of
protecting the citizen’s positive self-image. Many of the challenges faced by residents center
around nonrecognition of their identity and clashing expectations of competing interaction
orders—one endogenous to the community, the other (i.e., that of the police) exogenous.
In many situations with actors who have the power to sanction, a resident’s ability to
resist is shaped by the limited accountability of those administering the sanction (or, in some
cases, the reward) and the limited resources of the citizen. Residents’ strategies rest on a local
understanding that their recourses are limited. Conversely, police, schools, creditors, social
workers, public housing officials, landlords, and probation and parole officers have great leeway
in their actions, producing an asymmetrical power dynamic that restricts interactional, legal, and
bureaucratic avenues for redressing injustices. The narratives that follow touch on issues of trust,
legitimacy, and the discretion of police and other authorities; they also describe an organization
for survival in spite of overwhelming conditions.
Outsiders’ Stories
To illustrate how embedded law enforcement is in this community, I present cases of both
insiders’ and outsiders’ contacts with police officers.4 Through steady contact with the
community, a number of outsiders have come to understand the interaction order of crime in the
Lyford Street neighborhood. Among those who helpfully explained the local code of the street to
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me were defense attorneys, teachers and school administrators, local church officials, social
workers, patrol officers, and individuals who worked in the juvenile justice system. All of them
seemed to have a good sense of the types of crime plaguing the community and how crime works
in these spaces.
Stacy: Reporting a drug stash to a “legit officer”
Christian missionaries who had been living on or near Lyford Street since the early 1980s, and
had never been victims of violence themselves, learned how long-term residents without familial
connections could stay safe. While they recognized their outsider status, they knew the
neighborhood well enough to avoid places and times where crime and violence were likely to
occur. They also understood the difference between crimes related to the drug trade and those
that were part of larger interpersonal disputes. Stacy, a white woman in her mid-twenties who
worked with Global Ministries, continued to rely on the neighborhood patrol officer, whom she
trusted, even after she had been withdrawn from the beat. “I miss her,” Stacy said. “She was the
only legit officer.” When confronting a situation that she did not know how to handle, Stacy
contacted her instead of dialing 911. “One time we found drugs at our house, in the garden,” she
recalled. “It was a brick of white powder . . . solid,” which was worth a fortune. So Stacy called
the former patrolwoman, who promised to get it taken care of right away. “Another officer called
back and said, ‘Don’t go outside. Stay in your house until we get there. Don’t come outside.’
They came in their unmarked cars, undercover. He calls me, like, ‘Where is it?’ I’m like, ‘OK,
you’re parked.’ He’s like, ‘You’re watching me out the window?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah. Heck, yeah,
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I’m watching this go down!’” Stacy was laughing, but she understood that law enforcement
officers must avoid implicating the missionaries in their confiscation of huge quantities of drugs.
While the drug trade is embedded in this community, Stacey’s response illustrates the
complexities of dealing with law enforcement. Her decision to cooperate with the police is
significant, but her experience in this neighborhood illustrates a larger point: some officers are
seen as more legitimate than others, and this level of legitimacy shapes how she contacts the
police. Harold Garfinkel (1963) proposed that mutual “trust” and commitment to a shared set of
“background expectations” are required in maintaining a social contract. Stacy’s story indicates
the presence of local trust amid global distrust (i.e., needing to go to the right officer with one’s
concerns) is significant. While Stacy may be an outsider, she understands that in a community
where accountability and recourse are limited, finding officers who exercise legitimate authority
in a taken-for-granted way builds trust, as opposed to eroding it.
Insiders’ Stories
Justin: Trying and failing to avoid the police “getting petty”
Like many of the men in this study, Justin had been a childhood lookout and young drug dealer.
His stint in the drug trade was limited to his high school years, however, and he was relatively
successful in finding employment after graduation. Although he attended community college for
two years, he never finished his degree in child psychology. While in high school, he
experimented with alcohol and marijuana but never viewed himself as a person with a substance
abuse problem. At 19, Justin was arrested for unpaid tickets and a DUI after he refusing to take a
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Breathalyzer test; he subsequently pled guilty to the DUI. Because of his personal involvement
with the penal system, Justin has many well-founded opinions about the culture of incarceration:
There’s so many black men in prison. It’s common knowledge that because the prison
system with, you know, private industry, you need consumers. Who’s the best consumer?
