Neighborhood climates of legal cynicism and complaints about abuse of police power†

• Author: Bill McCarthy,Daniel Herda,John Hagan
• Published date: 01 August 2020
• Date: 01 August 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12246

Received: 23 May 2019 Revised: 26 February 2020 Accepted: 13 March 2020

DOI: 10.1111/1745-9125.12246

ARTICLE

Neighborhood climates of legal cynicism and

complaints about abuse of police power*

Bill McCarthy1John Hagan2Daniel Herda3

1School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University—Newark

2Department of Sociology, Northwestern University & the American Bar Foundation

3Department of Sociology, Merrimack College

Correspondence

BillMcCar thy Schoolof Cr iminal Justice,

RutgersUniversity—Newark.

Email:wm307@scj.r utgers.edu

∗Additionalsupporting information can be

foundin the full text tab for this article in the

WileyOnline Library at http://onlinelibrar y.

wiley.com/doi/10.1111/crim.2020.58.issue-

3/issuetoc.

Wethank Ana Bettencourt, Collin Cameron,

JacobFaber, Ryan Finnegan, Jessica Kalbfeld,

WestonJ. Morrow, John Shjarback, Rajiv

Sinclair,Bradely Smith, Michael White, and

membersof t he UCDavisSociology Social

ControlResearch Cluster for their help and

suggestionson earlier drafts, as well as John

Danielsfor his help with geocoding. Direct

correspondence to Bill McCarthy,School of

Criminal Justice, RutgersUniversity—Newark,

123Washington Street, Newark,NJ 07102-

3094(wm307@scj.r utgers.edu)

Abstract

Research findings show that legal cynicism—a cultural

frame in which skepticism about laws, the legal system,

and police is expressed—is important in understanding

neighborhood variation in engagement with the police, par-

ticularly in racially isolated African American communi-

ties. We argue that legal cynicism is also useful for under-

standing neighborhood variation in complaints about police

misconduct. Using data on complaints filed in Chicago

between 2012 and 2014, we show that grievances dis-

proportionately came from racially segregated neighbor-

hoods and that a measure of legal cynicism from the mid-

1990s predicts complaints about abuse of police power

two decades later. The association between legal cynicism

and complaints is net of prior complaints, reported crime,

imprisonment, and other structural factors that contribute

to the frequency and nature of interactions involving police

and residents. Legal cynicism also mediates the influence

of racially isolated neighborhoods on complaints. The mid-

1990s is the approximate midpoint of a half-century of

police scandals in Chicago. Our research findings suggest

that contemporary complaints about police misconduct in

highly segregated Chicago neighborhoods are grounded in

collectively shared historical memories of police malfea-

sance. They also suggest that persistent complaints about

510 © 2020 American Society of Criminology wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/crim Criminology.2020;58:510–536.

MCCARTHYET AL.511

police misconduct may represent officially memorialized

expressions of enduring racial protest against police abuse

of power.

KEYWORDS

cultural frames, neighborhoods, police complaints, police misconduct,

racial segregation

A succession of reports have provided cumulative evidence of more than a half-century of police

wrongdoing in Chicago (Andonova,2017). These include Cong ressman Ralph Metcalfe’s (1972) 1970s

report on police abuse, and more recently, the U.S. Department of Justice’s (U.S. Department of Jus-

tice, Civil Rights Division, 2017) investigation of police misconduct and the report of Mayor Rahm

Emmanuel’s Police Accountability Task Force (2016). In the spring of 2018, the Cook County State

Attorney’s office added to this list, announcing it no longer considered credible ten Chicago police

officers led by supervising Sgt. Ronald Watts (Gonnerman, 2018; Rogers,2018). Residents in housing

projects reported that these officers planted drugs, framed people, and bullied victims into guilty pleas.

Much of this abuse occurred in station houses in Chicago Police Districts Two and Three, districts that

include several South Side neighborhoods with high concentrations of Black residents. The Wattscase

involveshundreds of potentially wrongly convicted defendants, stretched from the 1970s to the present,

and resulted in the exoneration of more than 40 convicted men.

The Watts case is only one of a series of high-profile cases of Chicago police abuse. In the 1960s,

officer James “Gloves” Davis had a reputation forwear inga glove on his right hand when he beat sus-

pects and for participating in the 1969 raid that killed the rising Black Panther activist Fred Hampton

(Diamond, 2017). Beginning in the 1970s, Police Commander Jon Burge and a team of officers rou-

tinely harassed and bullied people in South Side Chicago. Burge’s squad systematically tortured more

than 100 Black men between 1972 and 1991 (Hamilton & Foote, 2018; Lantigua-Williams, 2016;

Taylor, 2014).

Cases such as those of officers Watts, Davis, and Burge bring into sharp relief and raise pressing

questions about police misconduct, especially in raciallyisolated Afr ican American communities. Most

city-level research has documented a positiveassociation between police complaints and percent Black

(Holmes, 2000; Smith & Holmes, 2003, 2014); however, as noted in recent analyses, we know much

less about the context of complaints at the neighborhood level (Faber & Kalbfeld,2019) or the connec-

tions between complaints and neighborhood attributes, including racial segregation (Smith & Holmes,

2014). Moreover, we know little about how cultural mechanisms mediate any association between

racial isolation and complaints. Cultural narratives are, as Sampson (2012, p. 66) noted, essential for

understanding connections between neighborhood structural conditions and behavior.

We focus on legal cynicism, a cultural frame or narrative in which people perceive the law and

the police as unresponsive, disinterested, dismissive, and not worthy of trust (Kirk & Papachristos,

2011; Sampson & Bartusch, 1998). In prior research, scholars found that legal cynicism is pronounced

in many Black and economically disadvantaged neighborhoods (Sampson, 2012). They have also

reported a positive association between legal cynicism and reported crime, including homicide (Kirk

& Papachristos, 2011; Sampson, 2012). This finding has encouraged the thesis that legal cynicism

encourages people to use self-help (Black, 1983) in response to crime, rather than reporting crime to,

or engaging with, police (Kirk & Papachristos, 2011), as well as to accept, rather than complain about,

police mistreatment (Faber & Kalbfeld, 2019). In this view,legal cynicism is a neighborhood “deficit”