1. Schuppe (2016).
2. Winsor (2016).
3. Butler (2017).
4. Fisher (2016).
5. Neidig (2016).
6. French (2017).
7. See the Movement for Black Lives (2016) and Black Lives Matter (2019) on the movement’s broad program.
8. Graham (2016).
9. Boddie (2017).
10. Felony stops involve police contact with individuals believed to have committed or be planning to commit a violent offense. These multiple-officer stops involve the threat or use of force by police; officers, for example, may unholster their guns as they order suspects to exit a vehicle or demonstrate that their waistbands are not concealing a firearm.
11. Butler (2017); Jones (2018); Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003); Stoughton (2014; 2016); Stuart (2016); Zimring (2017).
12. Morin et al. (2017).
13. Butler (2017).
14. There is a useful debate regarding the circumscription of violence, and whether it “necessarily includes physicality in either the action or its effect” (Walby 2013: 101; see also Bourdieu 1991; Butler 2011; Ray 2011). For the purposes of this book, I focus on threat or enactment of physical violence involving guns.
15. Weber (1946).
16. Burnett (2016); Crime Prevention Research Center (2020); Gallup (2019); Parker et al. (2017).
17. Carlson (2015); Stroud (2012); Mencken and Froese (2019).
18. Carlson (2015; 2018).
19. Miller (2010).
20. Rose (2013).
21. Kendi (2017); Seamster and Ray (2018).
22. Kraska (2007); see also Balko (2013).
23. Stoughton (2014: 226).
24. Smith and Williams (2016).
25. Armstrong and Carlson (2019); Dow (2016); Rios (2011).
26. This is vitally underscored by the #SayHerName campaign (Crenshaw et al. 2015); see also Madriz (1997). Furthermore, the consequences of police harassment and violence against boys and men of color is not confined to them; it reverberates in a variety of forms of violence against girls and women. See Butler (2017); Comfort (2008); Jones (2018).
27. E.g., Butler (2017); Forman (2017); Muhammad (2011); Rios (2011).
28. According to Feagin (2013: xi), racial frames represent “a broad and persisting set of racial stereotypes, ideologies, interlinked interpretations and narratives, … visual images, … racialized emotions, and racialized reactions to language accents” (emphasis in the original). This definition reflects a broad body of scholarship on race and crime control starting with W.E.B. Du Bois, across sociology (e.g., Bonilla-Silva 2006; Feagin 2013), history (e.g., Kendi 2017; Muhammad 2011), psychology (e.g., Gutsell and Inzlicht 2012; Payne 2006), and law (e.g., Harris 1993; Gonzalez Van Cleve and Mayes 2015).
29. Carlson (2015).
30. Carlson (2015).
31. See Jones (2018) on masculinity, gun violence, and the politics of respectability.
32. Sociological and political analyses of the state also provide a foundation for understanding gun populism, unraveling Weber’s (1946) argument that the “right” to use violence—both the capacity to deploy violence and the ability to do so “legitimately”—is dynamically and intimately connected to the “politics” over which “states” and “groups within a state” struggle. Recall, for example, Black’s (1983) contention that much crime is justice by another name. In contexts where access to legitimate, state-centric channels of redress is limited, individuals take justice into their own hands. Claims by historical criminologists (e.g., Roth 2012) that homicide rates are inversely related to trust in government institutions are likewise suggestive. Underscoring legitimate violence as a sociological phenomenon, Elias (1939) reminds us that violence becomes monopolized by the state through a contingent “civilizing” process of social-psychic and structural processes. Furthermore, Weber’s (1946) designation of the state as a “human community,” especially when paired with an understanding of the state as interpenetrating civil society (Foucault 1977; Mann 1986), anticipates subsequent scholarship that proclaims that the state has no clear a priori boundaries (Mitchell 1991).
33. Spierenburg (2006: 113).
34. Obert (2018) shows, across these contexts, that communities struggled to reinvent order maintenance as social order (whether due to industrialization, emancipation, or frontier expansion) transformed around them. His book traces how these struggles produced new forms of organized violence: public law enforcement, private security firms, and white supremacist militias.
35. Dunbar-Ortiz (2014; 2018); Madley (2016).
36. Drawing on an ethnography of local security arrangements in Colombia, Gordon (2019: 3, 17) analyzes the social psychological mechanisms among residents and police by which “extrajudicial violence and legal authority can be viewed as legitimate simultaneously” such that “extrajudicial violence [can be] viewed as a legitimate complement to, rather than a replacement for, legal authority.” Likewise, in her ethnography of immigration-restrictionist and pro-immigrant activists on the Arizona border, Elcioglu (2015; 2017) emphasizes how appraisals of state efficacy embolden nonstate actors to engage in policing and patrol activities that buttress state legitimacy while simultaneously undermining the state’s strict monopoly on legitimate violence. Explicitly extending Elias’s (1939) theory of the civilizing process to a “no rules” weapons fighting group, Gong (2015) analyzes how participants interactionally draw lines between legitimate violence (i.e., “civilized” violence) and illegitimate violence (i.e., impulsive and undisciplined violence). Although rule of law matters in shaping the limits of legitimate violence for participants, Gong (2015: 611, 613) also found that some members of the group were military and law enforcement who participated to cultivate dispositions that they believed regular police training did not. Such findings disrupt the insularity of police subcultures of violence, suggesting that norms surrounding private violence co-constitute public actors’ sensibilities surrounding legitimate violence.
37. Bonikowski (2016); Brubaker (2017); Müller (2017).
38. Carlson (2014; 2015); McDowall and Loftin (1983); Simon (2003); Steidley (2019).
39. Bonilla-Silva (2006); Feagin (2013); Gonzalez Van Cleve and Mayes (2015).
40. Harris (1993).
41. When whiteness is considered in studies of policing, it often serves as a justificatory backdrop for the policing of “out of place” black and brown bodies (e.g., Meehan and Ponder 1992) or used to signal a lack of police attention that whites experience as compared to people of color. Whites experience less harassment in the context of investigatory stops than African Americans (Epp, Maynard-Moody, and Haider-Markel 2014), while analyses of white suburban drug dealers found that respondents had little interaction with police (Jacques 2017; Jacques and Wright 2015). The treatment of whiteness as a “racial lack” reflects the invisibility of whiteness and its conflation, as Dyer (2008: 12) notes, with “the human condition.” As the criminologists Smith and Linnemann (2015: 101) describe with respect to whiteness and policing, “it is the normalized ‘invisible weight’ of whiteness that provides meaning for the difference and crafted inferiority of the other.”
42. Maghbouleh (2017).
43. Lipsitz (2008: 76); see also Oliver and Shapiro (2013); Rothstein (2017). Harris (1993: 1725) argues that whiteness affords both a negative freedom (e.g., a lack of police attention) and also a positive liberty (e.g., entitlement to different treatment) insofar as whiteness itself is a form of property.