Black men. You know why? ’Cause the cop’s whole job is to make quota, to show police
activity. Can’t have all these crimes without no activity. So the good part is they riding
around, but the bad part is they mess with people and get petty . . . it’s petty crimes and
stuff that ain’t even existed, and you locking people up for it just to make quota, but
you’re not getting to the root of the problem, which is arresting the people that’s really
doing crime. Like, you’ll lock somebody up for having a bag over a beer or something,
but you know so-and-so is a known criminal on the block, but you won’t mess with him,
’cause you know he gonna shoot at you. You ain’t gonna mess with [laughs] hard
criminals; you just gonna nitpick and politic with the people you know really ain’t doing
so much, just so you can make your numbers. Now, if you a cop and you do what you
supposed to do and you don’t make your numbers, then they say something wrong. The
whole thing is geared to put the black man in jail. It don’t matter what you do.
Like most of the employed men in the neighborhood, Justin earned an hourly wage; he made
nine dollars an hour as a security guard. His credit was poor, so most of his housing included
roommates. Because he had moved at least three times in the previous two years, he never
received a summons for his court appearance related to his DUI, which led to a warrant being
issued for his arrest. At 26, Justin still owed more than $3,000 stemming from the seven-year-old
criminal case.
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Recently, Justin was unlawfully evicted from his home and arrested on an outstanding
warrant for unpaid court fees and fines. He was originally given two weeks’ notice to vacate the
house he shared with a roommate, but when he was out with a friend the locks were changed
with all of his possessions still inside. When he attempted to retrieve his belongings, he was
arrested after the police officer ran a background check. He was released several days later.
Justin returned again to collect his property, which resulted in his being rearrested:
So I get out, I don’t have anything, I don’t have a phone, I don’t have keys, I only had six
dollars on me. . . . So that’s the main thing I’m doing all day, trying to figure out how I
can get my ID for work and some work clothes so I can at least keep my job because I
had been off work for three or four days. Luckily, I was already off on Tuesdays, and
Monday was a holiday, but I’m trying to get to work. I speak to the landlord, he tells me
he’s going to meet me. He doesn’t show up until 45 minutes later, and then he tells me,
“No, I can’t let you in to get your things.” I am furious, so I decide to get my belongings.
So basically I waited for him to leave. I go in there, come out, he’s waiting outside; mind
you, this is three hours later. He just so happens to be pulling up when I was leaving.
Next thing I know, I hear police sirens. I’m confused. I’m arrested again, taken to jail
again. . . . First they were going to charge me with breaking and entering, but there was
no proof of breaking or entering, so then they tried to charge me with burglary but
couldn’t because I was taking my own belongings, so they charged me with criminal
trespassing.
It is possible that, had Justin called the police when he was unlawfully evicted, he could have
retrieved his belongings without so much hassle. But Justin did not call the police, because he
felt that they would treat him as a criminal instead of seeing him as the victim in this situation.
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Given what transpired, we see that his general assumption with regard to law enforcement was
correct. And, unlike their tenants, landlords have a relatively free hand in operating outside the
law. Justin’s interaction with his landlord is what I call a “null response” in the face of
nonrecognition of one’s identity. These null responses range from refusal to acknowledge or
ratify the other’s actions toward the self to complete withdrawal from interactional reciprocity.
Justin’s withdrawal from interacting with the landlord illustrates a basic understanding among
many residents in precarious positions who, despite being wronged, have little or no legal
recourse in the moment. When landlords rent to tenants like Justin, they may know that the
tenants’ legal situation makes them vulnerable. Under such circumstances, disengaging from
problematic interactions with outsiders becomes an essential survival strategy for many who live
in this neighborhood.
Benita: Getting arrested for unpaid tickets and still staying at the scene at her auto accident
In 2010, Benita, a 29-year-old African American woman, was arrested for unpaid traffic tickets.
While most Americans do not accumulate enough traffic tickets and unpaid fines to be arrested,
this situation is surprisingly common in Bristol Hill. Debt from state-enforced sanctions was a
common theme in many of my interviews and observations. In an attempt to curb the drug trade,
local law enforcement agencies received additional state and federal funding to patrol the area.
Traffic stops were a byproduct of the extra vigilance, leading to disproportionate contact with
law enforcement. Law enforcement tends to police the places where poor neighborhoods
transition into middle-class ones. Many jobs in the surrounding areas require low-wage workers,
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and in order to access those jobs, workers have to cross those boundaries. Although Benita was
not a direct target of increased police surveillance, she was caught in the net.
