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POLICY ESSAY

R A C E , P L A C E , A N D D R U G E N F O R C E M E N T

The Racial Dilemma in Urban Policing Sudhir Venkatesh C o l u m b i a U n i v e r s i t y

Engel, Smith, and Cullen (2012, this issue) bring new data to bear on the pressingissue of racial disparities in U.S. policing practices. Drawing on citizen calls forservice to the Seattle Police Department, they argue against a racial-bias perspective in which police are presumed to discriminate willfully against ethnic minorities in urban areas. As an alternative, they suggest that a “deployment hypothesis,” in which “differential

police patterns” are believed to produce greater contact between police and minorities, is

more likely the root cause of the increased presence of minorities in criminal arrests. The primary policy implication of Engel et al.’s (2012) article might be to caution

scholars that they should not jump too quickly to allegations of discrimination in criminal

justice institutions. “Our findings demonstrate the importance of selecting an appropriate

and conceptually sound benchmark to measure racial disparities,” Engel et al. write, in reference to the need to use ecologically valid data. (A less innovative, but nonetheless

mentionable, finding is that results can shift depending on unit of analysis—census tract,

city block—and so researchers should exercise due diligence on this matter as well.) One

can hardly dispute their contention that better “benchmarks” are necessary to ensure that we treat appropriately a subject as politically (and ethically) significant as state racism.

Readers who appreciate the need for modest, precise social scientific reasoning that

hews to the data at hand will likely enjoy Engel et al.’s (2012) article. The limitations

of the article appear in the Discussion section, in which Engel et al. try to move beyond their simple, straightforward, and powerful claim for improved data collection. Their policy

discussion is filled mostly with folk sociology about how crime operates in the lives of

everyday urbanites—their speculations fail to draw on the bounty of ethnographic and

historical research on the subject. In general, Engel et al. (2012) are struggling with a basic empirical fact that confronts

every social scientist who studies criminality: Namely, minorities are given disproportionate

Direct correspondence to Sudhir Venkatesh, Department of Sociology, Columbia University, Knox Hall, 606 West 122nd Street, New York, NY 10027 (e-mail: [email protected]).

DOI:10.1111/j.1745-9133.2012.00845.x C© 2012 American Society of Criminology 655 Criminology & Public Policy � Volume 11 � Issue 4

Pol icy Essay Race, Place, and Drug Enforcement

treatment (of both an unfavorable and an amplified nature) by the criminal justice system.

In a purely legal sense, we may not have evidence to conclude that Seattle police are racist. However, critics are probably correct in suggesting that the city’s law enforcement agencies

have not treated minorities fairly. From their own data, Blacks seem to be arrested at higher

rates than Whites, and policing practices are the subject of much criticism, although perhaps

less so than in other urban regions. The frustrating beauty of the Seattle case, like so many others, is that we may never be

able to disentangle the factors that produce such outcomes with the precision that statistical

analysis requires. Here, we turn to the sociologist Eliot Liebow (2003) who analyzed how

low-income urban Black males ended up suffering the same poor job prospects as their fathers even though there was no explicit racist organization whose mission was to produce

such results. He never mentioned racist employers who were unwilling to hire Blacks except

for the most menial jobs in the city. He does not identify racist politicians who sought

to keep Blacks disenfranchised. And he does not include discriminatory education officials who wanted to maintain poorly performing schools in minority neighborhoods. Yet, each of

these actors—and their respective agencies—played a contributing role in ensuring relatively

poor outcomes for inner-city populations. Liebow might argue that, in Seattle, a similar “elegant social machinery” in which no

single person or institution has fault for perpetuating racially problematic outcomes that

can be isolated and measured in any systematic way. Yet, politicians, police, philanthropy,

and so many other urban institutions in Seattle are complicit—if only because their actions perpetuate the status quo.

Engel et al. (2012) hint at some of these hard-to-pin-down dynamics. For example,

they suggest that police are not targeting minorities. No, cops are simply responding to

neighborhoods where there are greater calls for assistance. In these areas, there are as many minorities as there are ethnic Whites making such calls. Thus, it would be hard to pin down

a racist conspiracy against the city’s ethnic minorities. Indeed, if anyone is racist, then it

must be African Americans—which by definition, of course, makes no sense at all. With

this fancy sleight of hand, the conclusion that cops are racist can easily be shown to be statistically implausible. But, any astute reader knows that citizens of Seattle should not let

law enforcement off the hook simply because the analysis came back without a definitive

verdict.

Engel et al. (2012) ask, “Is there a viable alternative?” A rational person would probably agree with their conclusion that “legitimacy in policing demands fairness in the distribution

of police services.” Withholding police assistance to calls for help in minority neighborhoods

would only exacerbate the problem, so let us not retrench state services any further.

In the face of an “elegant social machinery,” the potency of such statistically driven arguments will always paralyze us. It will almost always be impossible to isolate social factors

when the social conditions are produced by a coordinated ballet of multiple institutions,

each working independently but aligned to perpetuate the outcomes in question.

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Venkatesh

A different kind of social analysis is required.

