Why federal intervention in Portland shouldn’t be a shock

For several months, protests have been ongoing in Portland, Oregon, following the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Aaron Roussell and Gisela Rodriguez Fernandez examine the intentional misconceptions which have developed to delegitimize the protests in Portland and elsewhere, writing that despite sentiments that such tactics are ‘not American’, the use of police violence and federal agents against protests in US cities is nothing new

The "Territorial Imperative" and Problem Solving Partnerships: LAPD Defines Community

This presentation, delivered in 2013 for the American Society of Criminology, considers community-based policing and its use in Los Angeles, California. The presentation considers the effect of community-based policing on racial and social interactions in a given community

The Forensic Identification of Marijuana: Suspicion, Moral Danger, and the Creation of Non-Psychoactive THC

American federal and state laws present marijuana as a dangerous substance requiring coercive control and forbid private citizens from possessing, selling, or growing it. The differences between marijuana and hemp--a similar but uncontrolled substance in the United States--remain largely social and legal, rather than chemical. These complications present conceptual and practical difficulties for the law, which is structured around neat, mutually exclusive categories. More practically, current forensic tests are incapable of discerning hemp from marijuana because of this legal confusion. This paper investigates the conflicting social, scientific, and legal understandings of marijuana and the potential practical implications of its legal status

Policing the anticommunity: Race, deterritorialization, and labor market reorganization in South Los Angeles

Recent decades have seen the rise of both community partnerships and the carceral state. Community policing in Los Angeles arose after the 1992 uprisings and was built on two conceptual building blocks—the territorial imperative and community partnership—which remain central more than 20 years later. At the same time, LA has undergone a significant black-to-Latino demographic shift linked with its restructured economy. This article discusses these changes using archival analysis and 5 years of participant observation in one South LA precinct. Police help to reshape the demography of South LA in ways conducive to post-Fordist economic shifts. The “community” concept appropriated by urban governance initiatives is composed against the unwanted “anticommunity,” which serves to heighten territorial control over black and Latino residents. Rather than encourage community cogovernance over the institution of policing, community rhetoric facilitates racial preference in neighborhood transition under the auspices of an increasingly bifurcated labor market

Defining "policeability": Cooperation, control, and resistance in South Los Angeles community police meetings

Community policing partnerships are built and maintained by community meetings wherein participants coproduce social order by identifying local problems and devising strategies for their reduction and resolution. Coproduction is a dynamic process of meaning construction that takes place through social interaction. These interactions build toward a mutually satisfactory discourse on local definitions of law, crime, and order. This discourse creates a set of understandings about what citizens interpret as problems, disorder, and crime, as well as police officers’ ability to address these issues using a range of enforcement and non-enforcement strategies. Through this interactive process, police and residents define the “policeability” of residents’ interpretations. Drawing on literature in symbolic interactionism, we chart a course for unpacking the contest over policeable discourse using ethnographic data gathered over a four-year period in community-police meetings in South Los Angeles. This paper explores participants’ roles and explicates the process of defining policeability through a set of ideal-type interactions (cooperation, control, and resistance). Power, in this setting, is control over the definition of policeability. Residents are locked into a supplicatory role, while officers are akin to legal brokers, accepting, rejecting, or reframing residents’ claims of crime and disorder. Our findings suggest that, in this precinct, while the rhetoric of cooperation abounds, pessimism on the part of policing scholars about the claims toward true partnership are warranted with respect to the power police retain and express in police-citizen interactions

Paradise lost: White flight, broken windows, and the construction of a criminogenic origin myth

This presentation deconstructs narratives about crime, pointing to racist assumptions in narratives that are framed as colorblind. This presentation occurred at the meeting of the American Society of Criminology in San Francisco, 2014

State Administration of Drug Courts: Exploring Issues of Authority, Funding, and Legitimacy

Although drug courts are local programs, many were established using federal grant dollars from the U.S. Department of Justice. As these federal grants run their course and overall federal funding for drug courts declines, drug court programs are increasingly relying on state funding for long-term sustainability. Based on prior research and interviews with state drug court directors, this article delineates the three basic models that have emerged for funding and management of these programs at the state level. There is no one best model—each has its strengths and weaknesses. States contemplating a centralization of their drug court activity are urged to carefully consider the executive, judicial, and collaborative models in light of their respective state bureaucratic structures. Whatever decision is made, it must reflect input from the important state-level stakeholders

Normalising Desistance: Contextualising Marijuana and Cocaine use Careers in Young Adults

Although there is a vast literature on drug use and addiction, there is little work that addresses the long-term use of drugs within the general population. We take a more contextual look in examining longitudinal drug use patterns over the course of 14 years for a representative sample of young adults in their late teens and early twenties in the United States using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). We use a growth trajectory modelling approach for cocaine and marijuana users to determine general use careers. Using contextual and life-course variables, we then estimate a multinomial logistic regression model to predict group membership. In addition to establishing general use career groups, we ask how well mainstream theories comport with our findings and how the different chemical makeup of cocaine and marijuana influence our findings. We find four general use career groups: (i) high use/late desistance; (ii) peaked use/strong desistance; (iii) low use; and (iv) stable use/gradual desistance. Our results suggest similar careers for users of both drugs, with desistance over time as the rule for all groups. We also find some support for life-course and contextual factors in drug using patterns, but our findings challenge other psychological and criminological theories

An Exercise in Failure Punishing “At-Risk” Youth and Families in a South Los Angeles Boot Camp Program

Juvenile correctional boot camps seek to transform youth labeled “at-risk” into productive members of society. While these military-style programs have been in decline since the early 2000s, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), one of the largest agencies in the country, continues to embrace them as a key disciplinary practice and vestige of the “get tough” era in U.S. juvenile justice reform. Contemporary transformative programs have been linked to Progressive Era juvenile social control, and scholars are beginning to show that, historically, racial exclusion has been a central function. The goals of this research are to interrogate the treatment of boot camp participants by police and demonstrate how racial exclusion remains central to juvenile social control. Drawing on collaborative ethnographic fieldwork, this study shows how police stigmatize Black and Latino parents, adopt the role of disciplinary authority in the family, and infuse formal control processes into domestic life. Youth face stigmatizing encounters through degradation and punitive physical training as part of the camp’s disciplinary regime. This research suggests that youth intervention programs built on liberal ideals are the most recent in a long line of racialized social control systems in the United States that seek to stigmatize and confine youth of color

Field Observations of the Developing Legal Recreational Cannabis Economy in Washington State

Background Washington State legalized the sale of recreational cannabis in 2012. This paper describes the unfolding of the market regulatory regime in an eastern portion of the state, including field descriptions to illustrate the setting. Methods We made observations and conducted interviews of the local supply chain comprising a producer/processor, analytic facility, and retail establishments as well as querying the state director of the regulatory board. Results Interviews and observations of facilities suggest an overwhelming concern for black market diversion drives state regulatory efforts. The ongoing dialogue between market actors and the state has resulted in a more equitable distribution of profits at different stages in the process. State safety regulations have thus far been shifted to independent laboratories. Banks and insurance companies have slowly begun making inroads into the industry, despite federal prohibition. Conclusion The law was conceived as a social justice remedy, but the bulk of the legal and regulatory activity surrounds cannabis marketplace management. This has been characterized by concerns for black market diversion, producer/processor profits, and a hands-off approach to safety regulation. Minor cannabis violations as a pathway to criminal justice system involvement have been reduced substantially but disproportionate enforcement upon racial/ethnic minorities continues