44. As Butler (2017: 12) points out, in addition to the psychosocial benefits of safety and security offered by police, there are material ways that whites benefit from the criminal justice system: “the American criminal justice enhances the property value of whiteness.… [A] vote for a conservative is an investment in the property value of one’s whiteness. The criminal process makes white privilege more than just a status symbol, and more than just a partial shield from the criminal process.… [B]y reducing competition for jobs, and by generating employment in law enforcement and corrections, especially in the mainly white rural areas where prisons are often located, the Chokehold delivers cash money to many working-class white people.”
45. See Collins (2002) on “controlling images.”
46. Note that although Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (2007) focuses on the Algerian context, his analysis of a bifurcated system of racial governance—consent for whites, coercion for people of color—resonates with these frames of gun populism and gun militarism in the U.S. context.
47. Du Bois (1995); Morris (2015); Muhammad (2011).
48. Stuart (2016).
49. Greenberg (2005); Hadden (2001).
50. Greenberg (2005).
51. Reviewing centuries of racial ideas in North America, Kendi (2017) concludes that U.S. history cannot be distilled into a racial teleology moving from regress to progress but rather represents a “three-way argument” animated by multiple projects of racial inequality, alongside pushes for antiracism. See also Seamster and Ray (2018).
52. Fernandez and Gould (1994).
53. Fernandez and Gould (1994).
54. Fernandez and Gould (1994).
55. Garland (2001); Hinton (2016); Muhammad (2011); Murakawa (2014); Simon (2007); Tonry (1995; 2011); Wacquant (2001).
56. Ackerman and Furman (2013); Aguirre (2012); Armenta (2017); Beckett and Herbert (2009); Beckett and Murakawa (2012); Garland (2001); Hinton (2016); Murakawa (2014); Simon (2007); Tonry (1995; 2011); Wacquant (2001).
57. Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence (2017).
58. Wood (2017).
59. A recent analysis conducted by 24/7 Wall St. and featured in USA Today ranked Arizona sixteenth in the United States for gun violence (Frohlich and Harrington 2018).
60. McCombie (2011).
61. Arizona’s state constitution frames the right to keep and bear arms as follows: “The right of the individual citizen to bear arms in defense of himself or the State shall not be impaired, but nothing in this section shall be construed as authorizing individuals or corporations to organize, maintain, or employ an armed body of men.” The final clause has a strange ring to it, given that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution opens with the prefatory clause, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.” The historical preeminence of the mining industry as a site of private policing, however, helps explain the curiosity of this Arizona provision.
62. United States Fish and Wildlife Service (2017).
63. Hopper Usher (2019).
64. Mack (2018).
65. Frohlich and Harrington (2018).
66. Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence (2017).
67. Wood (2017).
68. See Judicial Council of California (2019).
69. E.g., Moen (2018).
70. E.g., Albanesius (2014).
71. Note that there is no statewide system in California for issuing concealed pistol licenses on a nondiscretionary basis.
72. Frohlich and Harrington (2018).
73. Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence (2017).
74. Wood (2017).
75. See Forman (2017); Kraska (2007); Stoughton (2014; 2016).
76. See Jones (2018) on the politics of respectability.
1. See Morin et al. (2017) for police opinion data on the assault weapons ban, gun rights versus gun control, and other measures. See Avery (2013) for police opinion data on the assault weapons ban, concealed carry, and other measures.
2. McClellan (2010).
3. Kahr (1916).
4. The NRA offers grants to police departments as part of its NRA Foundation Grant program and its range development program. See NRA Foundation (2019) and NRA Range Services (2019).
5. Note that the NRA established its Law Enforcement Division in 1960. As of July 2019, the Division boasted of more than thirteen thousand active instructors who specialize in police training. The Division also organizes police shooting competitions as well as provides insurance and other benefits to public law enforcement. See NRA Law Enforcement, Military and Security (2019).
6. Recall that this is what the sociologists Fernandez and Gould (1994) analyze as an “itinerant broker.”
7. Bayley and Shearing (1996); Zedner (2005).
8. Marx and Archer (1971); Simon (2007).
9. Greenberg (2005: 26, 27).
10. Greenberg (2005: 34).
11. In the decade after the Civil War, freed slaves exercised their newfound rights—including the right to keep and bear arms and organize into a militia. When the North encouraged state militias as a means of establishing order in the Reconstruction South, freed slaves joined to provide protection to fellow freedmen and Republicans—and thus they became known as “negro militias.” As the historian Otis Singletary (1971) notes, these militias were widely praised in the North and among black Southerners as vehicles of security, dignity, and citizenship. But among white Southerners, these forces inspired brutal backlash. As Singletary (1971: 152) writes, “It is ironic that the organization of this protective force, because of its racial implications, actually aided in the destruction of the very thing it was created to protect.” Amid economic upheaval, the negro militias—and the broader project of black political emancipation they represented—riled white vigilantes who would terrorize and torture freed slaves, and their descendants, for decades. Note that the last Ku Klux Klan–orchestrated lynching, of Michael Donald, took place as recently as 1981.
12. Hadden (2001: 218).
13. Hadden (2001: 218–219).
14. Hadden (2001: 218).
15. Garland (2005).
16. Greenberg (2005: 3).
17. Harring (1983).
18. Vitale (2017: 37)
19. Foucault (1977); Harring (1983).
20. Woodward (1955).
21. See Muhammad (2011). Furthermore, the “scientific” charities of the nineteenth century (Stuart 2016), which were facilitated by fledgling public law enforcement at the time, typically excluded African Americans from the social support they offered. As a result, so-called ethnic whites—Italians, Polish, Germans, and other Eastern and Southern Europeans—would assimilate economically and politically, while African Americans would remain isolated as workers and as citizens.
22. Prassel (1972: 129).
23. Greenberg (2005: 68).
24. Brown (1991); Prassel (1972).
25. Kopel (2014).
26. Greenberg (2005).
27. See Carrigan and Webb (2013). Thousands of Mexican Americans (known at the time as Tejanos) were lynched from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. In addition, the Texas Rangers waged a brutal campaign on the border of Texas and Mexico, executing nearly three hundred Tejanos in 1915 alone and facilitating the transfer of almost two hundred thousand acres of land from Tejano to Anglo hands. The Texas Rangers are widely considered the precursor to the U.S. Border Patrol, which was founded in 1924.
28. As another example, in 1917 in Southern Arizona, Sheriff Henry C. Wheeler deputized hundreds of citizens to participate in the “Bisbee Deportation” of thirteen hundred mine strikers, including many innocent Mexican Americans working in the mines; within a few years, the U.S. government took it upon itself to expel up to two million Mexicans and Mexican Americans living in the United States. Finally, brutal forms of repression—often targeting Chinese and Mexican laborers—were employed by private policing agencies at the behest of railroad and mining companies. Recall that concerns about the brutality of these organized private policing groups lie behind the wording of Arizona’s right to keep and bear arms provision.
29. Arguably, U.S. policing took Sir Robert Peel’s notion of democratic policing-by-consent and, while perhaps not inverting it, flipped it sideways. Sir Robert Peel is often considered the founder of modern policing, articulating in 1829 the British Metropolitan Police Act to found the London Police as we know it. He proclaimed police as a highly trained, professional, and incorruptible force that represented the will of the people, who for their part have consented to be policed. In the Peelian tradition, public law enforcement is the exemplar social contract: I, the citizen, consent to your, the police officer’s, capacity to use the full force of the state against me, in exchange for protecting me from fellow citizens and thus enhancing the broader social order. Policing-by-consent necessarily emphasized law enforcement as community members, whereby “the police are the public and the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence” (Kopel 2019: 17–18).
