Firearms violations should be aggressively used in prosecuting violent crime. They are generally simple and quick to prove. The mandatory and enhanced punishments for many firearms violations can be used as leverage to gain plea bargaining and cooperation from offenders.
—United States Department of Justice, Criminal Justice Manual (2018)
There is a war on guns. Targeting criminal guns, this war on guns reflects a broader U.S. project of crime control that, over the past several decades, has ramped up the criminal justice system’s capacity to proactively police and aggressively punish. This war on guns entails a tangled web of policies, practices, strategies, and sensibilities that all aim to establish a state—that is, a police—monopoly on legitimate violence.1 This war on guns is made possible by the prisms through which urban gun violence is viewed by the public and by police alike, one that delimits gun violence as a particular kind of problem and that racializes gun offenders as particular kinds of people. It is echoed loudly by gun rights advocates in the National Rifle Association, within police circles, and beyond—even by gun control advocates, too.
I expect at least a few readers to bristle at my use of the phrase war on guns to describe gun policy. At one point, Americans declaring a war on something meant taking it seriously as a foundational threat to the fabric of society: crime, drugs, terrorism, and so forth. To say that we have a war on guns, advocates of stronger gun regulations would rightly object, suggests a level of consternation that does not reflect the ongoing apathy, especially among many politicians, regarding American gun violence as a social problem. The total number of Americans who have died by guns since the passage of the 1968 Gun Control Act outpaces the cumulative number of American deaths in all wars in U.S. history.2 Roughly forty thousand Americans die every year from gunshot wounds (in 2017, nearly four in ten were homicides; six in ten were suicides); around one hundred thousand each year are wounded but survive.3 When medical expenses, lost productivity, and legal costs are taken into account, one estimate put the costs of gun violence at more than $700 per American per year.4 With these figures as the backdrop, federal inaction on a variety of gun regulations suggests to many not war but surrender.
But although many Americans have favored broad-based gun control in the form of universal background checks or an assault weapons ban, they have received—both in policy and in enforcement—a war on guns. This war on guns encompasses the set of gun policies aimed at urban violence, not the whole of gun control or even gun law enforcement. This war on guns is evident in the late-1990s Project Exile, a national initiative that aggressively enforced federal gun laws by not just prosecuting but also relocating offenders to distant federal prisons (hence Exile in the name of the program). It is apparent in the Department of Justice’s current Project Safe Neighborhoods program, which the legal scholar Bonita R. Gardner argues targets gun offenses in African American communities while ignoring gun offenses elsewhere.5 It is likewise visible in “zero-tolerance” gun policies that take the form of sentencing enhancements and mandatory sentencing and that drive an irreconcilable divide between the “good guys with guns” (e.g., the police) and the “bad guys with guns” (e.g., “the violent felons who illegally carry and misuse guns,” according to the NRA’s praise of Project Exile).6 And it is also visible in more mundane ways in day-to-day policing: gun violence provides a legally acceptable justification for police to disproportionately stop and frisk people of color. Although these searches rarely find illegal weapons, they provide a pretext for arrests for drug-related and other nonviolent offenses.7
The Washington Post columnist Radley Balko suggests that racial disparities in drug law enforcement may be dwarfed by those in gun law enforcement.8 The Truthout editor-in-chief Maya Schenwar has questioned the utility of mandatory minimums in the context of gun possession.9 And the Jacobin contributor Daniels Denvir has noted, amid outcry that the United States has no gun control, that “the only kind of gun control we have in the United States is the kind that locks up black people.”10 The statistics are suggestive of something deeply amiss: in 2016, a startling 51.3 percent of those convicted of federal gun crimes (and these are exclusive of violent crimes such as murder, robbery, and so forth) were African American.11 That’s a larger concentration than for any other federal crime—including the crimes of drug trafficking and drug possession.
It is possible that black people are more likely to illegally possess guns; even if rates of unlicensed gun carry are equal, the racial disparities in felony records—1 in 3 black men have felony records, as compared to fewer than 1 in 12 U.S. adults overall12—would tip the scales in favor of black criminalization. But more than a century of American criminal justice scholarship—starting with the work of W.E.B. Du Bois13—casts serious doubt that, even assuming racial disparities in offending, the institutions charged with transforming an illegal act into a criminal record would not aggravate these disparities. In a viral Twitter thread posted in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting,14 the sociologist Eve Ewing unraveled how structural racism intersects with gun policy to aggravate, rather than ameliorate, vulnerabilities facing communities of color:
Consider this scenario: two 15-year-olds are in rival sets. They both join because they feel they have to in order to survive, because on the block where they live everyone else is affiliated so people assume they’re in a gang anyway. On the way to their school they have to cross several boundaries and territories to get to school because the city closed their old school and they have a long commute. On the way to school these young people meet and each of them thinks the other is a threat. They both shoot. Instantly one is a criminal and one is a victim. Which one is basically a question of chance. Now we have one young person who is going to be incarcerated, which will lead to long term trauma, educational gaps, and problems with employment. And another who is physically harmed, also traumatized, and whose family and friends are traumatized (and maybe retaliate).
Ewing’s remarks articulate for gun law enforcement what scholars of drug law enforcement have long known: that under the current configuration of the U.S. criminal justice apparatus, not just crimes but also punishments have dire consequences for individuals, families, and communities.15 The law professor James Forman Jr. reminds us that “of course, there are good reasons to regard the issues [of drugs and guns] differently … but despite such differences, drugs and guns—and our response to them—have commonalities we rarely acknowledge.”16 As Radley Balko notes, “you enforce the gun laws with the institutions you have, not the institutions you want.… [W]e can only consider the demonstrated history of how investigators and prosecutors have used … discretion [to enforce gun laws], not some idealized prosecutor or ATF investigator that we’d want to be in charge.”17
This chapter unravels the racial politics that undergird the wars—the war on alcohol, the war on drugs, and, I argue, the war on guns18—that are disproportionately fought in urban America against black and brown boys and men. Specifically, it examines police chiefs’ gun talk in the context of urban gun violence: how they embrace a war on guns, how they understand themselves within it, and how they frame the license and limit of legitimate violence accordingly. This chapter approaches police chiefs as “representative brokers”19 who must navigate—by virtue of their professional standing—the interface between the cultural conditions within their own police jurisdiction, on the one hand, and the political conditions in the broader U.S. landscape, on the other. In reference to urban violence, police chiefs embrace “tough on crime” policies such as mandatory minimums. They reinforce a “Warrior mindset” that emphasizes aggressive policing and harsh punishment. And they adhere to a particular understanding of legitimate violence—what I call “gun militarism”—as they imagine legitimately armed actors (here, the police) as engaged in a protracted, high-stakes battle to disarm illegitimately armed actors (here, the urban gun criminals). As a racial frame, gun militarism clarifies where and how the battle lines of this war on guns are drawn—and why, at times, these lines break down.