To begin, for Engel et al. (2012) to move beyond their flummoxed state—as evidenced by curious statements like “[s]upport for the deployment hypothesis . . . provides both good

and bad news” for policy (I have no idea what they mean by “good” and “bad”)—doing

so means reconceptualizing “structural racism.” Rather than believing that the absence of

racial animus must lead us to consider “structural” factors that are “race neutral,” we could conclude just as defensibly that racism is alive and well in Seattle. Doing so means altering

our understanding of social structure. In the case of Seattle, the agents cum perpetrators of law enforcement discrimination are not so easy to identify because the division of labor

has been neatly redistributed so that accountability can no longer be measured with blunt instruments of the kind wielded by Engel et al.

To understand how this labor is divided yet coordinated, one approach might be to

take into account the kind of research on institutional racism that is discounted by Engel

et al. (2012). For example, researchers who argue for a “New Jim Crow” are cited several times by Engel et al. These scholars are trying to reframe our analytic framework so that we

can focus on the institutional alignments that reproduce racial disparities even when intent

is hard to establish in strict juridical terms. These observers point to factors such as political lobbying for accelerated prison construction, the overloading of courts, the formal obstacles

to dismantling racism in our legal system, and differential sentencing that produces racial

disparities in crime rates. None of these factors can be given “blame” because they work in

conjunction with one another to yield the measured outcomes. Engel et al. (2012) do not care much for this line of scholarship, and they are right

to point out that many “New Jim Crow” adherents rely on the analogy at the expense

of systematic empirical review. But they are being equally simplistic when they attack the

structural–institutional racism perspective by pointing to the fact that Blacks are more conservative on criminal justice matters.

If they had read Stuart Hall and the three decades of work in cultural studies—or

the work of ethnomethodologists and sociolinguists like William Labov, John Ogbu, or

Shirley Brice Health—then they might have concluded that Black conservatism is, at one fundamental level, a means of signaling: The cry of the disenfranchised in democratic

systems will commonly include vigilant, expressive demands for fair services by the ruling

institutions. That most Blacks are as likely as Whites to call the police—and that they support

tough penalties even if their own ethnic group is affected unfairly—can be explained easily by their insistence that the institutions designed to “serve and protect” do just that. This

is no more evidence of the lack of racism in our system than minorities voting actively in

states where the laws unfairly disenfranchise Black voters.

Other forms of sociological analysis will be needed to move forward, in Seattle and around the country, to understand the social reproduction of racial disparities in drug arrests

and the overall disproportionate negative impact of law enforcement institutions on U.S.

minority groups. We will need more review of institutional decision making, including how

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Pol icy Essay Race, Place, and Drug Enforcement

political leaders allocate resources, how evidence and informed advocacy can be routinely

ignored or impotent in bringing about social change, and how police officials are hamstrung through the cult of “evidence-based” evaluation. After all, the same drive for “big data” that

led to the insights in Engel et al.’s (2012) article is at the root of the pressures placed on

risk-averse police commanders who avoid any policing innovation that does not lead to

immediate improvements on conventional public safety indices. In this sense, we can look no further than modern criminological theory to observe how difficult these conditions

are to change: Even though “collective efficacy” is a far better predictor of crime, few

cities are willing to transfer police budgets to services that increase residential trust and

social cohesion. Few police officials are going to stand for diversion of funding from their departments. Why? Our attention should turn to this subject.

Some notable examples of such research might illuminate modern-day criminologi-

cal paradigms. To cite just one, Nicole P. Marwell’s (2007) analysis of the allocation of

government resources in New York City suggested that the civic sector can play a critical role in reproducing social order (see also, Venkatesh [2007] and Duneier [1999]). Local,

community-based organizations are highly involved in the lives of urban residents, provid-

ing a host of services that often are given relatively little attention by social scientists, but that are instrumental in family outcomes. These organizations are susceptible to the political

winds, which can remove funding as quickly as it is granted. Thus, as these organizations

wither, so too are the neighborhoods that seek to transmit values to youth, keep crime down,

and so on, at a relative disadvantage. As these disadvantages contribute to increased social isolation of residents, various problems can easily manifest, such as youth delinquency. All

of this can drive calls for service by citizens who find that their areas are unsafe.

In this manner, what seems an isolated area of social analysis—municipal resource

allocation—can be central to our ability to understand crime. Only with a theoretical orientation that links the two can we start to understand how an “elegant social machinery”

produces certain outcomes. It might be productive to examine the distribution of resources

in Seattle and how the civic sector’s contribution to social order maintenance is affected as

a result. The creative analysis of Engel et al.’s (2012) article will never be outdated, and the

authors are right to suggest that many questions are raised by the study’s findings. Their call

for identifying alternatives—in both research and practice—should not be ignored.

References Duneier, Mitchell. Sidewalk. 1999. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.

Engel, Robin S., Michael R. Smith, and Francis T. Cullen. 2012. Race, place, and drug enforcement: Reconsidering the impact of citizen complaints and crime rates on drug arrests. Criminology & Public Policy, 11: 603–635.

Liebow, Eliot. Tally’s Corner. 2003. New York: Rowan & Littlefield.

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Venkatesh

Marwell, Nicole P. 2007. Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the En- trepreneurial City. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Venkatesh, Sudhir. 2007. Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sudhir Venkatesh is William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology and the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University in the City of New York. His most recent book is

Gang Leader for a Day (2008, Penguin Press).

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