Neighborhood Watch: Policing White Spaces in America, “explores the private weaponization of racial fear” (p. 5) that shapes modern policing practices in the United States, particularly as it pertains to how white citizens use police to re-assert and enforce racial hierarchy. The book offers a framework to understand the push-and-pull between institutional oppression of Black Americans, their subsequent resistance, and the casting of that resistance as evidence for the need to assert new modes of oppression. Shawn Fields refers to this as cycles of fear, and evaluates contemporary policing practices and the legal logics that support them through this lens. Ultimately, though, the book’s primary purpose is to reorient our approach to reform around decreasing interactions with the police writ large, rather than improving them. As such, the book is an entry in an abolitionist tradition, where the vision of abolition guides the identification of reforms worth pursuing.
Fields builds on the cycles of fear framework through turning to the interplay between White citizens and agents of the law, where citizens wield criminal legal infrastructure to assert White space, police respond, and case law protects them both. In chapter 2, Fields deftly problematized the 911 dispatch system, which provides White citizens a mechanism to make demands of police (and they are required to respond). This chapter is perhaps the highlight of the text, where the 911 call dispatch system and its capacity to deliver demands for racialized policing to law enforcement’s doorstep is often overlooked in inventories of institutional bias. Fields notes that law enforcement are required to respond to calls for emergency assistance and dispatchers have no discretion in terms of which calls they forward. Chapter 3 follows by highlighting the development of case law (particularly around the 4th Amendment) that provide law enforcement protection for nearly any kind of interaction they have with civilians. Chapter 4, then, positions stand-your-ground laws as an extension of the power of White citizens to wield extra-legal violence for the purpose of maintaining white supremacy. Legal protection for citizens who claim self-defense is matched in Chapter 5 with legal protection afforded to officers via unqualified immunity. Fields concludes this explication of legal racial violence with a review of research around unconscious bias held by White Americans – after centuries of codified white supremacy, how can we expect White Americans to unlearn their own privilege? Fields ultimately concludes that we cannot, thus setting up his claim that rather than gear reforms to improve interactions between legal actors and civilians, our only hope is to gear reforms to reduce those interactions overall.
The evidence Fields brings to bear on his argument centers on the development of case law around the issues that anchor each chapter. The exception is Chapter 1, which recounts a long history of the criminalization of blackness, beginning with slave codes, and moving through Jim Crow, an era characterized by legally supported lynching. Throughout the text, Fields recounts anecdote after brutal anecdote of the violent deaths of Black individuals first at the hands of lynch mobs, then at the hands of police, and then again by White civilians in the contemporary era. Through this exercise, he drives home the role this violence plays in maintaining racial hierarchy, carrying it through eras of racial change, and the ease with which it is accessible to White citizens. This narrative thread is valuable for two reasons: 1) it clearly connects the nation’s past sins to the contemporary political moment, reminding the reader that the common-sense rejection of the violence of slavery likewise demands that we approach contemporary legal violence with urgency; and 2) it reminds us of the lives and potential lost at the hands of police – Elijah McClain’s name will not be forgotten.
The central argument of the book is that there is no escaping the racialized violence of the state (and White citizens’ predilection to wield it to maintain the color line) and so we should instead focus on reducing interactions with police – thus, whether one finds the book compelling depends on their orientation towards police. Fields has not produced a text that is likely to convince even the average reform-minded liberal that crime is not an issue, that public safety is not an important social good, and that police do not have a role in providing public safety. In fact, he has presented no analysis dealing with the real issue of public safety that many individuals living in race-class subjugated communities face daily.
The text does cover a fair amount of evidence that the police have a lot of discretion and legal protection in ways that are problematic in a democracy. However, this evidence is likely to be familiar to criminal legal scholars. The historical recounting of the push-and-pull between Black resistance and the mechanistic reassertion of state violence in response to that resistance by way of criminal justice policy retreads arguments developed by scholars elsewhere, such as in Weaver’s work on race and punitive crime policy (Vesla Weaver, “Frontlash: Race and the development of punitive crime policy,” Studies in American Political Development, 21[2)]: 230-26); Gibran Muhammad’s [2010] The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, crime, and the making of modern urban America, and Naomi Murakawa’s [2014] The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America. Michelle Alexander developed similar legal analysis in The New Jim Crow [2010]. The usefulness of Fields’ analysis, then, arises from turning attention to the role of white citizens in the contemporary moment who wield their power not through explicit acts of violence, as in the case of the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, but through the comparatively more quotidian use of the 911 call system to police out-of-place Black bodies in White spaces. Whether this pivot is enough to convince Fields’ audience to embrace abolition is unclear. Nevertheless, Fields adroitly problematizes the 911 call system, effectively highlights the demand-side factors that promote racialized policing practices, and identifies an often-overlooked area of policy ripe for reform.
In sum, Neighborhood Watch develops analysis of case law that undercuts the ability to hold law enforcement accountable together with an account of the means by which White citizens can use police to protect White space and uphold White supremacy. He then leverages this analysis to identify a suite of reforms that would ostensibly succeed in reducing overall interactions between civilians and police. The text is an entry into a growing body of work oriented around the project of abolition. The book complements a series of other works that provide more in-depth scholarly accounts of the political development of the American carceral state and legal analyses that lay bare the racialized nature of the system. However, researchers interested in extending an empirical analysis of how the criminal justice system operates to produce racialized outcomes are not likely to find much new ground to work in Neighborhood Watch. Nevertheless, the accessibility of the text does render it a useful entry into understanding the institutional mechanisms by which policing reinforces racial cleavages. By turning attention to demand-side drivers of racialized policing, Fields identifies an enduring agent in criminal legal inequality – citizens, ourselves.