Defining what constitutes an illegal gun, or illegal gun use, is legally, socially, and morally complicated.20 This is, perhaps, because illegal guns are never just about guns themselves but also about the people wielding them, as evidenced by the lengthy list of attributes that disqualify a person from possessing or purchasing a gun, including a felony record, age, a documented history of severe mental illness, and dependency on illicit substances. When gun rights advocates emphasize that law should regulate the person and not the gun, they are actually tapping into a long history of gun control: though certain guns and accessories have been regulated or banned at particular times in history (see, most notably, the 1934 National Firearms Act, 1986 Firearms Owners Protection Act, and 1994 Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act), gun laws have more often regulated which people can do what with their guns and where.21
Historically, race has been central to these delimitations. Early gun laws and gun customs enforced a color line that equated freedom, citizenship, and arms-bearing with whiteness.22 This trend can be traced all the way to the 1967 Mulford Act, a law introduced by the California Republican legislator Don Mulford. The Second Amendment expert Adam Winkler describes Mulford as having “a history of fighting radicals,” with “special contempt for the [Black] Panthers.”23 The law was intended to end the armed patrols of the Black Panthers active in Oakland, California—the heart of Mulford’s home district of Alameda County. The Black Panthers were one of many Black Power groups turning to arms in the 1960s; the group embraced the Second Amendment as part of a broader ten-point program to address the twin problems of state brutality and neglect (the Black Panthers’ overall plan spanned from gun rights to social services, including providing free lunches and health care for the underserved urban black community).24 Mulford’s law, however, would effectively disarm Black Power, “giv[ing] California an unusually strict set of gun control laws,” according to Winkler.25 At the same time, it largely left untouched hunters as well as the nativist and white supremacist groups operating in the state at the time.26
Though the 1967 Mulford Act is often singled out as a standout example of the intersection of gun law and race, its visibility reflects both its audaciousness in drawing a color line with guns and its standing as historical anachronism. For gun policy in the 1960s and afterward, the color line would be predominantly drawn not by using gun laws to target African American “extremists” and “subversives” for disarmament, but by deploying firearms laws as a vehicle of expansive criminalization. “Tough on crime” gun laws would become the unifying mantra across the increasingly polarized gun debate. Such laws included enhanced sentencing and mandatory minimums for those who commit a crime with a firearm as well as while in possession of a firearm; they also included expanding prohibitions on firearms and firearm paraphernalia for those deemed unfit due to a criminal record or other disqualifying status.
Although popular debates about gun policy have often noted the uncanny capacity of the NRA to block federal gun laws, federal gun regulations have been successfully proposed and passed—but under the mantra of “tough on crime” policy rather than “gun control.” In 1984, at the behest of NRA-backed President Ronald Reagan, the U.S. Congress enacted the Armed Career Criminal Act; the Act stipulates that repeat offenders who have three or more prior convictions involving violent felonies or drug felonies must serve a minimum of 15 years in prison. Shortly thereafter,27 federal sentencing guidelines expanded the penalties for firearms-involved crime, with 5-, 7-, 10-, and 30-year mandatory minimum sentences for possessing, brandishing, or discharging a firearm during the commission of a crime, as well as 25-year mandatory minimum sentences for subsequent offenses.
Even before these federal laws were changed, states were already busy enhancing punishment for firearms-related offenses, alongside other offenses, during the early decades of the war on crime. For example, in Michigan in the 1970s, the African American mayor of Detroit Coleman Young insisted on clear-cut protection of gun rights for the city’s black residents: “I’ll be damned if I’ll let them collect guns in the city of Detroit while we’re surrounded by hostile suburbs and the whole rest of the state … where you have vigilantes practicing in the wilderness with automatic weapons.”28 Unwilling to disarm Detroiters, however, he “saw mandatory minimums for gun crimes as a reasonable compromise,”29 as the law professor James Forman Jr. observed. Michigan passed a two-year mandatory minimum sentencing for crimes committed while in possession of a firearm in 1976. That same year, Arizona passed a law so that “anyone found to have used a firearm while committing robbery, kidnapping, rape, various forms of aggravated assault, or resisting a police officer was no longer eligible for a suspended sentence, probation, parole, or other release from custody before serving a mandatory sentence.”30 In 1978, Arizona further expanded the scope of this sentencing apparatus to include “dangerous” offenses as well as “repeat offenders.”
Although the trend toward mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines transformed penal codes across the United States, perhaps the most infamous example of “tough on crime” gun law came from California in the 1990s. Known as the “Use a Gun and You’re Done” law, the 1997 measure added respective enhancements of 10 years, 20 years, and 25 years to life for “using” a gun, firing a gun, or killing or seriously injuring another person with a gun. As with federal guidelines, these enhancements were added onto the sentence for the underlying conviction—and were to be served consecutively. Following on the heels of California’s “three strikes” law enacted in 1994, it was billed as the most onerous gun law in the nation and passed, according to the Washington Post,31 “with little fanfare or [the] controversy” usually associated with gun-related legislation. A decade later, California’s Department of Justice got to work tracking down—and prosecuting—persons illegally in possession of firearms with the Armed Prohibited Persons System. Its database lists individuals who at one time owned firearms but then became prohibited due to a criminal conviction, mental health designation, or other issues. The system makes it bureaucratically possible to prosecute California’s Felon with a Firearm law, which stipulates that those convicted of a felony, anyone convicted of specific misdemeanors, and narcotic drug addicts may face additional sentencing, an extended loss of gun rights, and—for legal immigrants—possible deportation if they are found to possess a firearm.