30. Hadden (2001); Vitale (2017).
31. Muhammad (2011).
32. Hernández (2017); Muhammad (2011).
33. As LeFave (1970: 104) writes in his dissertation on the National Rifle Association, “Evidence was abundant and much publicized by police and other officials that the number of shootings in the United States was extremely high. Many attributed the difficulty to the easy availability of mail-order pistols and revolvers accessible to anyone for six or eight dollars. In 1920, 71.8 per cent of all murders were committed with a gun. Against a backdrop of rising complaints and demands for gun controls, Congress passed two laws during the decade of the twenties. One in 1924 was a simple tax measure levying an excise on the sale of arms and ammunition. More pertinent to the problem, the shipment of concealable weapons through the mails was outlawed in 1927.” Leddy (1985: 216), referring to a quotation from the American Rifleman in 1927, notes: “In the twenties a new type of crime began. Robberies of banks and the use of guns by criminals became much more common. A spectacular crime wave replaced the calm period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In those good old days a policeman’s gun was merely a symbol of office, never fired, and sometimes even nonfunctional: ‘The gun was part of the uniform—a symbol of authority—just that and nothing more. Most police departments [were] ruled by men who cherished the traditions of the two fisted cop who ruled Bedlam with his hands and night stick.’ ”
34. This was especially so as African Americans fled the South and headed North in what would become known as the “Great Migration.”
35. McGirr (2015).
36. Adler (2015: 43).
37. Adler (2015: 43).
38. McGirr (2015: 84).
39. McGirr (2015: 86).
40. McGirr (2015: 93).
41. McGirr (2015: 71).
42. Kahr (1916: 169).
43. Morrison (1995).
44. Bright and Maccar (2017).
45. Morrison and Vila (1998: 514).
46. Kahr (1916: 169).
47. Morrison (1995: 350).
48. Morrison (1995: 339).
49. Cited in Morrison (1995: 338).
50. Morrison and Vila (1998: 516).
51. LeFave (1970: 101–102).
52. New York Times Staff (1927).
53. New York Times Staff (1927).
54. New York Times Staff (1927). It is interesting that this chief made these statements in 1927, just two years after an African American doctor named Ossian Sweet defended himself and his family with firearms against a white mob (under the auspices of a homeowners’ association) that terrorized his residence after he moved into an all-white block. Detroit’s police department responded to white-on-black crime with apathy; had the police intervened, Sweet might not have had to fire shots in self-defense.
55. Morrison (1995: 481).
56. In the next decades, police would apparently favor firearms controls: “In response to a questionnaire circulated at the 1950 meeting of the Attorney General’s Conference on Organized Crime, 255 members of the International Association of Chiefs of Police favored restriction while only twenty-three opposed controls” (LeFave 1970: 152–153).
57. Simon (2007).
58. Note that these terms refer to racial tropes—or what Collins (2002) calls “controlling images.” For the origins of the term superpredator, see DiIulio (1995).
59. Sergel (1962: 2C).
60. Griffith (2010).
61. Whitten (1963: A27).
62. For example, Louisville’s Courier-Journal (1965) notes, “All efforts to pass regulatory legislation has been stymied largely by the lobbying efforts of the National Rifle Association.” Likewise, Senator Thomas J. Dodd, who reintroduced a defeated bill to regulate mail-order guns, noted in 1965 that “the gunrunners are more powerful than the American people who I believe want this law.” The Arizona Republic reprint of the Congressional Quarterly (1965) article explained, “He [Dodd] blamed the failure to report the bill on the ‘almost hysterical efforts’ by a ‘small but loud and well-organized hard-core minority.’ … The private organization most actively involved in firearms legislation is the National Rifle Association, which in 1963 had more than 600,000 members and 400,000 affiliates and a total income of just under $4 million.… [T]he NRA does not register under the Federal Regulation of Lobbying Act because its stated purpose is not to influence Congress but merely to ‘inform’ or ‘educate’ its members and the public.”
63. Berg (1967: 6A).
64. Avery (1965: 28).
65. Anderson (1965: 20).
66. Carper (1965: B1).
67. Moley (1965: 9A).
68. Friedman (1975: 5A).
69. Lane (1967).
70. Police buying own carbines (1967).
71. Riots and guns (1968: A22). The NRA, it should be noted, was inconsistent in its support for armed African American groups up through the 1960s. On the one hand, it provided charters for rifle clubs that pursued civil rights, including the group organized by the civil rights activist Robert Williams in Monroe, North Carolina, that desegregated the public library and the swimming pool (Williams 1998). At the same time, when given the opportunity to weigh in on the Mulford Act of 1967, the California law that outlawed open carry after the emergence of the armed Black Panthers, the NRA supported what many gun rights proponents, antiracist activists, and at least one former FBI agent (Leonardatos 1999) would decades later see as a clear-cut example of racially motivated firearms restrictions. Schmitz (1967), a California lawmaker, noted after the passage of the Mulford Act that “members of the National Rifle Association in California should know that their organization, despite its record of opposing gun control bills in the past, favored this bill and that without NRA support it almost certainly would have been defeated.”
72. See Carlson (2015).
73. Buchwald (1967: 36).
74. Washington Post Staff (1975).
75. Washington Post Staff (1975).
76. Marx and Archer (1971: 58, 59).
77. Marx and Archer (1971: 58).
78. Marx and Archer (1971: 58).
79. Congressional Quarterly (1965).
80. L. L. (1968).
81. Though police militarization was visible in the war on alcohol and in the police response to riots throughout the twentieth century, policing historians often credit the 1980s and 1990s as the era of police militarization.
82. Turner and Fox (2017).
83. These terms represent commonplace tropes and metaphors emerging from the war on crime. As Kraska (1996: 420) notes, the “ ‘war’ metaphor … filter[s] solutions to the complex social problems of crime and substance abuse.” This filtering is reinforced by racial tropes such as gangbangers or superpredators—what Collins (2002) calls “controlling images”—that justify inequality, legitimate discrimination, and render tolerable the overt coercion of marginalized groups.
84. See, e.g., Forman (2017).
85. For a detailed look at the racial politics of this case, see The Central Park Five, a 2012 documentary by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon.
86. Eschholz et al. (2002).
87. Hurwitz and Peffley (1997: 375).
88. DiIulio (1995).
89. See Collins (2002). I will return to the concept of controlling images, particularly the controlling image of the thug, in chapter 5.
90. Recall the definition of police militarization from the introduction to this book: “the process whereby civilian police increasingly draw from, and pattern themselves around, the tenets of militarism and the military model” (Kraska 2007; see also Balko 2013).
