Teaching Gender as Social Structure: “Walking While Trans” as Illustration

This teaching note offers a description of the analysis of features of the phenomenon of police harassment of trans and gender non-conforming folks as an illustration of gender as a social structure and related course concepts, with a focus on how the use of this illustration enhances student understanding of ideas central to the course.

Black Men’s Experience of Police Harassment: A Descriptive Phenomenological Study

The Black community has a long, well-documented history of being disproportionately harassed by law enforcement. While psychological research has studied this phenomenon, more in-depth research on Black men’s lived-experience of police harassment is needed. This qualitative study used descriptive phenomenology to investigate Black men’s experience of being harassed by law enforcement officers. An analysis of non-structured interviews with a sample of four participants revealed several essential aspects of this experience, including: anxiety in response to the initial awareness of law enforcement’s presence, fear and confusion in response to abrupt escalation of aggression and hostility by officers, a sense of humiliation in response to degrading police tactics, anger over inability to pursue redress through the justice system, ongoing negative emotion, and a sense of having been psychologically harmed by the harassment. The implications of the findings are discussed.

The white-painters of Cabbagetown: Neighborhood policing and sex worker resistance in Toronto, 1986–1987

Toronto in the 1980s was embroiled in intense debates about the place of sex work in society. The passing of new legislation in 1985 criminalizing communication for the purposes of prostitution led to increased police harassment of outdoor sex workers. Within a gentrifying urban neighborhood, homeowners created a neighborhood organization, the South of Carlton Association, with the express purpose of collaborating with Metro Police and City Council to remove sex workers from the downtown stroll. In turn, sex worker activists in the Canadian Organization for the Rights of Prostitutes practiced a range of strategies to challenge this oppression—including archiving their resistance.

In Brief

Same-sex parents, how police harassment affects adolescent mental health, and unequal distribution of household labor. New research from the journals.

A Neglected Problem: Understanding the Effects of Personal and Vicarious Trauma on African Americans’ Attitudes Toward the Police

The relationship between the police and African Americans has had a contentious history for decades. To explore this topic further, we interviewed 77 African Americans in the City of Durham, NC, about the declining relationship between their community and the police. We find that African Americans’ perceptions of the police are nuanced and complicated by personal experiences, vicarious experiences of relatives and friends, and news from social media and television regarding policing practices and treatment, including police harassment and/or brutality. We characterize these direct and vicarious experiences as the transmission of trauma. Even for the proportion of African Americans who had positive perceptions and interactions with the police, their views of the police seemed to be further complicated by broader concerns of discriminatory treatment. We proffer solutions to improve the relationship between the police and African Americans. The implications of our findings for future research are also discussed.

Sex Workers’ Access to Police Assistance in Safety Emergencies and Means of Escape from Situations of Violence and Confinement under an “End Demand” Criminalization Model: A Five City Study in Canada

There is limited available evidence on sex workers (SW) ability to access police protection or means of escaping situations of violence and confinement under an “end demand” criminalization model. Of 200 SW in five cities in Canada, 62 (31.0%) reported being unable to call 911 if they or another SW were in a safety emergency due to fear of police detection (of themselves, their colleagues or their management). In multivariate logistic regression, police harassment–linked to social and racial profiling in the past 12 months (being carded or asked for ID documents, followed by police or detained without arrest) (Adjusted Odd Ratio (AOR): 5.225, 95% Confidence Interval (CI): 2.199–12.417), being Indigenous (AOR: 2.078, 95% CI: 0.849–5.084) or being in Ottawa (AOR: 2.317, 95% CI: 0.865–6.209) were associated with higher odds of being unable to call 911, while older age was associated with lower odds (AOR: 0.941 per year older, 95% CI: 0.901–0.982). In descriptive statistics, of 115 SW who had experienced violence or confinement at work in the past 12 months, 19 (16.52%) reported the incident to police. Other sex workers with shared expenses were the most commonly reported group to have assisted sex workers to escape situations of violence or confinement in the past 12 months (n = 13, 35.14%). One of the least commonly reported groups to have assisted sex workers to escape situations of violence or confinement in the past 12 months were police (n = 2, 5.41%). The findings of this study illustrate how the current “end demand” criminalization framework compromises sex workers’ access to assistance in safety emergencies.

Policing in Europe: disability justice and abolitionist intersectional care

Over the last few years, the intersections between mental health and punitive violence have gained more attention within scholarship and activism around race and policing. Disability justice and intersectional approaches have argued that the discourses around and categorisations of various forms of disability are deeply rooted in projects of colonialism and enslavement, and their legacies. These discourses are strongly enacted in contemporary logics and practices of policing, as racialised people who identify or are categorised as mad, neurodiverse, mentally ill, psychiatric survivors and disabled are particularly vulnerable to police harassment and violence. This article discusses how policing is deeply intertwined with discourses around saneism – institutional and systemic oppression of people who identify, have been diagnosed as, or are perceived to be, mentally ill, which has implications for abolitionist intersectional thought and practice. Foregrounding a black feminist abolitionist analysis, in dialogue with intersectional disability justice and mad studies, the author argues that an accountable engagement with the mad analytics of policing of black lives has important implications for intersectional and abolitionist thought and activism as forms of care/ing for black lives.