Police chiefs whom I interviewed in Arizona, California, and Michigan remain committed to “getting tough on guns.” According to the vast majority of interviewed chiefs across the different political and legal contexts of Arizona, California, and Michigan, they wanted more, and more drastic, enforcement with respect to gun policy. They wanted severe punishment, including mandatory minimum sentencing and sentencing enhancements, to ensure that gun criminals are disarmed and incarcerated. One California chief told me that his “top priority … would probably be the administration of justice and punishment. Put teeth in the existing laws. And direct the majority of resources at that.” Another California chief sardonically echoed this. “How about: let’s enforce the laws! 99 percent of the time, if someone is arrested, they have ten different gun violations! But we’ve weakened the punishment. It’s just a farce.” Two Michigan chiefs also agreed: “We need to enforce the laws we have and the courts should be held accountable. But we have no money, so people reoffend, they get probation, and this happens multiple times”; “If someone is caught with an illegal gun, they should be punished. They are the ones who should be severely punished and incarcerated, because if they are carrying illegally, that’s eventually going to lead to a shooting, and then a homicide.” And an Arizona chief even referenced the myth of El Salvador’s punitive drunk driving laws to make a similar point: “Look at San Salvador. If you get a DUI, and you are caught, you are killed, there’s a sign posted about you. It’s brutal—and I’m not advocating that, but I think we need to start prosecuting the shit out of criminals, and I think that would do a lot to take care of gun crime. You know, none of this, ‘my mommy beat me.’ ” Though the chief is wrong about El Salvador (the country ended the death penalty for everything but military crimes decades ago), this “tough on crime” sensibility was consistent across the vast majority of police chiefs with regard to gun policy.
Chiefs did not embrace “tough on crime” policies unilaterally or unthinkingly; for example, when conversation strayed into the topics of drug law enforcement or immigration, for example, chiefs were more ambivalent about the efficacy of such approaches.32 One chief from Michigan noted, “I am a fan of mandatory minimums … even if it can be too punitive at times. Now … I don’t think someone should be going to prison forever for drug convictions. But firearms, I think, are completely different than drugs. Guns are about public safety, and the mandatory minimums are about incapacitation.” Likewise, a California chief saw the best “tough on crime” policies as targeted toward violent offenders, not drug offenders: “I am all in favor of enhancements for violence. You should go to jail. I don’t care about subsistence dealers. Violent people is where we should focus. It’s the people who hurt people—put them on an island, parachute them in food, and let them figure the rest of it out.” And an Arizona chief chimed in: “I would not necessarily say that for all crimes, but for violent crime in particular, I think mandatory minimums are a good thing.” Guns were “different,” these chiefs and others across Arizona, Michigan, and California noted, because guns made possible irreversible and unmeasurable damage, loss of life, and trauma.
In asserting the unique exigencies of gun law enforcement, chiefs recognized a core finding regarding the criminogenic effects of guns: the instrumentality effect,33 which holds that the weapon, above and beyond the intentions of its user, affects the outcome of an act of violence. This is why gun availability tracks gun homicides, but not other homicides; why armed robberies committed with firearms are more likely to escalate to homicide than other kinds of robberies; and why lethality rates are correlated with ammunition calibers.34 These consequences of guns warranted a severe response from the criminal justice system.
Chiefs’ sentiments are expressions of punitiveness, but they are also expressions of exasperation at the broader system of criminal justice of which police chiefs are a part—and which they must navigate on its terms, not theirs.35 Amid concerns about the lethal consequences of guns, police chiefs’ support for mandatory minimums, sentencing enhancements, and gun policies was also rooted in misgivings about the criminal justice system’s efficacy in punishing offenders.36 Chiefs described a “revolving door” of criminal justice, frustrated that their efforts are deemed futile by lenient judges, inadequate prison space, and prosecutors interested only in “winnable” cases. Chiefs offered that “what it comes down to is, it is very hard to get to prison” (Arizona); they regretted that “you have felonies turned into misdemeanors turned into infractions—all through plea bargaining” (California); they wondered “why we always plea down the gun crime” (Arizona); they lamented that “if the court system would just enforce [gun laws] and put people away so that if they have a gun or use a gun they never see the light of day—well, that’s what I’d prefer” (California). One Michigan chief, who policed an African American–majority jurisdiction, expressed his frustration by detailing how plea bargaining had created a library of absurd offenses, including “attempted CCW [concealed carrying of a weapon]”:
I am all for mandatory minimums. So, take this offense: attempted CCW. Do you know what that is? How do you “attempt” CCW? Well, I will tell you what it is. You have your first HYTA [a conviction that is expunged due to age-related eligibility]. Then you have your second HYTA. Then you have a plea down, from CCW to attempted CCW. And then you have a CCW. And then only on the fifth time do you have the mandatory minimums kicking in, and the convictions go federal.
In this excerpt, this chief references Michigan’s HYTA program as an illuminating point of frustration. The Holmes Youthful Trainee Act, which was enacted in 1927, was intended to allow youths facing criminal convictions avoid a permanent criminal record. A holdover from when American criminal justice was characterized by rehabilitative justice,37 HYTA has come to signal a criminal justice system weak on juvenile justice in an era of “tough on crime” sensibilities.
Although Arizona, California, and Michigan chiefs were largely cynical about the broader criminal justice system, California chiefs raised an additional grievance—California legislators. California police chiefs were particularly chagrined about the rollback of the war on crime that California legislators were attempting in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2011 decision in Brown v. Plata. (The U.S. Supreme Court found that prison conditions in California violated the Eighth Amendment and mandated that the state must reduce its prison population to 137.5 percent of capacity within two years.) Though the case represents a powerful symbolic critique of inhumane and unconstitutional conditions within California prisons,38 the reforms undertaken in response have largely shifted the burden of incarceration from the state prisons to county jails, localizing and fragmenting a supervised population in order to comply with the Supreme Court mandate—a strategy known as “realignment.”