Public transportation was available within Bristol Hill, but Benita usually worked in
suburban areas accessible only by car. While driving to and from work, Benita received tickets
for speeding, driving an uninsured vehicle, failing to wear her seatbelt, and improperly
displaying her license plate. She explained:
I had the license plate in my window instead of on [the] back of the car. I can’t remember
why. I just got the plates to put on the car, and I didn’t have the screws to screw it in, so I
just stuck the plate in the window. And they pulled me over for that [laughs]. The city
doesn’t care about that. So it’s like, it’s outside the city—suburban areas, mainly, like,
when I’m goin’ to work, or, you know, goin’ to look for a job—where you get a ticket.
She could not pay the tickets immediately, and penalties for unpaid fines increased the amount
she owed to $2,200. After Benita was arrested for failing to pay the tickets, she served three days
in jail and lost her driver’s license.
A day after her release, I asked her how she got to work. “Yeah, I drove,” she replied,
“because there’s . . . how am I gonna get there? I can’t lose my job, so now I’m cautious. I have
to watch for the police, and when I see them, I turn off and go a whole ’nother route and then get
back on track, and then I’m off.”
While Benita was a very cautious driver, no amount of caution could have prevented
what happened one morning on her way home from her night shift, when a young white man on
his bike—on his way to work, but running late—rushed from the sidewalk into the street in front
Benita’s car. As she passed through the intersection, her car hit the front wheel of his bike; the
impact threw the man off his bike onto her windshield. She instantly stopped to help him. Even
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though Benita was operating her car without a license or insurance and at that time owed more
than $600 in fines, she called 911, and an ambulance and the police were dispatched. Meanwhile,
she stayed at the scene.
Benita told me that this was her first car accident. When I spoke to her a few days
afterward, she was still distressed. At the time of impact, the bicyclist’s body cracked her
windshield. Her initial fear was that she might have killed or paralyzed the man. Even though he
was fully conscious and appeared to be fine, she relied on her medical knowledge and worried
that the bicyclist might have internal injuries; thus, she insisted that he wait until medics could
check him out. She described being so distraught herself that the bicyclist hugged and comforted
her while they waited.
When the police arrived on the scene, she recognized both officers from numerous
previous traffic stops. She quickly explained that she did not have a license and that she was in
the process of paying off the previous fines, but stressed that she had to drive to work every day
in order to support her family. Still in her nursing scrubs and obviously distraught, she was then
comforted and hugged by one of the officers, who explained that most people in her
circumstances would have left the scene of the accident. Moreover, because she remained until
the police got there, the officer told her that he would not give her a citation or place her under
arrest. No one was severely injured, and the bicyclist took responsibility for the accident. After
the officers left, one of Benita’s coworkers picked her up and they drove the bicyclist to work.
Benita continued to ruminate on the accident and wonder why she hadn’t been arrested.
In discussing the incident, several of Benita’s friends also speculated about why she hadn’t been
arrested and considered what role race may have played. Normally, hitting a white suburbanite
could well have landed her in jail, particularly given her driving record and suspended license.
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Had the bicyclist been a poor person from Bristol Hill, they suggested, the victim probably
would have attempted to exploit the circumstances for financial gain by filing a personal injury
lawsuit. I, too, wondered why this encounter with the police did not end with a sanction.
Moreover, I was perplexed about why Benita had stayed at the scene after realizing that the
bicyclist was unhurt. Finally, given the number of mundane traffic stops and citations of the past,
it became clear that police officers exercise a wide range of discretion with regard not only to car
accidents, but also to traffic stops.
I believe that in the eyes of the police officers, Benita exceeded the ordinary expectations
of the situation—that someone in her circumstances would have fled the scene of the accident.
As Goffman (1961) observed, social anticipations are transformed into normative expectations,
especially toward stigmatized groups. If the officers expected that the driver would leave the
scene, then her remaining present was abnormal and unexpected in a positive way; she showed
herself to be more conscientious than an ordinary person. In addition, she was so upset and
remorseful that the police officer responded by comforting her. Had she not shown emotion, she
could have received sanctions, but it would have been difficult for the officers to do that when
she was clearly so remorseful. The role of the bicyclist was also crucial, in that he comforted her
and admitted wrongdoing. The situation appeared to have been resolved to the satisfaction of
everyone involved, but in the end, Benita was very likely given a break.
