“Your Pants Won’t Save You”

• Author: Kimberly Bender,Erin M. Kerrison,Jennifer Cobbina
• Published date: 01 January 2018
• Date: 01 January 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/2153368717734291
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

“Your Pants Won’t Save

You”: Why Black Youth

Challenge Race-Based

Police Surveillance and

the Demands of Black

Respectability Politics

Erin M. Kerrison

1

, Jennifer Cobbina

2

and

Kimberly Bender

3

Abstract

The politics of “Black Respectability” foreground Black citizens’ individual and col-

lective responsibility to prioritize self-policing, polish, and propriety. Proponents

believe that the steady performance of restraint and decorum is critical and that any

departure from that repertoire can result in punishment. The belief that racially

minoritized youth must earn respect and autonomy, rather than see those rights

protected as a standard afforded to all community members, may not be widely held

by younger Black people. The following study makes use of interview data collected

from 23 Black Baltimore City millennials who shared their perspectives on the social

and political contexts that led to Freddie Gray’s death while in Baltimore Police

custody. When discussing police officers’ pursuit of citizens who match Freddie Gray’s

outward appearance, younger respondents resisted the demands of Black Respect-

ability Politics and, instead, asserted their right to pass through their neighborhoods

absent state-sanctioned harassment. This study features an exploration of how gen-

erational membership moderates legal socialization, attitudes about personal

responsibility for police profiling, and beliefs about the right to the same full spectrum

of freedoms and protections enjoyed by majority citizens. Implications for critical race

theory, legal cynicism, and intergenerational coalition building are also discussed.

1

School of Social Welfare, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

2

School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

3

Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice, University of Michigan, Flint, MI, USA

Corresponding Author:

Erin M. Kerrison, School of Social Welfare, University of California at Berkeley, 120 Haviland Hall, MC

#7400, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.

Email: kerrison@berkeley.edu

Race and Justice

2018, Vol. 8(1) 7-26

ªThe Author(s) 2017

Reprints and permission:

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DOI: 10.1177/2153368717734291

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Keywords

critical race theory, deadly force, legal cynicism, race and policing, racial profiling

The gods will not save you.

—Ervin H. Burrell, The Wire

1

[I]t’s the postmodern institutions that are the gods. And they are gods. And no one is

bigger.

—David Simon, “Behind The Wire”

2

Freddie Carlos Gray, Jr., was born on August 16, 1984, and was pronounced dead on

April 19, 2015. On April 12, 2015, Gray was arrested by officers of the Baltimore

Police Department (BPD) for allegedly possessing an illegal switchblade. Eyewitness

accounts and video footage suggest that the six BPD officers involved in Gray’s arrest

used excessive force while detaining him. It was also reported that the officers failed

to safely secure Gray inside the transport van, resulting in his sustaining lethal injuries

to his larynx and spinal cord. The ongoing outcry that unfolded following Freddie

Gray’s death escalated to a series of riots and acts of arson following his funeral

service on April 27, 2015. Many Baltimore City residents have expressed dis-

appointment in the violent and destructive events that ensued. However, there may not

be consensus around the empathy extended to protestors who may have been

responding with hurt and anger to what scholars including Alexander (2010) and

Embrick (2015) might refer to as contemporary state-sanctioned lynching.

To provide some context, note that Baltimore City residents have not only been

subjected to the blows of structural violence for decades, but that those conditions

were exacerbated by the War on Drugs and Broken Windows-based law enforcement

ideologies (Collins, 2007). Police and civilian relations were radically transformed

when the urgency of ramped up surveillance measures outweighed concerns about due

process, fourth amendment protections, and probable cause requirements. Investiga-

tive journalism revealed that the architects of these crime reduction initiatives were

more concerned with (and seduced by) the potential impact of the potentially crime-

reducing ends derived from their new tactics, than the constitutionality of their means

(Simon, 2006; Simon & Burns, 1997). For example, in the late 1980s through the early

2000s, the BPD conducted mass arrests in which residents of primarily Black

neighborhoods were rounded up for nonexistent charges (Pinard, 2015).

3

This practice

was animated by a war-like mentality through which sworn officers abandoned the

community policing elements associated with the original intentions of Wilson and

Kelling’s (1982) Broken Windows thesis (Taylor, 2001). They became occupiers and

enforcers rather than partners in protection, and used aggressive tactics that have sown

immense distrust among residents, many of whom, in 2015, were coming of age as

millennials. At the time of Freddie Grays’ death, the setting was rife for cynicism, as

younger Black Baltimore residents had only known an occupied state where their

communities were systematically preyed upon.

8Race and Justice 8(1)