Realignment and other reforms have failed to dismantle mass incarceration, as the legal scholars Keramet Reiter and Natalie Pifer note,39 but they did spark a backlash among Californians in favor of a renewed “tough on crime” approach to punishment. At the time of my interviews, one recent reform in particular—Proposition 4740—caught the ire of many chiefs. The proposition reduced a variety of felonies to misdemeanors, including certain crimes involving drug possession and stolen property worth $950 or less. Chiefs were quick to point out that that included virtually all stolen firearms—an oversight that would eventually be addressed through Proposition 63, passed in November 2016. At the time of my interviews, though, chiefs used Prop 47 as an occasion to argue that the state’s “tough on crime” policies had led to historically low crime rates and to assert their apprehension regarding California’s recent penal changes. As one California chief pointedly noted, “I think we are going backwards. In terms of sentencing, we now have a number of felonies that we have turned into misdemeanors. And we see property crimes sky rocketing, significantly increasing. And I think the same thing will happen if we do that for violent crime. So it’s not so much about punishment, but about what works. Look at the stats: when we put people behind bars, we keep crime lower.”
Criminologists have found limited support for this chief’s assertion; the number of people imprisoned in the 1990s did have an effect on crime rates—as did changes in policing and demographic shifts, though criminologists remain unable to explain the totality of the dramatic drop in crime the United States experienced from the 1990s onward.41 But mass incarceration also imposed heavy costs on those incarcerated, their families, their communities, and taxpayers. These costs have become the subject of sustained public debate due to public intellectuals like the legal scholar Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, as well as growing criticism from political leaders on the left and right alike.42 Accordingly, public opinion and public policy—especially with regard to drug law enforcement—have started to shift away from their “tough on crime” antecedents. In contrast, gun law enforcement largely remains under the mantra of “tough on crime” politics, both within and outside of law enforcement circles. As one chief admitted with regard to California’s Armed Prohibited Persons System, which focused on felons in possession of firearms, “it was easier to get people behind that mission because everybody—whether it’s the Brady Campaign, the NRA—everybody wants people who shouldn’t have guns to not have them. So that was our focus.” The criminalization of armed felons, this chief seemed to imply, was a crucial rallying point for uniting foes across the gun debate and creating politically feasible gun policy. This maneuver reflected the persistence of punitive sentiments among the American public with respect to gun law; it also spoke to the ethos of U.S. police agencies tasked with enforcing it.
There is an elective affinity between “tough on crime” gun policies and the police subcultures that characterize American public law enforcement. Police subculture is the topic of a deep body of scholarship; scholars43 who have worked alongside urban police—often as researchers, but at other times as police recruits themselves—have documented that police embrace a subculture that emphasizes a crime-fighting mission; a desire for action and excitement; an us-versus-them mentality; the glorification of (crime-fighting) violence; suspiciousness and cynicism (toward criminals and toward the criminal justice system); social isolation and strong in-group loyalty (what the policing scholar P.A.J. Waddington calls “defensive solidarity”);44 and authoritarian conservatism. Police subculture provides police—from patrol officers to chiefs—with stories to interpret their own engagement in the world of police work, values to understand their moral standing within that world, and cultural tools to navigate the unique and intractable tasks that go along with policing.45 Likewise, police subculture helps explain the social organization of police work; as the policing scholar Peter Manning argues,46 police work is best understood as a drama—one centered on law enforcement projecting their crime-fighter image to the broader public, to the individuals they police, and even to themselves. Finally, police subculture helps explain how policing produces disparities and inequalities despite formal adherence to equality and fairness: ideas about what is suspect are shaped by race47 through implicit biases linking blackness to criminality, which in turn shape how police make big and small decisions that add up to major racial disparities in policing outcomes.48
The Warrior is a foreboding presence in the context of contemporary police subculture. The former officer and legal scholar Seth Stoughton notes that “within law enforcement, few things are more venerated than the concept of the Warrior.”49 He describes the Warrior as “a simplified attempt to provide an ethical framework for an inherently violent job”50 that “refers to a deep-bone commitment to survive a bad situation no matter the odds or difficulty, to not give up even when it is mentally and physically easier to do so.”51 The Warrior reinforces the necessity of law enforcement as the key barrier between order and chaos (i.e., the “thin blue line”).52 It acknowledges the exclusivity of the law enforcement profession—not everyone is morally equipped to face the kinds of violence that police officers must accept as the price of admission to their chosen profession. It allows officers, furthermore, “psychological protection” from any cognitive dissonance that arises from the gap between how they understand themselves and the reality of the actions they both respond to and must undertake as part of police work.53 It offers practical leverage to officers who “are frequently reminded that their single most important goal every day is simply to make it home at the end of their shift … [and] that every aspect of policing is intensely dangerous.”54 And finally, the Warrior is appealing to people beyond law enforcement, from “tough on crime” politicians across the political spectrum to ordinary people who want the assurance of a robust police force ready and able to address issues of law and order in ways that they themselves cannot or will not—whether morally or legally—undertake.
