October 22, 2020
The 2020 Symposium’s second panel, “Racial and Gender Hierarchies in Policing,” brought together policing scholars and experts to discuss how police departments can address racial and gender inequities in policing. The panel, moderated by Professor Donald Braman of The George Washington University Law School, featured Professors Kami Chavis, Christy Lopez, Eric Miller, and Seth Stoughton.
First, Professor Kami Chavis—law professor and director of the Criminal Justice Program at Wake Forest University School of Law—spoke about how police departments can use technology to advance justice without sacrificing privacy for marginalized communities. She started by making the case for body cameras by giving high-profile examples of police shootings where body camera footage showed or would have shown what occurred. Michael Brown’s death, for example, had no video footage from the officers who shot him, and witness accounts varied. Video footage of Laquan McDonald’s murder contradicted Chicago police officers’ accounts of the incident. Even bystander video footage, like videos seen in the cases of Walter Scott and George Floyd, help showcase the truth of the scene. And in Breonna Taylor’s case, body camera footage of her shooting would likely help answer questions. Professor Chavis notes that body camera technology was supported by the Obama Administration and civil rights groups, but effectiveness of body cameras depends on limiting officers’ discretion of when to turn the cameras on.
Professor Chavis then addressed concerns of the proliferation of surveillance technology related to body cameras. There are tens of millions of surveillance cameras in the United States, and such technology implicates Fourth Amendment concerns and reasonable expectations of privacy. People in low-income or marginalized communities have less privacy than other communities, but these communities, too, want police departments to release footage when there is body camera footage available. Professor Chavis pointed, for example, to protests over police withholding body camera footage in Keith Lamont Scott’s shooting. Ultimately, technology policies should balance accountability and privacy concerns. She lists three best practices for developing policies on body cameras and other new surveillance technology: (1) make policies publicly available, (2) limit officers’ discretion about when to turn cameras on, and (3) consult with the community. Professor Chavis emphasized that community consultation was most important to her and pointed to the failures of Baltimore’s drone program as evidence, where police used drone surveillance to gather evidence without informing residents of Baltimore.
Next, Professor Christy Lopez—Professor from Practice and co-director of the Innovative Policing Program at the Georgetown University Law Center—addressed claims that the culture of policing could change by increasing the number of women in the profession. Professor Lopez pointed out the fallacy of this assertion, saying that studies suggesting this outcome do not show the full picture. She explained that some studies suggest female officers use less force, pursue more de-escalation, and receive fewer complaints, but these studies do not take into account the fact that women are less likely to take or be given assignments that involve interaction with the public. She gave several high-profile examples to illustrate the fact that women do not actually police as differently as men: the officer that shot and killed Terence Crutcher; Amber Guyger, who murdered Botham Jean; and the officer that killed Alesia Thomas. Instead, Professor Lopez asserted, injecting more women into police departments would be akin to increasing the percentage of Black officers on the force. She described the results of the movement to get more people of color in policing as, in a word, “disappointing”—it does make a difference, she said, but has not made policing what advocates want it to be.
The real answer, Professor Lopez said, is to decouple policing and public safety from stereotyped masculinity and “carceral logic.” She explained that carceral logic promotes white supremacy and involves a stereotyped vision of masculinity. Policing as an institution is intertwined with a version of masculinity that is not tolerated in other areas of society—the prevalence of sexual harassment and sex abuse of female officers by male officers being just one example. Recruiting and adding more female officers without addressing policing’s emphasis on stereotyped masculinity will not solve the problem. The solution Professor Lopez proposes is not to merely add more women to policing but to make policing more “womanly.” No, she does not actually believe in identities or tropes based on gender, but she advocates making different choices about the attributes we want police to exhibit. Instead of incentivizing punishment and a “warrior” mentality, police departments should incentivize officers to act as guardians, to talk more and act less, to nurture healthy communities rather than police them into submission, and to cede resources into other public services like housing and mental health services. This is the way, Professor Lopez asserted, to achieve both an increase in the number of women in policing and a change in the fundamental culture of policing.
Speaking third, Professor Eric Miller—law professor and Leo J. O’Brien Fellow at Loyola Law School—focused on society’s misunderstanding of the role of police. Commonly, people see the core function of policing as being willing to employ violence when approaching a situation or inflicting harm or reinforcing neighborhood norms. This majority view, Professor Miller said, is misguided. The role of public officials, like police, is to ensure public welfare and protect the public. Police are not defined by their ability to use force, because if we were to disarm tomorrow, they would still have the ability to police. Professor Miller pointed to the United Kingdom for an example of successful unarmed policing.
Instead, police violence is a core feature of social norms of order, and policing Black people is police vigilantism. Police violence and use of force, in fact, are norms that white people use to “resist the resistors,” or keep people of color in their place. Police enforce norms of who belongs where, Professor Miller asserted, norms that exclude Black people from participation in white spaces. As white people tacitly allow police to enforce this point of view; they allow police to “kick ass” to ensure their (white) spaces are not disordered by fear of crime. In this way, policing is an informal control measure of the community itself. Professor Miller pointed to Ahmaud Arbery’s murderers; George Zimmerman, who fatally shot Trayvon Martin; and Amy Cooper, a white woman who threatened to harness the power of the police to remove a Black bird watcher from Central Park, as examples of this mindset. Recognizing this social structure, Professor Miller asserted that we should view police-inflicted pain and violence as means of reinforcing partisan, racialized norms of how we view people of color, rather than an essential feature of the job.
Finally, Professor Seth Stoughton—associate law professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and former Tallahassee Police Department officer—addressed police culture and the “warrior vs. guardian” mindset. Warrior and guardian, he explained, are metaphors for how police view their role and their interactions with community members. Police culture emphasizes warrior mentality, which manifests in community interactions through a “command presence.” This presence is characterized by assertiveness, aggression, and being in charge as the sole authority. Warrior culture views noncompliance as a challenge or threat and forces compliance through yelling or other aggressive measures. Conversely, guardianship emphasizes cooperation over compliance. Professor Stoughton asked, “What default do we want police to have?” Ultimately, a warrior culture manifests a demand for compliance rather than a search for cooperation. Forcing compliance, he criticized, actually receives more noncompliance because people do not like being yelled at and respond by asserting their autonomy.
To shift police culture, he said, it is important to understand how officers view this warrior mindset, why they value it, and what internal forces solidify the existing culture. Police officers understand being a warrior as: (1) honorable, which separates and justifies police officer’s actions from the same actions that would otherwise be considered dishonorable or criminal; (2) the embodiment of duty and resolve, which is important because it requires a tremendous amount of duty and resolve for officers to dedicate their lives to the call to be a police officer; and (3) the willingness to engage in “righteous violence,” or to engage forces of evil with equal and opposite violence. Warrior culture is a celebrated part of policing, Professor Stoughton said, because it emphasizes the importance and exclusivity of the job, relieves cognitive dissonance among officers, makes them safe, and gives them social and political capital. Stoughton ended his remarks by directing the audience to a study offering empirical support for shifting police culture from a warrior to guardian mindset. See Kyle McLean, Scott E. Wolfe, Jeff Rojek, Geoffrey P. Alpert & Michael R. Smith, Police Officers as Warriors or Guardians: Empirical Reality or Intriguing Rhetoric?, 37 Just. Q. 1096 (2020), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07418825.2018.1533031?scroll=top&needAccess=true&.
This panel review was authored by Jessica Mugler.