Because recognition of performed identity often depends, as Goffman (1961) said, on
“stereotypes” and “previous experience with individuals roughly similar,” inconsistencies
between stereotyped expectations and performed identities are barriers to recognition. A failure
to recognize an identity as presented can, in turn, call the definition of the situation itself into
question. In cases like Benita’s, disconfirming negative expectations about oneself can
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sometimes produce rewards, or at least prevent sanctions. This situation brings the functions of
law enforcement into view; issuing tickets and levying fines are quite different from writing an
accident report.
Mr. Thompson: Lack of accountability in police shootings
As these narratives suggest, there are many sources of tension between neighborhood residents
and law enforcement officials. In more extreme cases, these tensions can manifest in acts of
violence resulting in bodily harm or death. That happened recently in Ferguson, Missouri with
the death of Michael Brown. Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Philando
Castile, Alton Sterling, and numerous others have suffered untimely deaths due to their
encounters with the punitive arm of the state. Given the embedded police presence, such
tragedies, along with countless other instances of brutality, have become a day-to-day reality for
many working class and poor Americans, especially people of color.
In The Functions of the Police in Modern Society (1970), Egon Bittner states that the
trick in police work is not to make people obey, but to create preconditions for obedience. For
Bittner, the role of firearms has little to do with practical need or use. Further, American police
emphasize that if an officer does discharge a weapon, they should be shooting to kill. Local
actors and law enforcers alike understand this: whenever a weapon is discharged, it is discharged
with intent to kill (Bittner 1973; Manning 2013). These two excerpts from interviews conducted
in the aftermath of a shooting that took place while I was doing fieldwork in 2011 illustrate
Bitter’s argument. The victim was a 21-year-old African American man who had been shot in the
back by a local white police officer.
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When I was speaking with Mr. Thompson, a 50-year-old resident, I sensed that he was
acting differently than he had during our previous interactions. At the time, word of the shooting
was spreading quickly.
Waverly: I mean, personally I can sense that your tone is a bit different because
probably—is it because of that shooting that happened?
Mr. Thompson: It hurts, man. I mean, and then they [residents] say they’re gonna get a
cop. If they take a cop out, it’s gonna be unbelievable. I understand these kids have guns,
but to shoot somebody in the back through the heart, I mean—you got to look at it from
both ways, but the guy was running. We don’t know—and it almost started a riot
yesterday at the hospital. They had to call all kind of units in, OK, but, uh . . .
Interviewer: So the cop shot the kid in the back?
Waverly: Yeah, it was in the back. But everybody is fearful. Everyone knows that the
police is going to shoot first and ask questions later.
Mr. Thompson understands that there are two sides to the story, but he sees shooting a person
who is running away as an immoral act of murder. He captures the community uproar by
acknowledging that some young men who have access to guns want to target a police officer in
retaliation for the shooting. Yet, as an older resident, he endorses the common understanding of
police use deadly force: “they are going to shoot first and ask questions later.”
This shooting led to an investigation by the local police. The brother of the victim said
the following to a local investigative reporter:
Everyone knows that if anyone other than a cop shoots and kills someone, they are
arrested and held in jail while things are sorted out. We are frustrated that only because
the police are involved and he is allowed to continue to work. We don’t completely
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understand the investigation process, who is conducting it, how long it will take, or what
to expect. I wish that investigators would come in from the outside who have no ties to
the community and would only work with facts and what is right or wrong. There is not a
lot of confidence that the investigation will uncover the truth. Why do almost all the excons in Bristol Hill who have paid their debt to society never seem to get a second
chance? Why can a troubled cop come to our town and get a job but I can’t go to that
town and get a job?
While the brother wants justice, he has little faith in the investigation will result in charges
against the officer. The victim’s brother points out a discrepancy: the ex-convicts of his
neighborhood are rarely given a second chance, while troubled cops are allowed to continue
working.
The larger issue highlighted by both of these responses to the shooting is the lack of
police accountability, which is compounded by the mystery that shrouds police procedures. The
taken-for-granted notion that police are rarely held accountable sheds light on how residents
understand outcomes when they have trouble with the police. Essentially, the community views
the police officers as men and women who can use as much force as they deem necessary with
impunity. Another salient point that outsiders often miss is that if people understand that the
drawing of a weapon signals the intention to use deadly force, then running away becomes a
rational response. The officer was put on leave until the investigation was resolved. Eventually,
however, the investigation found that the police officer did not use excessive force and that a
weapon was found in proximity to the victim.
