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Racialized Policing: Residents' Perceptions in Three Neighborhoods

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Ronald Weitzer
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Abstract

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One of the most controversial issues in policing concerns allegations of racial bias. This article examines citizens' perceptions of racialized policing in three neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., that vary by racial composition and class position: a middle-class white community, a middle-class black community, and a lower-class black community. In-depth interviews examined residents' perceptions of differential police treatment of individual blacks and whites in Washington and disparate police practices in black and white neighborhoods. Findings indicate, first, that there is substantial agreement across the communities in the belief that police treat blacks and whites differerently; and secondly, there is racial variation in respondents' explanations for racial disparities. On the question of residents' assessments of police relations with their own community relative to other-race communities, a neighborhood difference is found, with the black middle-class neighborhood standing apart from the other two neighborhoods.

Type
Symposium on Norms, Law, and Order in the City
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , 2000 , pp. 129 - 155
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Law and Society Association

Footnotes

Research for this article was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, Law and Social Science Division, grant no. SBR-9423992. I am grateful to Cheryl Beattie for research assistance and to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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