“I’m Wise to the Game”: How Inner-City Women Experience and Navigate Police Raids

• Date: 01 October 2021
• Author: Carolyn Greene,Marta-Marika Urbanik,Manzah-Kyentoh Yankey
• Published date: 01 October 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/15570851211005541
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/15570851211005541

Feminist Criminology

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DOI: 10.1177/15570851211005541

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Article

“I’m Wise to the Game”:

How Inner-City Women

Experience and Navigate

Police Raids

Carolyn Greene1, Marta-Marika Urbanik2,

and Manzah-Kyentoh Yankey2

Abstract

Despite the plethora of research on inner-city policing, little is known about how

women experience and make sense of involuntary police encounters. Based upon

interviews with women who had their homes raided by police in Toronto’s inner-

city, this paper explores how these marginalized women perceive, navigate, and resist

normative gender expectations in their interactions with police officers during raids.

Our findings demonstrate that women believed officers treated them according to

gendered stereotypes, and in response, women strategically deployed gendered

presentations in an effort to resist, negotiate, and temper anticipated raid related

harms. However, participants’ positionality constrained their efforts.

Keywords

gender, policing, qualitative research

Introduction

In North America, police presence is heightened in many inner-city communities, sub-

jecting residents to racial profiling, police abuses, and criminalization (e.g., Anderson,

1999; Brunson, 2007; Brunson & Miller, 2006a, 2006b; Cobbina 2019; Comack &

Silver, 2008; Contreras, 2013; Gaston & Brunson, 2020; Maynard, 2017; Rios, 2011,

2017; Skogan, 2006; Weitzer & Brunson, 2009, 2013; Wortley & Owusu-Bempah,

1Athabasca University, AB, Canada

2University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

Corresponding Author:

Marta-Marika Urbanik, Department of Sociology, University of Alberta, 5-21 HMT, Edmonton,

AB T6G2H4, Canada.

Email: urbanik@ualberta.ca

1005541

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2011). In response, some community residents draw upon strategies (e.g., police/area

avoidance, verbal challenges, knowing one’s rights, and officer-specific tactics) to

limit and mitigate police contact (Anderson, 1999; Goffman, 2014; Jones, 2014;

Stuart, 2016; Urbanik & Greene, 2020; Weitzer & Brunson, 2009; Weitzer & Tuch,

2006). Despite this broad knowledge base, few empirical studies have examined more

invasive and oft veiled police encounters, such as police raids. In Western countries,

police raids often involve militarized police units forcefully and unexpectedly entering

properties in search of a suspect and/or evidence (Cyr et al., 2020; Fisher, 2010; Kraska

& Kappeler, 1997; Roziere & Walby, 2019). The March 2020 police killing of Breonna

Taylor during a botched raid of her home in Kentucky, U.S.A. has ignited broader

public criticism—largely led by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement—of resi-

dential search warrant execution. However, despite BLM’s continued advocacy and

global protests since 2014 (see Lebron, 2017; Rickford, 2015), racially biased policing

continues (Gaston et al., 2020; Roach et al., 2021; Ross et al., 2020).

Much of what we know about experiences of inner-city policing is rooted predomi-

nantly in men’s experiences (e.g., Brunson, 2007; Brunson & Miller, 2006b; Goffman,

2014). The relative paucity of research examining inner-city women’s experiences

with police is curious because women—particularly racialized women—living in mar-

ginalized neighborhoods are also subject to heightened police surveillance, discrimi-

nation, and criminalization (Brunson & Miller, 2006a; Crenshaw et al., 2014, 2015;

Maynard, 2017; Ritchie, 2017; Stuart, 2016). While scholars have examined women’s

experiences with crime, victimization, and the criminal justice system (e.g., Adler,

1975; Burgess-Proctor, 2006; Cullen et al., 2014; Daly, 1992; Gartner & Kruttschnitt,

2004; Grundetjern, 2015; Hoskins & Cobbina, 2020; Jones et al., 2019; Kruttschnitt,

2013; Maher, 1997; Messerschmidt, 1995; Miller, 2001; Stearns, 2019; Steffensmeier

& Allan, 1996), few studies have analyzed women’s involuntary police encounters

outside of intimate partner violence situations (see Johnson, 2007; Saxton et al., 2021).

Of those that have, most have documented women’s general perceptions of police,

police trauma, harassment, microaggressions, and avoidance strategies during street

encounters (Aniefuna et al., 2020; Brunson & Miller, 2006a; Brunson & Stewart,

2006; Bundy, 2019; Fine et al., 2003; Fox-Williams, 2019; Hitchens et al., 2018;

Maynard, 2017; Rengifo & Pater, 2017; Wilson et al., 2020). One notable study—

Goffman’s (2014, pp. 63–69) “On the Run”—documented how police treat women

during police raids, illuminating officers’ techniques for coercing women’s coopera-

tion. However, Goffman did not examine women’s perceptions of and/or responses to

officers’ tactics. Thus, while some studies have explored how women use gender to

avoid police attention/arrest (e.g., Jacobs & Miller, 1998; Maher, 1997), none examine

how gender is used/performed during police interactions—a surprising omission since

police encounters are a “gendered experience” (Brunson & Miller, 2006a, p. 538).

In unpacking gendered experiences, we acknowledge that people “do gender”

within the context of everyday interactions, which shapes behaviour through “a com-

plex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities”

(West & Zimmerman, 1987, p. 126). Gender performances vary according to situated

normative ideals and expectations about “masculinity” and “femininity” (West &