Brent: At risk from the school to prison pipeline
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During my second year in the field, I volunteered as a tutor in a local church’s afterschool
program, where I met a ninth grader named Brent who not only participated in the program but
also tutored younger participants. Brent stood out largely because many counselors and tutors in
the program recognized him as a young man with great promise; he was a successful student and
a talented writer. His parents kept him constantly busy.
Brent was especially memorable because he exposed me to a young-adult book series that
highlighted the challenges facing young urban youth. The Bluford Series is composed of twenty
or so novels set at a fictional high school in Los Angeles named after Dr. Guion Stewart Bluford
Jr., the first African American in space. After I told him I was from Detroit, Brent pointed out
that one of his favorite characters from the series was from Detroit as well.
Four years later, I rediscovered Brent during his senior year of high school after he was
charged with bringing a weapon to school. This incident prompted both a criminal hearing and a
school disciplinary hearing. Just months before his expected graduation, the school district
sought to expel him, not understanding that Brent was participating in a college preparatory
program sponsored by a local religious organization. The Prestige Project was designed to
mentor and monitor students’ academic achievement from ninth grade through college.
Fortunately, the director of the program worked diligently to organize teachers, politicians,
counselors, and school administrators on his behalf.
Since I knew Brent from the afterschool program, I followed the situation closely. I
learned that the criminal and disciplinary charges were lodged when he brought a shuriken
(throwing star) to school. Through the Prestige Project, Brent was taking classes in Japanese. He
brought the shuriken to school as part of a homework assignment that required students to bring
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items from home that show Japanese cultural influence. The shuriken was found in his bag as he
went through the school’s metal detectors. Security at Bristol Hill High was provided by city
police officers, who worked under a policy of zero tolerance for weapons. So they arrested him.
The Bristol Hill High School code of conduct stated that the school district has a zerotolerance policy with regard to the safety of the school and disruptions to the educational
experience of other students and teachers. The policy lists a number of offenses that would result
in a mandatory hearing, including violence and the possession of weapons and drugs. It did not,
however, define what might be considered a weapon.
Brent had no history of violence, yet he faced expulsion for this technical violation of
school policy. Upon hearing all the details of Brent’s case, the principal, several of his teachers,
counselors from the Prestige Project, and other mentors agreed that the situation should have
been handled differently and the decision about how to respond should have been made by the
school principal rather than the police officers. Yet, according to the guidelines, anyone who
worked in the school could enforce the zero-tolerance policy, which usually involved an
expulsion hearing.
Brent first had to appear before the city court, which charged him with possession of a
deadly weapon. After testimony from teachers, counselors, and people from the community, he
was cleared. Nonetheless, he still had to go before the school disciplinary court.
The director of the Prestige Program, Fatima Hagar, spoke to several of the hearing
officers, who gave her a grim warning that he would most likely be expelled. They admonished
her that weapons charges were serious offenses and that if they let Brent go, they would have to
treat other cases similarly. To ensure Brent’s chances for a successful graduation, she reached
out to the superintendent, who made sure Brent’s disciplinary hearing was scheduled after he
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received his diploma. Like defensive civility, Fatima and the superintendent strategized to find
loopholes in a bureaucratic process in a situation that appeared to have little to no recourse.
Brent’s experiences reflect the operation of the youth control complex, which subjects
young people of color to collective punishment (Rios 2011). The term collective punishment
comes from the international law of war and of justice, which states that it is a crime against
humanity and a violation of the rule of law to punish a group of people collectively for acts
committed by some of them, even if those acts are violent and illegal.5 The kind of policing to
which all black and brown youth in impoverished neighborhoods and the public schools are
subjected is a violation of their fundamental human rights.
In Brent’s case, it was his school that imposed the punishment. In a setting where security
is provided by local police and school officials, even those in positions of power have little
discretion once a zero-tolerance policy is invoked. The case shows how the school to prison
pipeline works, and who has discretion to prevent this from happening. Zero-tolerance policies
can be applied in different ways, particularly with regard to what is considered a weapon. If the
police are in charge of enforcing the policy, the presence of any object that could conceivably be
used as a weapon is taken seriously. This blurring of the lines between what is and what is not
permitted makes it difficult for students and their parents to stay within the guidelines.