91. Murch (2015: 165–166).
92. Romero (2014).
93. Margasak (1986: 03A).
94. McNamara (1988: 10A).
95. See, e.g., Kopel (2004).
96. United Press International (1983: 7B).
97. Nelson (1984: 9A).
98. New York Times Editorial Board (1983: A18).
99. According to Mezzacappa (1984: A11), “Legislation that would have banned armor-piercing ‘cop-killer’ bullets was pulled from the House calendar at the last minute yesterday, killing any chance for a vote on the issue this year. The measure was apparently a victim of its own controversial nature. House members did not want to record a vote on the legislation—which pitted the National Rifle Association (NRA) against most of the nation’s law enforcement organizations—so close to an election.”
100. Herbers (1985: 1).
101. Philadelphia Inquirer (1986: A12).
102. Gates (1989).
103. Freed (1989: 1).
104. Lamar (2001).
105. Keenan and Walker (2004).
106. Parker (2012).
107. Although the Stockton school shooting helped spark political engagement more broadly, police involvement was largely galvanized around the problem of urban crime.
108. Balko (2013).
109. See https://
110. Annin (1992).
111. Houston (1989: 21A).
112. Annin (1992).
113. Annin (1992).
114. For example, Police Chief Howells of Allentown, PA, would ascend to the NRA’s board of directors (Fegely 1987) as other cops distanced themselves from the organization in the 1980s; in the 1990s, the Los Angeles and San Jose officers turned to the NRA for assistance, including legal assistance (e.g., Freed 1989).
115. Pyle (2001). Note that although this essay originally appeared on http://
116. De Parle (1990: A1).
117. Baye (2015).
118. Pyle (2001).
119. Lee (1991).
120. Annin (1992).
121. Baye (2015).
122. Fraternal Order of Police (2019).
123. Freedman (2013).
124. Fields (2000: B1).
125. Bedard (2015).
126. Eilperin and Rosenwald (2016).
127. NRA-ILA (2017a).
128. Hamburger and Horwitz (2013); Roberts (2004).
129. Baye (2015).
130. Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act (2003: 4).
131. Ammoland (2017).
132. NRA-ILA (2017b).
135. Note that two-thirds of FOP’s national delegates must agree on a candidate for a presidential endorsement to move forward; the organization did not endorse a candidate in 2012. See Jackman (2016).
1. Note that whereas the term police militarization (Kraska 1996; 2007; Stoughton 2014) refers to a social process of increased interpenetration of military mindset, tactics, strategies, and personnel with public law enforcement, I use gun militarism to specifically highlight sensibilities, policies, and practices that idealize a particular distribution of legitimate violence within American society.
3. Gramlich (2019); Pilkington (2018).
4. Follman et al. (2015).
5. Gardner (2006).
6. NRA-ILA (2000).
7. Gaston (2019); Gaston and Brunson (2018).
8. Balko (2014).
9. Schenwar (2014).
10. Denvir (2016).
11. United States Sentencing Commission (2016).
12. Shannon et al. (2017).
13. Du Bois (1995); see also Muhammad (2011).
14. See https://
15. Alexander (2012); Comfort (2008); Forman (2017); Lerman and Weaver (2014); Pager (2008); Western (2018).
16. Forman (2017: 51).
17. Balko (2014).
18. See Alexander (2012) on the war on drugs; Hinton (2016) on the war on poverty; McGirr (2015) on the war on alcohol.
19. Fernandez and Gould (1994).
20. Consider, too, that both illegal and legal gun use is often wrapped up in attempts to cope with adverse social circumstances (Barragan et al. 2016; Carlson 2015; Harcourt 2010), and the lines between legitimate and illegitimate coping are themselves blurry (Broidy and Santoro 2018).
21. See Spitzer (2015: 40–41) for an overview of gun laws by type from 1607 to 1934.
22. Cottrol and Diamond (1991); Johnson (2014).
23. Winkler (2011: 239).
24. Austin (2008); Bloom and Martin (2013); Nelson (2011).
25. Winkler (2011: 244); see in particular chapter 8, “By Any Means Necessary,” for a more detailed discussion of the impact of the Black Power movement on the introduction and passage of the 1967 Mulford Act.
26. Leonardatos (1999).
27. Hofer et al. (2000).
28. Forman (2017: 65).
29. As Forman (2017: 75) notes, “Young’s view—that private citizens should be able to keep guns in their homes while criminals who use them should face harsh sentences—was in line with the beliefs of many black citizens.”
30. Lowenthal (1993: 79).
31. Claiborne (1998).
32. According to a Pew study of police attitudes (Morin et al. 2017), “about two-thirds of police (68%) … believe the country’s marijuana laws should be relaxed”; one-third of police “support legalizing marijuana for both private and medical use.”
33. Zimring (1972).
34. For a review of the relationship between gun availability and gun violence, see Cook and Goss (2014).
35. Inordinately measured by their capacity to prevent crime, police chiefs rightly feel “set up” to fail at this mandate—not least because the relationship between what police do and how crime rates fluctuate is often tenuous at best. See Meares and Neyroud (2015); Stoughton (2016).
36. Scholars of police subculture show that these attitudes are prevalent among the public law enforcement community more broadly. See, e.g., Herbert (1998; 2001); Hunt (1984; 1985; 1990); Manning (1977); Micucci and Gomme (2005); Reiner (2010); Sierra-Arévalo (2016); Skolnick (2011); Skolnick and Fyfe (1993); Terrill, Paoline, and Manning (2003); Van Maanen (1973; 1978); Waddington (1999); Westley (1953); see also Morin et al. (2017).
37. See Martinson (1974) on rehabilitative justice—and its discontents.
38. Simon (2014).
39. Reiter and Pifer (2015).
41. Uggen and McElrath (2013).
42. A large literature has documented the sheer breadth of these costs and the myriad forms they take. As a starting point, see Alexander (2012); Comfort (2008); Forman (2017); Lerman and Weaver (2014); Pager (2008); Western (2018). On the conservative “Right on Crime” movement, see Dagan and Teles (2016).
43. E.g., Herbert (1998; 2001); Hunt (1984; 1985; 1990); Manning (1977); Micucci and Gomme (2005); Reiner (2010); Sierra-Arévalo (2016); Skolnick (2011); Skolnick and Fyfe (1993); Terrill, Paoline, and Manning (2003); Van Maanen (1973; 1978); Waddington (1999); Westley (1953); see also Morin et al. (2017).
44. Waddington (1999).
45. Herbert (1998); Campeau (2015); Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003); see also Swidler (1986).
46. Manning (1977).
47. Alpert, MacDonald, and Dunham (2005); Beckett, Nyrop, and Pfingst (2006); Welch (2007).
48. Carroll and Gonzalez (2014); Novak and Chamlin (2012); Smith and Alpert (2007).
49. Stoughton (2014: 225).
50. Stoughton (2016: 632).
51. Stoughton (2014: 226).
52. Stoughton (2016: 635).
53. Stoughton (2016: 637).
54. Stoughton (2016: 639).
55. Forman (2017: 156).
56. Anderson (2012); Bobo and Charles (2009); Muhammad (2011); Russell-Brown (1999).
57. Forman (2017: 156); see also Murch (2015).
58. Ramey and Steidley (2018: 839) “find that the relative size of minority populations is consistently and nonlinearly associated with 1033 Program participation.” As further evidence of this association between police militarization and racial domination, they note that this relationship applies only to military equipment—not to nonmilitary supplies also transferred via the 1033 Program, such as tools and medical supplies.