The Warrior became an ascendant paradigm of policing in the context of the urban crack epidemic of the 1980s; the epidemic’s “unprecedented carnage” helped to indelibly connect drugs, violence, and urban America in the minds of both the public and the police.55 Pantomiming previous eras of American crime fighting, the threat of violence was conflated with, and co-constituted by, blackness,56 but this time, the specter of urban disorder justified an unprecedentedly militarized response from law enforcement. As the legal scholar James Forman Jr. notes, “the fight against crack helped to enshrine the notion that police must be [W]arriors, aggressive and armored, working ghetto corners as an army might patrol enemy territory.”57 Indeed, the criminologists David Ramey and Trent Steidley found that an increased population of racial minorities is associated with increases in the amount of military equipment transferred through the 1033 Program set up to offload surplus goods from the Department of Defense to local police departments.58
The celebration of the Warrior has dovetailed with the proliferation of militarized equipment,59 ramping up crime fighting as a hypermasculine mission.60 As the police militarization scholar Peter Kraska describes his fieldwork, “the ‘military special operations’ culture—characterized by a distinct technowarrior garb, heavy weaponry, sophisticated technology, hypermasculinity, and dangerous function—was nothing less than intoxicating for its participants.”61 The Warrior’s overemphasis on danger in police work and the encouragement that police approach every individual and interaction as potentially lethal “because everyone they meet may have a plan to kill them”62 amplifies an already intense valorization of masculinity within policing. Writing more than three decades ago, the ethnographer and police expert Jennifer Hunt finds that police “construct their world in terms of a binary system of oppositional categories with masculine and feminine significance,” associating “crime-fighting” with “particular masculine skills and personality attributes” such that “the street cop … is a brave and aggressive soldier who has mastered the art of violence.”63 Likewise, the sociolegal scholar Stephen Herbert analyzes the “hard-charger” masculinity that frames aggressive police work as courageous and heroic: “Many police officers reinforce a robust form of masculinity, which encourages them to aggressively pursue ‘bad guys.’ … [O]fficers remind each other that the danger of their job requires a brave and often aggressive response.… Policing is mythologized as a test of agility, strength and tenacity.”64 Reflecting a style of masculinity as much as a style of policing, the Warrior encourages police to approach their interactions with civilians as masculinity contests;65 devalue certain tasks—such as paperwork—as “feminine”;66 imagine the jurisdictions they police as military grids to be dominated;67 and embrace firearms as both practical and symbolic evidence of their willingness to face danger.68
In my interviews, one police chief in particular illustrated the Warrior. A white man nearing retirement, the chief had worked for nearly four decades in a high-crime African American–majority city; we met in his office, a large suite that overlooked the city he policed. When I asked him how he first decided to go into law enforcement, he responded with sarcasm: “Because I want to help people!” After some stilted laughter, he added: “Because I want to catch bad guys! Lock ’em up!” In a matter of seconds, the chief juxtaposed two overarching ideals of police work: the helpful public servant and the hard-charging Warrior. Sarcastically dismissing the former as naive, the chief implicates a set of desires that have populated classic cop dramas such as Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, and The Enforcer. In these valiant, and edgy, films, police use of force is depicted not just as the reestablishment of justice. It is also portrayed as something that police seek out as a test of grit, or what the historian Richard Slotkin calls “the myth of regeneration through violence.”69 Drawing a line between “cops” and “police officers,” this chief echoes Herbert’s and Hunt’s observations that police work is valorized through its association with a masculine ethos of crime fighting:70
There are police officers, and there are cops. The police officer, they will be there at roll call. They’ll answer the calls, they will file the reports. They will write their tickets. But when their 8 hours is up, they go home. And that’s it. That’s what they do. A cop: he gets to work, and he starts reading the reports of what happened on the last shift. He gets into his car, and if he stops someone, he’s not writing a ticket. He’s saying you fit that description. He’s looking for the car involved in the robbery. He’s jumpy, he’s ready to stop a felony, to get the bad guy. He’s expecting that. He’s not just there to write a ticket—he’s gritty, and he has the edge. He goes the extra mile. And he has the dream.
In this excerpt, this chief explicitly endorses going “the extra mile” to profile suspects (“he’s not writing a ticket. He’s saying you fit that description”). This could be understood as a nod to racial profiling; throughout the interview the chief recognizes and recuperates the racial politics of urban violence. He refers to statistics regarding the disproportionate representation of African Americans among gun offenders and prison inmates. He suggests that black men are less likely to become cops because “a lot of the black men smoke and can’t pass a drug test.” And noting that “we don’t have social programs to deal with the fallout,” he pathologizes the black family, referencing a column by the conservative African American economist Walter E. Williams titled “The True Black Tragedy.”71
This chief’s references to black marginalization served to substantiate and celebrate a particular rendition of high-drama police work—one that required the stakes of urban violence for its appeal. To illustrate, this chief told me about what he called “the dream.” The dream, he explained, reveals the anxieties of the “real” cop: in the “dream,” the officer can’t find his gun; he (as this chief tells it, it is always a “he”) can’t draw his gun; his trigger finger is weak; there is just a click where there should be a boom when the trigger is finally forced back. The dream, I realized, was a crucial illustration of the intertwining of gun violence and police identity: by conjuring a stylized rendition of urban gun violence (and to the exclusion of other kinds of gun violence, such as domestic violence, active shootings, and negligent shootings), this chief and others could articulate the Warrior’s appeal through the drama of gritty crime fighting.
Other chiefs likewise articulated the Warrior as they reminisced about their early days on street patrol. One white chief discussed policing in 1980s Detroit: “Those were the good old days.… There was a lot of action—catching bad guys. It was legitimate police work.” Throughout the interview, the chief struggled with the politics of race, by turns wondering whether slavery was a “fatal birth defect” dooming the viability of the United States, bemoaning the “breakdown of the nuclear family,” emphasizing black men’s “disproportionate” involvement in gun crime as a reflection of “core family values,” and wagering that his own upbringing as white but poor helped him understand the plight of Detroiters better than other police. Alongside these ruminations, he recalled one experience while on patrol:
I got a call for a carjacking. And when you get into the hang of things, you get a sense of how things go down, so maybe a carjacking happens on one street, and you know to go straight over to another block nearby. It turns out there is a driver, a passenger, and two kids in the back seat. One kid in the back, a thirteen-year-old, pulls out a gun that looks like it has a fourteen-foot barrel. I know it was just a gun, but it looked like the biggest thing I have ever seen. I pulled out my gun and just shot—I didn’t see a kid, I just saw a cannon right in my face. And the only reason that kid didn’t die was because I was using “city council” rounds at the time, with limited penetration. They were frangible rounds.