Ultimately, if the policy violation leads to an arrest and criminal charges, which in turn
lead to a criminal record, a student is propelled into the school to prison pipeline. Brent’s case
had a relatively positive outcome, mostly because he had numerous powerful advocates, but
zero-tolerance policies that invoke sanctions without any discretion are dangerous. Once a
charge is made, a damaging outcome is highly likely.
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My Own (Outsider’s) Story: Doing Ethnography in a Context of Hyper-surveillance
While doing fieldwork in Bristol Hill, I learned to take the embedded police presence for granted
and found more or less effective ways to respond to it. Before the encounter described here, I had
been pulled over at least three times within a two-year period, and each time I employed an
interactional trick I learned from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis about turn taking:
whoever takes the first turn in a new interaction influences the topic of the preceding turn. I
would take the first turn to point out that I was lost or doing research, in hopes that the next turn
by the police officer would respond to my initial question, rather than his reason for the stop.
Unfortunately, the one time I neglected to employ this tactic, a county police officer
confiscated my car keys. A simple traffic stop developed into an incident that captured many of
the frustrations that many of my participants spoke of. It was a cold evening in late January 2010
during a rainstorm. As the weather took a turn for the worse, the rain froze as soon as it hit the
road. I was scared. I had a three-hour drive ahead of me, and the roads were slick and covered in
black ice. I drove very cautiously, wondering if the interstate would be salted. A mile before the
highway entrance, a county police officer pulled me over. As soon as I stopped the car, my
worries shifted from the ice to the police.
The officer approached my window and said: “What’s the big hurry?” Given the road
conditions and my previous stops in the past, I was fairly confident I wasn’t speeding but was
being profiled, and I was annoyed. I quipped, “I wasn’t aware that I was in a hurry especially
given the BLACK ice on the road” (putting extra emphasis on the word black), implying that this
stop was racial. The officer responded: “You know what, give me your license and registration,
better yet, run them keys too.” I complied. When the officer returned he flung my license and
21
registration at me and walked back to his patrol car. I was relieved for all of 60 seconds until I
tried to start my car and realized that my keys were still missing. The officer kept my keys. Now
I had to decide what I was going to do. Initially I just waited and waited, hoping that he would
come back. After ten minutes I called 911 and explained what happened. “I am on the road right
before the interstate, an officer from the county police department pulled me over and he has my
keys.” “Why does he have your keys?” “I don’t know, he took them when he pulled me over, I
just want him to bring them back.” After two additional dispatchers, I was finally connected to
someone from the county police. “What is he doing with your keys? “I don’t know—but I’m
cold and tired.” I was about to say, “Just have him bring them back,” but before I could finish my
statement I could see him coming up behind me with his lights flashing. “Cancel the call, he’s
here, never mind, I am going to hang up now.” The officer approaches my window, I roll it
down, and he smiles, dangling and then shaking my keys: “I guess you can’t get far without
these.” My response, “Nope, I can’t.” “I’m sorry,” he says, “I am under a lot of pressure. You
know how it is for us bruh.” Before his “you know how it is for us bruh” statement, I had
dismissed his ethnicity altogether. My first thought upon seeing him was that he was racially
ambiguous: I couldn’t make out his complexion; his head was covered, so I couldn’t see his hair
texture; his eyes were somewhere between hazel and grey; and his name was very generic, like
Steve Smith. His phasing of “run those keys” and the use of “bruh” as opposed to “bro” were
linguistic indicators of his blackness. Yet, what stood out about this interaction was the statement
about pressure. What type of pressure? Pressure to pull people over, pressure as a black man, the
pressures of the job—but what pressure did we have in common? Exactly what kind of pressure
is it “for us bruh,” as men of color? Prior to this interaction, I had worked with a patrol officer
22
who was responsible for community policing, but also spoken to neighborhood residents at great
length about their problematic encounters with law enforcement.
When I was pulled over, I was worried about how the interaction was going to play out.
Given the legality of the stop, I viewed this interaction as a troubled one, where trust and
legitimacy were in question. The exercise of legitimate authority by a black male police officer
violating the rights of another black man framed this interaction as one that was institutional in
nature. I already knew that, regardless of who you are or what you’re doing, especially if you’re
black, you’re liable to get stopped. But at a deeper level, the obligations that constitute the basic
social contract facilitating mutual cooperation for all participants is violated when these
interactions are racialized and don’t play out in the ways that other citizens take for granted.