59. Balko (2013); Kraska (1996; 2007).
60. See, e.g., Epp, Maynard-Moody, and Haider-Markel (2014) on the social foundations of racial profiling.
61. Kraska (2007: 507).
62. Stoughton (2014: 228).
63. Hunt (1984: 287, 288); see also Hunt (1990).
64. Herbert (2001: 56, 58, 59).
65. Cooper (2008).
66. Herbert (2001); Hunt (1984; 1990).
67. Herbert (2001).
68. Herbert (2001); Hunt (1984; 1990).
69. Slotkin (1973 [2000]).
70. Herbert (2001); Hunt (1984; 1985; 1990).
71. Williams (2015).
72. Anderson (2012); Bobo and Charles (2009); Collins (2002); Forman (2017); Muhammad (2011); Gonzalez Van Cleve and Mayes (2015).
73. Omi and Winant (2014).
74. Bonilla-Silva (2006); Harris (2012); Gonzalez Van Cleve and Mayes (2015).
75. Note that chiefs have become increasingly concerned about terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11, after which local police departments became increasingly involved in antiterrorist activities; see Huq and Muller (2008). Although this chief connects “gangsters” to the threat of terrorism, terrorism was most commonly raised in the context of active shootings, which I analyze in chapter 3.
76. Jones (2018).
77. Braga (2003); Papachristos and Wildeman (2014); Papachristos, Wildeman, and Roberto (2015); Wintemute (2015).
78. Braga (2003); Kennedy (2011). Note, however, that these initiatives have often turned on creating divides within communities—between upstanding and disreputable residents—under the banner of crime fighting. See Jones (2018).
79. After my interviews with police chiefs, California lawmakers somewhat limited the breadth of the state’s felony murder rule. Police have spoken in opposition to this law, which went into effect in 2019 following court challenges. See Smith (2018).
80. Russell-Brown (2009).
81. E.g., Alexander (2012); Butler (2017); Epp, Maynard-Moody, and Haider-Markel (2014); Forman (2017); Gonzalez Van Cleve (2016); Jones (2018); Lerman and Weaver (2014); Pager (2008); Tonry (1995); Wacquant (2001); Western (2018).
82. Du Bois (2015: 4).
83. Dow (2016).
84. Epp, Maynard-Moody, and Haider-Markel (2014).
85. Voigt et al. (2017).
86. See findings from the Stanford Open Policing Project at https://
87. Mitchell and Caudy (2015).
88. For example, the Stanford Open Policing Project finds that police conduct more than fifty thousand traffic stops every day. See https://
89. Ross (2015). Note, however, that although police brutality against African Americans has gained the most attention in popular media and debates, Native Americans are the racial group that experiences disproportionately the greatest number of police homicides, according to The Guardian data posted at https://
90. Weber (1946).
1. Cullen (2009: 66–67).
2. Muschert (2007: 355).
3. Willis-Chun (2011: 50). And as the sociologists William Mingus and Bradley Zopf (2010: 67, 68) note, “white privilege involves more than the ability to ignore race. It also controls the focus of official attention in crimes that involve white victims.… [T]he shooting of whites by someone else who is also white is considered so out of the ordinary that it receives massive media and governmental attention while more mundane violence, an everyday occurrence in poor urban areas, is ignored and attributed to a culture of poverty (often read as Black or Latino culture).”
4. Snow (1997).
5. The emergence of SWAT was itself spawned by a deep sense that traditional methods of policing had failed to stand up to the demands of the 1960s and 1970s. Riots, political uprisings, assassinations, generalized disorder, and at least one mass shooting—the 1966 Bell Tower massacre at the University of Texas, Austin—revealed a threat of chaos that seemingly lay just beneath the uneasy patina of American democracy. As SWAT units appeared in large and small jurisdictions alike and were used for routine policing activities—usually related to drug raids but, at least in some jurisdictions, also as part of regular patrol activities—SWAT teams became an increasing presence across the United States. Their use, however, was starkly racially disparate, as they were disproportionately deployed to police racial minorities. As such, these paramilitary units became quintessential components of the urban war on drugs, one that not only reinforced a culture that encouraged aggressive policing tactics but also gave police broad legal powers to stop, detain, arrest, and use force. The sociologist Christian Parenti (2000: 112) describes SWAT units as an “urban counterinsurgency bulwark,” quoting one SWAT officer who explained, “Those people out there—the radicals, the revolutionaries, and the cop haters—are damned good at using shotguns, bombs, or setting ambushes, so we’ve got to be better at what we do.”
6. Muschert (2007: 359).
7. Blair et al. (2013: 12).
8. Associated Press (2009).
9. Hybrid masculinity involves both “selective incorporation of performances and identity elements associated with marginalized and subordinated masculinities and femininities” and selective disavowal of hypermasculine attributes such that “the willingness to temper one’s masculinity is viewed as a sign of confidence” (Young 2017: 1364; see also Pascoe and Hollander [2016: 72, 68] on antirape slogans and masculinity). Recent scholarship reveals that race- and class-privileged men (Bridges and Pascoe 2014) in the contexts of conservative politics (Heath 2003; Messner 2007; Stein 2005), sport (Anderson 2010), and even violence (Carlson 2018; Stroud 2012; Young 2003) are reframing masculinity to selectively integrate care and compassion to navigate and justify their engagement in these areas.
10. Messner (2007: 467).
11. Berkowitz, Lu, and Alcantara (2018).
12. McGinty et al. (2014). Consider the roughly fifteen thousand gun homicides, more than one thousand police-perpetrated gun homicides, as well as roughly twenty-four thousand gun suicides that have occurred annually in recent years (Gramlich 2019; Pilkington 2018); whereas, for comparison, recall the Washington Post data showing that 1,135 people have been killed in active shootings since 1966 (Berkowitz, Lu, and Alcantara 2018).
13. Florida and Boone (2018).
14. Turk (2004: 271).
15. Altheide (2009: 1366).
16. See Phillips (2016) on active shootings, police myths, and the adoption of patrol rifles.
17. Note, however, that this contrasts with law enforcement’s broad-brush refusal of new responsibilities with regard to immigration enforcement (e.g., Harris 2006) and, as discussed later in this chapter, mental health.
