Mapping police power and the limits of reform
Topics: Urban Geography
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Keywords: police, mapping, urban geography, reform, abolition
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 61
Authors:
Nick Lally, University of Kentucky, Department of Geography
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Abstract
Policing in the U.S. faces periodic crises of legitimacy, most recently culminating in growing public calls to reform, defund, or abolish the police voiced in the summer of 2020. Some departments have recently grappled with reforms in the wake of these mass protests, but many reform efforts effectively funnel more money into policing while falling short of offering structural changes that could begin to address the racism endemic to policing. In this paper, I analyze reform efforts led by the mayor's office in Lexington, Kentucky that seek to "dismantle systemic racism" within policing. I show how these reform efforts struggle to address the everyday practices of policing that spatially concentrate risk and harm in already vulnerable communities. Reforms may attempt to target the most egregious bad actors within the department, perhaps offering a temporary reprieve from the most spectacular disasters of policing that roil departments. But these reforms offer little in the way of changing practices that, under review, would be found to follow department protocols, but which disparately ensnare people of color into the criminal justice system. Under the logics of criminology, racial and other disparities in arrests, citations, and police contacts become illegible, endlessly deferred, and buried under complex chains of causality and lack of actionable data. In this talk, I suggest we reject these logics and take seriously minor 'crime' data as indicators of police discretion and priorities. To those ends, I offer a series of risk maps and methods for mapping police power.
Mapping police power and the limits of reform
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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