This chief was notably silent on the racial details of this stop, but the tropes surrounding urban crime and law enforcement’s role in combatting it appear to nevertheless shape how he framed his own experiences of gun violence. The thirteen-year-old Detroit boy is literally reduced to weaponry (“I didn’t see a kid, I just saw a cannon right in my face”), and he casually dismisses the precariousness of life and death in Detroit: “the only reason that kid didn’t die was because I was using ‘city council’ rounds.” But his story could have been told differently: the chief could have emphasized his relief at having had “less lethal” rounds so that both the boy and the chief were able to leave the incident unscathed. Instead, this story of a close encounter with gun violence communicated a particular understanding of policing as a high-stakes drama that tests the perspicacity of police officers as they face off with firearms.
But police chiefs’ stories about, and insights into, urban gun violence did not just communicate how they saw themselves; they also communicated how they understood the people they policed.
For decades since the inception of the war on crime in the 1960s, urban gun violence has been popularly associated with the criminal propensity of racialized boys and men figured as hyperviolent aggressors: thugs, gangbangers, drug dealers, and superpredators. These tropes of urban criminality circulate on television screens, in tabloid headlines, in movie theaters, and on social media feeds. They populate fictionalized dramas and documentary accounts alike of crime in the United States. They appear in the stump speeches of politicians looking to galvanize voters through fear of crime. And they animate how those people professionally charged with addressing problems of crime and justice in the United States—such as police chiefs—understand and explain their work. Scholars of criminalization have overwhelmingly shown that these tropes reflect and reinforce racial distinctions regarding blameworthiness and criminality.72 The race scholars Michael Omi and Howard Winant understand such tropes as “racial code words,”73 or putatively race-neutral terms that nevertheless communicate implicitly racialized expectations and presumptions. Racial code words animate color-blind racism: though color blindness rejects explicit racial prejudice and animus, racial code words allow color blindness to sustain systems of racial domination by minimizing the grim consequences of racial inequality, oppression, and discrimination as the results of individuals’ bad behavior and moral laxity.74
Police chiefs across Arizona, California, and Michigan—even chiefs who did not have direct experience with urban gun violence—spontaneously referenced popular tropes of urban criminality: “the drug dealers that drive through from Detroit” (Michigan chief); “the gangbangers who still have their Roscoes [guns] in LA” (California chief); and the “gang members in Chicago” (Arizona chief). As one California chief explained, “I am not worried about the people who just want an assault weapon for the hell of it, or a military guy who had an M16 and wants one because it reminds him of his old gun. I’m worried about the gangsters who bring in guns [to California] and then they get into the hands of people who have hatred for America.” Here, the “gangster” is seen as assisting “people who have hatred for America” (that is, terrorists),75 while the person “who just wants an assault weapon for the hell of it” and the “military guy” are figured as harmless, lawful gun owners. A Michigan chief similarly explained: “The urban terrorists are gang members.” A California chief shared his perceptions of illegal gun owners: “I just think about all the guns that are illegally owned. Gangsters, people on probation, illegal immigrants.” And an Arizona chief maintained that it was largely “gangbangers and crooks” who take advantage of loopholes in existing gun laws.
More rarely, chiefs explicitly acknowledged racial disparities related to gun violence, throwing their hands up at a problem they can see but do not feel capable of fixing. For example, one chief noted:
A couple years ago, we had 19 shootings in 18 days. It was really bad. And they were all arrested, they are all doing time. But the reality is, you know, they might be doing 7 years, 10 years, but eventually—whether if it’s in a few years’ time or longer—they are going to come back to the community and they are going to go back into the same violence. And I get it: I get that there’s a lot going on, the fact that they are all African American, but I’m not trying to solve the world’s problem. I’m just trying to deal with the fact that 10 out of 12 of them will shoot someone else when they come out.
Reducing complex problems of racial inequality—as this chief noted, “there’s a lot going on, the fact that they are all African American”—to singular acts of criminality produced a simple, and putatively color-blind, line between “good guys” and “bad guys.” This chief’s exasperation rightly acknowledged the difficulties in solving urban gun violence; accordingly, he resigned himself to redefining this problem in narrower terms that aligned with his professional capacities as a police officer: “I’m just trying to deal with the fact that 10 out of 12 of them will shoot someone else when they come out.”
Other chiefs attempted to get a handle on the problem of urban gun violence by emphasizing that it was contained, both in the sense of being relegated to particular cities or parts of cities, and in the sense of involving a tight, racialized network of perpetrators and victims. As one chief told me about gun violence in his Michigan jurisdiction,
It’s very concentrated among a network of people. Let me show you a picture. [He grabs a picture that shows homicide victims; it’s three rows of several faces. Two white men in the middle, one African American woman, and the rest black men. He puts his fingers on the two white men to cover them.] Besides those two, they are all the same: black men who are between 18 and 24. [He does not acknowledge the African American woman.] It’s gang-related, but it’s local gangs. It’s organic. It’s not Chicago or Detroit gangs. It will happen when people are playing dice or what have you. So, one homicide victim—he was shot at 6 am and it was the third time he was shot. The guy who shot him then goes and kills himself. And it was because they had words, one of them accused the other of cheating at dice, and that’s it.
This construction of gun violence minimized it as a broad issue of public safety by confining its effects to relatively small circles of boys and young men of color and developing police strategies to isolate gun violence to particular settings and contain the “spillover.” Similarly, a California chief in a high-crime area naturalized this violence by appealing to the demographics of the city, “We have gang issues, and that’s connected to us having a low-income community and a high minority rate; we are 70 percent Hispanic. So that goes sort of hand in hand. Our crime rates have dropped about 25 percent, but here the gun violence is still people shooting people!” Another California chief in a jurisdiction that bordered a high-crime area likewise used the language of containment: “We are concerned with making sure that the gang violence does not spill over. As we say, we like to keep our enemies on the other side of the gate.” This language reflects a presumption, as the sociologist Nikki Jones notes, “regarding the value placed on black life …: violence is only a problem when it spills outside of the Black community.”76
This construction also minimized gun violence by blurring the lines between perpetrators and victims. Emphasizing that an incident can be “classified as gang-related if it is a gang member killing another gang member” (according to one chief), chiefs at times separately tallied homicides in non-gang-related and gang-related categories as they explained their city’s terrain of gun violence, and they refrained from labeling those who die in gang violence as “victims.” As one chief told me, “I would say that gun violence is my number one concern.… 90 percent of it is targeted. It’s people who are involved in a criminal lifestyle.” Another chief noted, “Usually these kinds of cases are gang on gang cases that involve people getting physical and then it escalating to a weapon.”
