Recognition gaps and economies of worth in police encounters
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Recognition gaps and economies of worth in police encounters Ron Levi1 · Holly Campeau2 · Todd Foglesong3
© Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract This paper examines what arrested individuals expect from the police, and the moral grammars they rely on to evaluate police behavior. Drawing on interviews with recently arrested suspects in the Cleveland city jail, we analyze the moral gram‑ mars, or common worlds, that residents invoke to reflect on interactions with law enforcement. We find that respondents care about two different moral dimensions in policing. At one level, they want police to treat them with civility and polite‑ ness, and to respect their rights—thereby treating them equally with other residents in the city. Yet at a second level, they want police to show care and empathy for their local situation, and to recognize that policing the neighborhoods in which they live is different than policing other parts of the city. As a result, we find that residents who are arrested by the police deploy two orders of worth: a civic order, grounded in fairness, legal rules, equality, and civic belonging in the polity; and a domestic order, based on a politics of community and difference, emphasizing empathy, local knowledge, and personal experience. We demonstrate how individuals assess and test the moral promise of institutions to offer moral recognition, redress, and repair. Keywords Recognition · Policing · Respect · Justifications · Moral grammars · Economies of worth
* Ron Levi [email protected] Holly Campeau [email protected] Todd Foglesong [email protected] 1
Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, 315 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON M5S 0A7, Canada
2
Department of Sociology, University of Alberta, 5‑21 HM Tory Building, Edmonton, AB T6G 2H4, Canada
3
Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto, 315 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON M5S 0A7, Canada
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R. Levi et al.
Introduction In this paper, we investigate how the expectations that residents have for law enforcement are also terrains of broad moral contention. We underline how understandings of the police are part of a broader set of expectations that develop within neighborhoods and communities and are embedded in the collective mem‑ ory of minority groups (Bell 2016; Desmond et al. 2016; Mastrofski et al. 2016; Stuart 2016). This resonates closely with the attention in cultural sociology to contentious police interactions for understanding the civil force of law (Alexan‑ der 2016; Shimizu 2018, 2019), and work in moral philosophy that highlights such contention to ask what the moral expectations of residents in highly disad‑ vantaged “ghettos” (Duneier 2016) ought to be, when living in conditions that are fundamentally unjust (Shelby 2016). Research in cultural sociology is increasingly attuned to the moral reason‑ ing through which people make claims to their own dignity and worth, and the dimensions through which they evaluate
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