18. Huq and Muller (2008).
19. Follman, Aronson, and Pan (2018); Fox and Levin (1998); Madfis (2014).
20. Kellner (2015); Larkin (2011); Madfis (2014); Newman and Fox (2009); Tonso (2009).
21. Fox and Levin (1998).
22. Follman, Aronson, and Pan (2018).
23. Duxbury, Frizzell, and Lindsay (2018).
24. Metzl and MacLeish (2015).
25. Mingus and Zopf (2010: 73).
26. Metzl (2010).
27. Heitzeg (2015). Though not directly related to gun crime, consider, for example, the case of Sandra Bland, who allegedly committed suicide in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas, after being arrested for assaulting a police officer during a traffic stop. The initial public outcry centered on two opposing frames: either Bland was an unstable aggressor toward police, or she was a victim of police aggression. This binary was aided by the tendency to associate mental illness with whiteness, a tendency challenged by commentators, activists, and Bland’s friends and family. By 2017, Texas passed a law called the Sandra Bland Act, which “mandates county jails divert people with mental health and substance abuse issues toward treatment, makes it easier for defendants to receive a personal bond if they have a mental illness or intellectual disability, and requires that independent law enforcement agencies investigate jail deaths.” See https://
28. Regarding more broadly the frustrations of frontline workers at the intersection of mental health and law enforcement, see Chiarello (2015). See also the literature on “transinstitutionalization,” whereby criminal justice institutions are increasingly charged with addressing mental illness (e.g., Primeau et al. 2013; Reiter and Blair 2015).
29. Ford (2015).
30. Bonilla-Silva (2006).
31. This was especially the case under President Obama’s Twenty-first-Century Policing Initiative.
32. Rahr and Rice (2015: 3).
33. Stoughton (2016: 632).
34. Messner (2007: 467).
35. Young (2003).
36. See Messner (2007) on the “Kindergarten Commando” and Young (2003) on masculinist protection.
37. Police off-duty carry has been a largely understudied phenomenon, however. See Fyfe (1980).
38. Carlson (2015).
39. The New York Times wagered that the ruling means that “police officers in some cases [could] avoid jury trials in controversial shootings in which officers believed they were acting in self-defense but might have had other options.” See Robles (2018).
40. Before, policy stated that police “may” intervene. See Rosenblatt (2018).
41. The commission was charged with investigating the Parkland school shooting and its lessons for future prevention and response.
42. Burch and Blinder (2019).
43. Bittner (1973).
44. Swidler (1986).
45. Morin et al. (2017).
1. White (2017).
2. Ruelas (2017).
3. Ruelas (2017).
4. Carlson (2015).
5. Ruelas (2017).
6. The Phoenix New Times, in this regard, had an atypical headline: “Armed civilian praised for shooting undocumented suspect who attacked trooper”; see Stern (2017).
7. Arizona law enforcement described him as “a known drug user but has no criminal history that we can find”; he was also an officer for the Mexican federal police. He had crossed the border and was turned away at least once, and police claimed he was in the United States without authorization. See Holland (2017).
8. Kravarik and Elam (2017).
9. ABC15.com Staff (2017).
10. Bonikowski (2016); Brubaker (2017); Müller (2017).
11. In Cop Knowledge, Christopher Wilson (2000: 16) uses the term police populism to describe a police trope that emerged in the 1960s to describe “the labor of a dedicated, hard-bitten knight of the city, an everyday man-in-shirtsleeves servant of the mostly white working class, solving crimes not through eccentric genius but by shoe leather, hard work, and pragmatic adherence to often-tedious procedure. And as such they exhibit not simple authoritarianism or paramilitary values, but a long-recognized double-edged potential in populist ideology, applications that are progressive and reactionary, liberal and authoritarian all at once.… [A] classic pitfall of critical analysis is to mistake the cultural or media entanglement with policing for complicity with a generalized, monolithic (or hegemonic) political authority, rather than with this historically contingent and more particular political sub-culture.” In this excerpt, Wilson is interested in understanding broad-based cultural representations of police; his is the only use of the term populism with respect to policing of which I am aware. My development of gun populism is somewhat different; I use this concept to clarify how (1) police understand themselves by (2) blurring the lines between state and nonstate actors with respect to the deployment of legitimate violence.
12. Greenberg (2005: 34).
13. Greenberg (2005); Hadden (2001).
14. Garland (2005).
15. Dunbar-Ortiz (2018); Greenberg (2005); Hadden (2001); Obert (2018); Vitale (2017).
16. Verma (2015); see also Page (2011).
17. Though perhaps motivated by the politics of their position as chiefs, this assessment is not an inaccurate take on California laws passed since the 1990s; see Zimring, Hawkins, and Kamin (2001) on California sentencing laws.
18. Page (2011); Reiter (2016); Zimring, Hawkins, and Kamin (2001).
19. Simon (2014).
20. Petersilia (2013).
21. Kail (2016).
22. Aviram (2015); Simon (2014).
23. Gusfield (1986); see also Page (2011).
24. McGreevy (2016).
25. Carlson (2015).
26. See also Black (1983); McDowall and Loftin (1983); Smith and Uchida (1988). But see Wilcox (2002).
27. Lipsky (2010).
28. Bell (2000).
29. Note that this inverts Brayne’s (2014) concept of “system avoidance.”
30. John Lott (2013) is the progenitor of the “more guns, less crime” study that found that increasing lawful gun carry was correlated with lowered crime rates. Some scholars have reproduced the results (Plassmann and Whitney 2003); many have criticized Lott’s findings as an artifact of the study’s statistical approach (e.g., Ayres and Donohue 2002) and quality of data (e.g., Duggan 2001).
31. Müller (2017).
32. Pager (2008).
33. Shannon et al. (2017). Note that these records not only bar someone from obtaining a concealed pistol license but may also shape voting, employment, welfare eligibility, and other informal and formal collateral consequences. See Allard (2002); Chin (2002); Manza and Uggen (2008); Pager (2008).
34. Carlson (2015; 2018); Shapira, Jensen, and Lin (2018). Racial disparities in licensing rates reflect both racial differences in demand and systematic differences in how licenses are processed for African Americans versus whites (Shapira, Jensen, and Lin 2018). States releasing public gun licensing data show that African Americans are armed at rates equal to (e.g., Michigan, suggesting that demand overwhelms disproportionate disqualification) or less than (e.g., Texas, suggesting disparate demand and/or disparate disqualification) their white counterparts.
35. A review of historical accounts of guns and self-defense reveals that the trope of the armed citizen is historically rooted in a republican ideal of citizenship reflecting the prerogatives of hegemonic white masculinity. Dunbar-Ortiz (2018); Filindra and Kaplan (2016); Light (2017).
36. Omi and Winant (2014); see also Harris (2012).
37. As of February 1, 2018, 621,327 residents were licensed to carry a firearm concealed, comprising 8 percent of the adult population (Mack 2018).
38. Note that under Arizona state law, an eighteen-year-old may lawfully possess a handgun, provided it is not purchased from a federally licensed firearms dealer, and openly carry it; an individual must be twenty-one years old to carry it concealed.
39. Although chiefs in Arizona more consistently embraced this stance than chiefs in California and Michigan, these brands of populism were not mutually exclusive across states. For example, though he was in the minority in the context of California, one California chief illustrated a sentiment that aligned with co-policing (as per Arizona) and system exposure (as per Michigan) when he explained, “Yes, I am comfortable with concealed carry. You know, the only concealed carry that is a problem are parolees with firearms in their belts—not someone who studied for carrying. I don’t know who is armed around me, but my feeling is—if there’s an off-duty cop next to me in the store when I need back up, I’m going to want that back up. And I don’t see what’s the difference between that off-duty cop and the responsible citizen. There is zero difference.”