Note that these sentiments do reflect the empirical reality that urban gun violence is concentrated—in terms of both perpetrators and victims—in small circles of boys and men of color,77 and initiatives that have used a blend of policing strategies and community support networks to target “at-risk” individuals have meaningfully reduced categories of gun crime (see, for example, the Boston Miracle).78 Constructing urban gun violence as a localized issue of “bad people” from “bad places” doing “bad things,” however, chiefs reflected not just empirical trends with respect to gun violence perpetration and victimization. They also forwarded a moral claim about those involved in urban gun violence: that they are, by definition, involved in a “criminal lifestyle” rather than community members and fellow citizens.
As Ewing and other scholars of crime and criminalization remind us, the victims and perpetrators of gun violence are often distinguished not by moral standing but by the exigencies of circumstance. Likewise, the distance between criminal violence and defensive violence can be excruciatingly small. Imagine someone who has grown up in a violence-saturated, economically depressed neighborhood. They decide it makes sense to involve themselves in small-time drug deals. This, however, exposes them to even more risks of violent victimization. Without a felony record or any other disqualifier, they purchase a handgun for self-defense—and, eventually, find themselves in a situation when they need to use it: someone violently assaults them. Could this be self-defense? Or is it necessarily criminal violence? Does it matter if the assaulter knew the victim through the latter’s criminal activity? If so, how?
Given that the police chiefs I interviewed were broadly supportive of gun rights, I almost always posed to police chiefs a question that pushed their embrace of self-defense: does a drug dealer have the right to self-defense? In Michigan, California, and Arizona, most chiefs answered in the negative. As one chief in California reasoned:
It’s not self-defense—any death incident to the commission of a felony in California is a felony murder. That’s the felony murder rule. There are some cases, where you have someone say, I was getting mugged! Well, then you drill down and realize, that’s the what but that’s not really the why [i.e., there was a criminal element going on].
An Arizona chief agreed:
It’s felony murder. I believe so. It would be illegal—what they were doing. If they hadn’t done all of the illegal things leading up to that, there would have been no shooting.
Felony murder refers to a criminal homicide that results from the commission of a felony: it makes a person criminally liable for murder if a co-conspirator kills someone, or if a death is a reasonably foreseeable consequence in the commission of a violent felony. As a legal term, felony murder defines the circumstances in which a suspect can be held responsible not just for the underlying felony but also for murder. States vary in terms of their felony murder doctrines. California has a long-standing legal culture of felony murder;79 in Michigan, felony murder was abolished by the Michigan Supreme Court in 1980; and Arizona retains felony murder by statute, but it does not inform the state’s legal culture to the same extent as in California.
These state-level differences mapped onto cleavages among chiefs: chiefs in California were most likely to see self-defense as revocable, whereas Michigan chiefs were most ambivalent about rendering self-defense a crime. These differences also revealed that felony murder is not just a legal category but also a moral category that exceeds its legal parameters: broadening the felony murder rule, many chiefs, especially in California, adhered to a one-drop rule of criminal involvement, whereby drug dealing, gangbanging, and other activities associated with urban crime indicated both criminal depravity and legal and moral exclusion from the right to self-defense. One California chief even explained a case in which defendants were held criminally liable for a homicide that resulted from self-defense by their victim. When asked whether his jurisdiction has had any justifiable homicides (the legal term for self-defense homicides), he responded by explaining,
We’ve had them. We had one with a jewelry store where the merchant was armed, and shot back [on a group of armed robbers]. One of the guys died in the front of the store in the parking lot, and we tracked them [the rest of the robbers] down and charged them with felony murder.
Given my pledge to police chiefs that I maintain their anonymity, I could not determine the veracity of this story, or its outcome, but the charge of felony murder in such circumstances would be unusual. Nevertheless, the felony murder doctrine allows this chief to align himself—legally and morally—with an armed citizen defending a jewelry business. Not unlike mandatory minimums and sentencing enhancements, self-defense in this story operates as an additional means of criminalizing the attacker, above and beyond the underlying felony.
As another example, one Michigan chief ruminated about the legal and moral gaps between self-defense law and the felony murder doctrine (recall that Michigan has abolished its felony murder doctrine): “I do think they should be charged if they are involved in illegal acts. I think they forfeit the right. But we had one case where a guy was getting beat up by a drug dealer. It was some kind of deal gone bad. Well, the son, who was not to my knowledge involved in any kind of illegal activity, gets a gun and shoots the guy because he sees his father getting beaten. And he kills the drug dealer. And that guy wasn’t charged. And that’s a tough one, because he wasn’t really involved, but it happened because of drug dealing.” The moral standing of the killing in this case presents the chief with a “tough one” insofar as the perpetrator cannot be straightforwardly categorized as either a “bad guy with a gun” or as a “good guy with a gun.” On the one hand, the proximity of the son to illegal activity rendered him suspect, and his actions were intended to protect his father, who was involved in criminal activity. On the other hand, he played the part of a “good guy with a gun” by acting in defense of his father and killing a drug dealer—not an otherwise innocent civilian. Even as the chief insists on the general rule that those “involved in illegal acts … forfeit the right” to self-defense, the chief accedes to the prosecutor’s decision not to charge in this “tough” case.
As these examples illustrate, the politics of urban crime predisposes police chiefs—and, for that matter, the public—to imagine gun law, and gun criminals, with particular frames designating boys and men of color as suspected criminals. But not all police chiefs unwittingly reproduced these frames. Navigating circumstances not of their choosing, with moral compasses and everyday experiences at odds with popular cultural frames, some police chiefs questioned the criminalization of self-defense—as well as its racial foundations.