Furthermore, in this interaction I had very little recourse. My response to the officer was one of
total agreement, being overly accommodating not only to end the interaction, but also to leave
without being punished. It was here that my exhibition of a smile, and agreement with his feeling
of pressure, paired with head nodding silence, allowed me to escape. This hyper-conformity is
what I call defensive civility. My interaction with the officer illustrates how basic trust conditions
were violated, resulting in a breakdown of mutuality. Indeed, the apology, as well as the
returning of my keys and the officer’s invocation of racial-ethnic identity, could be interpreted as
a way of trying, however minimally, to restore mutuality to the interaction—that is, he’s just
doing his job, which interferes with the solidarity that he claims with his “for us” utterance. In
this case, race adds an additional layer of complexity to this interaction. On the one hand, the
officer is engaged in racial profiling, but on the other, he’s using race as a basis for claiming
solidarity and understanding.
23
In many (if not all) communities, a police officer can stop any motorist at any time for
any or no reason. But police will sometimes stop a driver on the pretext of one offense, such as
speeding, in order to investigate another, such as driving without a license or driving a stolen car,
which is a legally questionable practice. The situation can be especially confusing where race is
in play and, because trust conditions are not met, shared resources for achieving resolution are
not available. Furthermore, because self and meaning are fragile achievements, a broken
interactional process is dangerous, threatening the coherence and safety of all parties involved.
Conventional ethnographic and qualitative methods are likely to overlook these points of breach
and violation, treating meaningful social objects as if they just existed (as “shared concepts”),
instead of treating them as accomplished only through cooperative action (in observable
empirical details).
An interaction order approach that regards overt trust violations as clues to the underlying
expectations and definitions of the situation people are using to make meaningful social sense
together treats the existence of a community corpus of narratives about such violations as
important information. Indeed, the existence of these narratives suggests a recurrent problem that
is serious enough to be repeatedly talked about.
In a context of general misunderstanding, there are consequences for all parties. Beyond
the incomprehension it produces for others, research shows that withdrawal from reciprocity
relations in interracial interaction can escalate interactional troubles related to race-ethnicity
(Rawls and David 2006). Further, there may be damage to the interaction order itself and to
mutual understanding, accompanied by a reluctance to trust participants of other races (Rawls
2000).
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Navigating a System of Collective Punishment
The interaction order is a useful conceptual tool for studying the complexities of poor
communities, especially with respect to how law enforcement operates there. In particular, it
highlights key issues with regard to legitimacy, trust, penalties, and discretion. Residents’ mixed
feelings about the police are shaped by officers’ constant resort to negative sanctions and their
inconsistent use of their discretionary power, which in turn generates mistrust and calls their
legitimacy into question. While residents may be compliant in an effort to counter negative
presumptions about minority groups, compliance as a strategy does nothing to get rid of the
mistrust that occasions its use. Most police-citizen encounters in this neighborhood seem to take
place in a context lacking the basic requirements for achieving mutuality in interaction—namely,
reciprocity and cooperation. This, in turn, limits pathways to meaningful change and social
justice.
Law enforcement plays a peculiar role in the hyper-surveillance that exists in poor
spaces, constantly penalizing small infractions while ignoring the larger problems of crime and
safety that residents see as most important. This practice, which could be an indirect result of
broken-windows policing, tends to backfire. In order to understand how law enforcement
functions in neighborhoods like Lyford Street, it is essential to pay attention to how people in the
community make sense of their interactions with the police, as well as the strategies they have
adopted to cope with the uncertainties and dangers posed by law enforcement.
In segregated cities like Bristol Hill, residents must navigate a terrain fraught with
economic hardship, fragile social networks, and the constant threat of criminalization. They are
bombarded with challenges that compound one another. To survive, they must circumvent, and
25
effectively undermine, major institutions, especially law enforcement, the economy, and the
educational system. It is a David and Goliath situation. Because their situations typically require
attention to urgent problems of work and family, they must often forgo making long-term plans.
Burdened with debt and criminal records, they are seldom able to realize whatever aspirations
they do develop to transform their lives.