40. Zimring (2017).
41. Zimring (2011).
42. Kurtzleben (2017).
43. According to Gerney, Parsons, and Posner (2013), the state ranks fourth for gun violence and eleventh for gun homicides. As noted earlier, a more recent analysis ranked Arizona sixteenth in the United States for gun violence (Frohlich and Harrington 2018). 2017 CDC data also rank Arizona eighteenth for its rate of gun deaths. For CDC data, see https://
44. Kahan and Braman (2003).
45. Omi and Winant (2014).
46. Note that when Zamudio encountered the shooter, another bystander had already disarmed him; Zamudio nearly shot the bystander, thinking he was armed. Realizing his mistake by noting the locked slide, he quickly assisted the bystander and helped to restrain the shooter. See Ruelas (2018).
47. Dagan and Teles (2016).
48. See Omi and Winant’s (2014) analysis of racial code words.
49. Foley (1998); Pierce (2018).
50. Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003).
51. In Michigan, these orders are called “personal protection orders.” I used the more general language of “restraining orders” here for reasons of accessibility.
52. Note, however, that historically police have been reluctant to see domestic violence as a public crime as opposed to a personal conflict. Indeed, the introduction of restraining orders and other mechanisms to address domestic violence represents a top-down protocol change in which police dramatically shifted their practices surrounding domestic violence. Scholars of gender and policing have documented historical tendencies among law enforcement to, on the one hand, deprioritize domestic violence as a legitimate policing problem and, on the other hand, identify with the perpetrators as opposed to female victims of domestic violence; see, for example, the sociologists Anastasia Prokos and Irene Padavic’s provocatively titled article, “There oughtta be a law against bitches” (2002). See also Bumiller (2009); Desmond and Valdez (2013).
53. See Collins (2002) on “controlling images.”
54. The Lautenberg Amendment, in particular, has been the subject of debate because it prohibits gun possession for a person convicted of a domestic violence misdemeanor, even if the act occurred prior to the passing of the Amendment. Although some critics argue that this violates the Ex Post Facto Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits ex post facto laws, at least two challenges to the law on this basis have been rejected by U.S. courts in United States v. Brady (1994) and United States v. Waters (1994).
55. Sometimes they saw open carry in an advantageous light; one California chief noted, “I actually wish we still had open carry. Because I can see the threat! Like with the Hell’s Angels, I want them to wear their stuff, I want to see it!” Others offered apathy, like the Arizona chief who told me, “We have people in this town—several who open carry in this town. That’s just—that’s how this town is.” And still others were ambivalent, like the Michigan chief who told me that “open carry: it’s a right, but I don’t know. Your nice guy: he’s going to have it in a holster on the side. But your criminal won’t have it in a holster; he’ll just wear it in front. But come on. It’s legal, but it’s like wearing a KKK hood at the Nation of Islam.” And finally, some vehemently opposed it; one Michigan chief admitted, “This is emotionally driven. I don’t have the data. But I would outlaw open carry. There is no reason for it, this isn’t the Wild West.… The only reason to do this in Michigan—I have not seen it in other states, but in Michigan—is to stick it to the man. And I think something’s wrong with people who do that.” Several police chiefs, especially in Michigan, saw open carriers as unstable or antisocial. One chief noted, “I’m okay if someone has a CPL. I am bothered, really bothered by open carry. Based on my life experience as a law enforcement officer, people who push open carry have issues of some sort. They are antisocial.” Another Michigan chief noted, “I think it’s a macho thing. [At one gathering] one of them came up to me and said the whole ‘It’s my right to carry’ thing. Well, I said, ‘I think you are just an asshole.’ ” In the interview, I verified that he actually said that. He went on: “Yes! Because it just scares people—and it’s like, why are you even there? This is not the forum for that. I’m not opposed to it on principle, but just get your CPL, and hide it.… [T]hey give gun rights a bad name.”
56. Siegel (2018).
57. Guzman (2018).
58. This pattern echoes the moral improvisation and identity work observed to shape frontline work more generally; see Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003).
59. Carlson (2015).
1. As with police chiefs, all names of gun board claimants and administrators are pseudonyms.
2. Herbert (2009); Thacher (2019); Vargas (2016).
3. Fernandez and Gould (1994).
4. For a breakdown of firearms laws regarding concealed carry, see the NRA-ILA’s “Right to Carry Laws” at https://
5. A note about generalizability should be made up front: although a handful of states maintain similar systems (Rose 2013), most states have no public board dedicated to this purpose; instead, claimants must file a court appeal (as is now the case in Michigan) or submit a written administrative appeal.
6. “Controlling images,” as Patricia Hill Collins (2002: 69) notes, “are designed to make racism, sexism and poverty appear to be natural, normal and a part of everyday life.”
7. Note that statistics about the number of guns, the number of gun owners, and the number of concealed carriers are frustrating at best. As there is no national registry of firearms or firearms owners, we do not know exactly how many guns circulate within the United States and in how many hands. Background checks and manufacturing data suggest that there are “more guns than people” (Ingraham 2018) in the United States, while survey data suggest that the percentage of gun owners has been erratic (Gallup 2019) or has declined (General Social Survey 2019) over the past several decades. In contrast, gun carrying appears by all measures to be increasing; although it is not possible to measure the number of gun carriers in states that allow permitless gun carry, the issuance of gun carry licenses has steadily increased since John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center began compiling the data in 2014; their report issued in 2019 tallies 18.66 million licensed gun carriers. See Crime Prevention Research Center (2020).
8. Myrick (2013).
9. Monahan (2010); see also Gilliom (2001).
10. Butler (2017); Epp, Maynard-Moody, and Haider-Markel (2014); Jones (2018); Rios (2011). As the legal scholar and former prosecutor Paul Butler (2017: 61, 65) explains, “It turns out arrests, which precede incarceration, are an even bigger deal. That’s because for most kinds of arrests—for low-level crimes called misdemeanors—police and prosecutors don’t care really whether you are guilty. That’s not the point of the arrest. African American men are arrested mainly so that they can be officially placed under government surveillance.… [A]rrests enable a set of surveillance practices.”
11. This is similar to what Kohler-Hausmann (2013) calls “misdemeanor justice”; see also Feeley (1979).
12. Similar to Kohler-Hausmann’s (2013) analysis of “procedural harassment,” I developed this term as an extension of what Sykes (1958) calls the “pains of imprisonment” to administrative settings. Sykes describes a variety of deprivations that are built into the experience of imprisonment; I use procedural pains to designate the frustrating hurdles built into administrative procedures so that they double as a punitive process evocative of Feeley’s (1979) thesis that the “process is the punishment.”
13. Myrick (2013); see also Gurusami (2018); Jacobs (2015); Lageson (2017).
14. Lipsky (2010: 90).
15. Shannon et al. (2017); Soss and Weaver (2017).
16. For Detroit, see Apel (2015) and Sugrue (2014); see also Sampson (2008) and Vargas (2016) on Chicago.
17. Lipsky (2010: 83).
18. Lipsky (2010: 132).
19. E.g., “with the law”; see Ewick and Silbey (1998) on legal consciousness. See also Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003) on moral improvisation.
20. Jacobs (2015).
21. Stivers (2007: 48).
22. Jacobs (2015).
23. Van Maanen (1978); Waddington (1999).
24. Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003).
25. Ewald (2016: 30, 29, 30, 29).
26. Recall, also, the discussion in chapter 4 on “system exposure.”
27. Note that whereas Pager (2008) addresses felony convictions, subsequent research has suggested how this extends to misdemeanor and administrative contexts. See, e.g., Kohler-Hausmann (2013).
28. This sentiment is especially felt among California law enforcement; see Page (2011).
29. Simon (2003).
30. For a revelatory analysis of the entanglement between child support and criminal justice systems, see Haney (2018).
31. Gustafson (2011).
32. The reliance on arrests and threats of arrest in Wayne County as compared to Oakland County resonates with Gonzalez Van Cleve’s (2016) findings in Cook County courts and with scholarship on the “racial empathy gap” more broadly: poor African American populations tend to be dealt with more harshly and more punitively. Another factor may be that, in wealthier Oakland County, outstanding warrants that might have elicited arrest “downstream” in the context of the gun board had already been addressed further upstream by other law enforcement mechanisms. These factors further suggest the utility of the valve-turning metaphor (as opposed to a “pipeline”) insofar as administrators may decide to deploy different kinds of tactics, ranging from symbolic to carceral, depending on their own sociolegal sensibilities as well as the sociolegal and material resources at their disposal.
33. Foucault (1977).
34. Page (2011).
35. In 2015, the upper age limit was increased to twenty-four.
36. Ewald (2016).
37. Carlson (2015).
38. Lerman and Weaver (2014); Mettler and Soss (2004).
39. Rios (2011); Stuart (2016).
40. Van Maanen (1978).
41. Considering the repercussions for driving under the influence (DUI), Jennifer Earl (2008: 765) explains, “In some cases, administrative legal settings serve as an initial stop in a larger judicial process, while at other times they parallel criminal or civil systems.… It is interesting to consider the extent to which these administrative hearings are used to augment the punishment meted out on the criminal side or to ensure that some formal punishment occurs, since these administrative hearings involve different burdens of proof and thus may well lead to the removal of licenses from individuals who are able to avoid conviction on the criminal charge of DUI.”
42. Zedner (2016: 9); see also Beckett and Murakawa (2012).
43. This is also evident in scholarship on courts (Gonzalez Van Cleve 2016) and the welfare system (Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011).
44. Garfinkel (1956).
45. Garfinkel (1956: 422–423) establishes criteria for “successful” ceremonies that “effect the ritual destruction of the person denounced” (421) by framing the denounced “as a representative of a ‘type’ of person … that poses an affront to common values” such that “the denouncement can serve not just as a personal punishment but as a broader warning about, and affirmation of, community values.”
46. Gonzalez Van Cleve (2016: 68).
47. Detroit is, e.g., colloquially disparaged as a “murder capital” by Greater Metro area residents; see Carlson (2015).
48. Harris, Evans, and Beckett (2011).
49. Dow (2016: 175).
50. Jackson and Carroll (1981); Tonry (2011); Wacquant (2001).
51. Dow (2016: 182).
52. Du Bois (1995); Muhammad (2011).
53. Collins (2004: 159).
54. Edin and Nelson (2013: 165, 188).
55. Marks and Palkovitz (2004).
56. Edin and Nelson (2013: 165).
57. Freeman (2003: 33).
58. Cooper (2008).
59. E.g., Butler (2017); Epp, Maynard-Moody, and Haiden-Markel (2014); Forman (2017); Rios (2011).
60. As another example, in a case involving an assault charge rather than a police interaction, an African American man in Oakland County said that he exposed his firearm after being called a racial slur by a customer; instead of acknowledging the slur, an administrator commented: “I think he just got upset, and wanted to just say, ‘Oh, here’s my gun!’ ”
61. Bonilla-Silva (2006).
62. Had this claimant “watched the news” leading up to this meeting, he would have viewed public outrage over the police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in addition to other acts of public and private violence; it is not clear to which of these incidents the administrator refers, but it is worth noting that this formed the broader context in which the administrator urged the claimant to “watch the news.”
63. Chesney-Lind (2006).
64. Haley (2013).
65. Vigdor and Mercy (2006).
66. Because gun records are sealed, my ability to ascertain the details of the case is limited to public proceedings. A “weapons charge” likely refers to carrying in an authorized manner, for example, concealed carrying into a designated “pistol-free” zone such as the secured area of an airport or a public school.
67. Bumiller (2009).
68. Lipsky (2010: 93).
69. Bumiller (2009); Roberts (2009).
70. See, e.g., Randles (2013).
71. See, e.g., Dubber (2000); Ewald (2016).
72. Cottrol and Diamond (1991); Johnson (2014).
73. Gonzalez Van Cleve (2016).
1. Muhammad (2011).
2. Hill (2004); Strain (1997).
3. Austin (2008); Bloom and Martin (2013); Nelson (2011).
4. This is a fictionalized name that the anthropologist Laurence Ralph (2014) uses in his study of a Chicago-area gang.
5. Butts et al. (2015); Slutkin, Ransford, and Decker (2015).
6. This is the pseudonym that the sociologist Nikki Jones (2018) uses for the peacekeeping group she studied in San Francisco.
7. Briggs (2004).
8. See, e.g., Carr (2005).
9. An NPR story notes that “Philando Castile frequently paid for the lunches of students who owed money or couldn’t afford them” (Van Sant 2019); carrying on this legacy, the Philando Castile Relief Foundation works to alleviate children’s lunch debts.
10. For example, on implicit bias training and policing, see James (2017); on deescalation training and policing, see Engel, McManus, and Herold (2020).
11. For 2017 figures, see Gramlich (2019) and Pilkington (2018). On surviving, and living with, gunshot wounds, see Lee (2012).
12. Kahan and Braman (2003).
13. Sontag (2003).
14. Armstrong and Carlson (2019).
15. Ball (2016).
16. Bonikowski (2016); Brubaker (2017); Müller (2017).
17. Kaffer (2017).
18. Tuccille (2018).
19. Fox (2018).
20. Lee, Richardson, and Patton (2018).
21. Jones (2018).
22. See https://
1. Kraska (1996).
2. For feminist critique and practical navigation of the “ethnographic fixations” of solitary research, intimacy and danger, see Hanson and Richards (2019).
3. On criminal justice unions in California, see Page (2011).
4. Pugh (2013).
5. Pugh (2013: 49).
6. Kendi (2017); see also Seamster and Ray (2018).
7. Thompson et al. (2006).
8. That said, I know that at least one interview was cancelled because the chief had been removed between agreeing to the interview and our interview date; I only knew because his emails were forwarded to an assistant chief, who politely declined the interview.
9. This cannot be chalked up to a “Trump effect”; most of my interviews took place before Trump was elected, and many took place long before he became a viable contender for the Republican nomination
10. Riddell et al. (2018).
11. Roman (2013).
12. Philly Voice Staff (2017).
13. Rios, Carney, and Kelekay (2017: 508).
14. Haraway (2003).
15. Van Maanen (2011).
16. Page and Goodman (2018: 15).
1. Moskos (2008).