These residents make sense of their lives by incorporating the local order of their
community, which is in direct conflict with the wider societal order, into their worldview; they
survive and reduce its dangers by tailoring their actions to its everyday realities. But the constant
presence of law enforcement, especially when police officers are given informal quotas for
arrests and the courts yield profits to financially strapped governments, inevitably leads to
sanctions. In many cases, minor infractions can be punished by debt and even prison. The quality
of everyday life deteriorates. Yet law enforcement officers are known; residents perceive them as
individuals and judge them by their behavior, even though they do not do the same with
residents. The police have the ability to use discretion for serious offenses. Their circumstantial
and inconsistent use of discretion, coupled with their lack of accountability, erodes trust and calls
the officers’ legitimacy into question.
The immediate loyalties of those who live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty are
to their family and friends, and working within that framework requires them to make decisions
about the matters that are the most pressing. Given the number of challenges these residents face,
their economic predicament can render an already difficult situation utterly intractable. Yet, as
the narratives examined in this paper suggest, many of the residents have found workable
solutions to the problems they face.
26
Policy makers could learn from these people’s experiences and perspectives, if only they
would pay attention to them. While it may be the case that law enforcement agencies have a
unified view that has no room for alternative viewpoints, the general citizenry could be more
open to understanding. It would be more effective for educators, landlords, and debtors to stop
using legal sanctions, and for local schools to distance themselves from the youth control
complex and the school to prison pipeline as a way of reducing negative effects of sanctions and
surveillance. When citizens have legal recourse, sanctions, and accountability for those who
wrong them, it restores trust, strengthening the foundations of the local interaction order and
eliminating the overuse of coping strategies such as defensive civility.
References
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New York: The New Press.
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Institute of Mental Health, Center for Studies of Crime and Delinquency.
Duck, Waverly. 2015. No way out: Precarious living in the shadow of poverty and drug dealing.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Garfinkel, Harold. 1963. A conception of and experiments with “trust” as a condition of stable
concerted actions. In Motivation and social interaction, ed. O. J. Harvey, 187–238. New
York: Ronald Press.
Goffman, Erving. 1961. Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Chicago: Free
Press.
Goffman, Erving M. 1983. The interaction order. American Sociological Review 48: 1–17.
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Fernández-Kelly, Patricia. 2015. The hero's fight: African Americans in West Baltimore and the
shadow of the state. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Miller, Reuben, and Amanda Alexander. 2016. The price of carceral citizenship: Punishment,
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of Race and Law 21: 291–311.
Manning, Peter. 2013. The work of Egon Bittner. Ethnographic Studies 13: 51–66.
Rawls, Anne. 2000. Race as an interaction order phenomenon: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “double
consciousness” thesis revisited. Sociological Theory 18 (2): 239–272.
Rawls, Anne, and Gary David. 2006. Accountably other: Trust, reciprocity and exclusion in a
context of situated practice. Human Studies 28 (4): 469–497.
Rios, Victor, Jr. 2011. Punished: Policing the lives of Black and Latino boys. New York: New
York University Press.
Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass, and
public policy. Chicago: University of Chicago.
1
Bristol Hill and Lyford Street are pseudonyms.
2
While I never lived in the neighborhood, I did volunteer there over a seven-year period.
3
In Duck and Rawls (2016) we explore the interactional contours of this conformity, which we
call “defensive civility,” through analysis of actual citizen interactions with police. Defensive
civility is deliberate hyper-conformity with social norms, behaving in a docile way as a strategy
for avoiding sanctions in situations of asymmetrical power. While this can help avoid trouble, it
rests on a foundation of distrust among parties and is not an adequate basis for achieving
mutuality in interaction, which requires reciprocity and cooperation. Thus, while the practice can
28
help avoid negative sanctions, such as prison or even death; it sustains conditions that limit
pathways to change. The idea that citizens adopt a submissive posture in relation to the police is
not new. But detailed analysis of interactions in which defensive civility is one strategy used by
the powerless, while what we call offensive civility is a strategy used by the powerful, is new.
This “game” is part of a local interaction order, in which residents must organize and coordinate
their responses to outsiders in positions of power based on lack of trust, reciprocity, and
legitimacy. Outsiders’ behavior in these interactions is governed by their own endogenous rules
and conventions.
4
My book No Way Out (Duck 2015) analyzes the drug trade in the neighborhood, as well as the
misconceptions various levels of law enforcement agencies have about “drug gangs” there. It
also presents residents’ understandings of the interpersonal causes of homicides, which law
enforcement agencies erroneously saw as drug-related.
5
This charge is now adjudicated by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and was
most recently lodged against the State of Israel for its deliberate and avoidable bombardment of
civilians during the war in Gaza.
29