Consider one chief who policed a rural area in California’s Central Valley; despite their bucolic veneer, small rural towns such as this chief’s often harbor a fair share of criminal activity. Pro-gun in his sensibilities, this chief wrestled with one incident involving a violent encounter between a “gangbanger” and “a wannabe gang member.” He set the stage: “There was a gang member at a party, and he was just beating up people. He took this one kid, and just threw him against the wall and was just beating and beating and beating him against a light. Well, this kid took out a buck knife and was waving it around and slit everyone. One guy actually died.… Another guy survived. This guy with the knife: he was no angel; he was a wannabe gang member. And I wanted to arrest him for homicide.” The story could have ended there as yet another example of felony murder, but the chief went on: “The detective had more common sense than I did, who saw it as self-defense. And I think that was right, that was the right call. That guy went to the Marines.” Again, the story could have ended there: a kid given a second chance turns straight. But: “He came back and ended up getting a [concealed pistol license] and getting into another shooting and killing a gang member, and then was arrested for homicide. But that was still deemed self-defense.” Here, the chief moves from sympathetic to exasperated; he admits that he understands the reasoning behind the man’s desire for a concealed pistol license: “He said, ‘These gang members want retaliation.’ And I think that’s a credible threat.” The chief continues: “But then what does he do? Put himself into a situation where he knows there will be gang members.… I would not have issued [him a concealed pistol license] because I know that he was associated with a gang.” At this point, the chief reiterates a point widespread among many police chiefs: that criminal involvement—including criminal association—can, and even should, put people in liminal spaces where their rights are de facto suspended. But then this chief catches himself yet again: “But you have to review every case. Because his brother was a gang member, and he looked up to him. Now, he’s [the brother] had a stellar career—because someone gave him a chance.… So it’s human nature—and you have to think about that. And again, I really agree with that saying: guns don’t kill, people kill.” Rather than embracing a one-size-fits-all “tough on crime” sentiment on gun law enforcement, this chief tries to shine light on the long shadow of racialized tropes of criminality such as gang-bangers’: he recognizes that people can change (even as they often do not), that officers can be wrong (even as they struggle to do the right thing), and that the law does not provide a clear “how-to” guide in dealing with the real-life problems of policing. Ultimately, he settles on a stance borrowed from pro–gun rights rhetoric—“guns don’t kill; people kill”—to tie up these tangled strands.
Across Arizona, California, and Michigan, a meaningful minority of chiefs were likewise openly flummoxed by racial profiling and racial disparities, explicitly recognizing that armed people of color are too often profiled as threats. One California chief who endorsed concealed carry for civilians noted, “Racial profiling is real. That’s a reality.… [That’s why] there needs to be crystal clear rules on how law enforcement engage armed civilians, and we should be able to check your ID, whether you are open carry or concealed carry, and we should have a right to hold on to your weapon as long as we need to.” An Arizona chief explained his broad support for civilian gun carry and his personal reluctance to use force by referencing Philando Castile as tragically avoidable: “the guy in Minnesota—he was just trying to get his insurance out, and then the officer is shooting. There is no way I’d be going for my gun in that case.” Finally, one California chief, largely ambivalent about gun policy itself, nevertheless linked guns to the politics of race in a clear-cut manner: “You have that corrosive racism. Look at [Johannes] Mehserle [a Bay Area Rapid Transit officer who killed the unarmed twenty-two-year-old Oscar Grant], look at his face after that shooting. Or the guy [officer] in Minnesota. Listen to him. They’re afraid. And they don’t even know how afraid they are! Totally uncomfortable.… You can just imagine what the [officer] thought in Minnesota, the guy says, ‘I have a gun permit,’ and the police officer hears ‘Gun! Black man with a gun!’ and thinks, ‘gotta shoot!’ It’s like a Richard Pryor joke: ‘Shoot the black man with a gun!’ ” These chiefs resisted—in different ways, and to different degrees—the racial tropes that mark guns in the hands of black and brown hands as inexorable threats to public safety, public order, and police power, bucking police and popular sensibilities alike.
Most chiefs embraced, to some degree, gun rights and the right to self-defense. Looking at the question of self-defense from the racial lens of urban gun crime, however, revealed the racial fault lines in demarcating the moral and legal boundaries of self-defense. Race shapes the terrain of legitimate violence. Through the color-blind lens of criminality, racial tropes of urban crime provide cues for demarcating what does and does not count—morally and legally—as legitimate violence. Some chiefs could see the racial contours of this terrain—and oftentimes, these chiefs did so not despite but because of their embrace of gun rights. Accordingly, they could name race as a visible dynamic shaping legitimate violence, not just as exercised by armed private civilians but also as exercised by police.
“Black Man with a Gun.” “Driving while Black.” “Walking while Black.” “Breathing while Black.” Or simply, “Criminal Black Man.”80 Each of these phrases describes how the structural81 condition of blackness inflects the otherwise ordinary stuff of everyday life: the “strange experience”—in W.E.B. Du Bois’s words—of “being a problem.”82 Accordingly, the public and private lives of African Americans83 have been shaped by an awareness that their presence and their actions—whether clothing, body language, words, glances, or simply skin color—may render them unduly suspect and therefore endangered.
These everyday sensibilities are rooted in structural realities. Police are disproportionately likely to stop African Americans for reasons such as a broken tail light.84 Once stopped, police are more likely to use respectful language with white drivers than with African American drivers,85 and police are also more likely to search and ticket African American and Latinx drivers.86 Arrest rates are also racially disparate, especially for possession offenses: racial minorities are disproportionately likely to be arrested for drug-related offenses, but this difference cannot be explained by differences in drug offending, nondrug offending, or more general crime rates.87 Police shootings may represent a small percentage of overall stops, but they represent a rather large number in terms of the absolute number of deaths; so while police conduct tens of thousands of stops every day,88 roughly one thousand people are killed by police in the United States per year, based on crowd-sourced data from the Washington Post and The Guardian. People of color are disproportionately represented among those killed by police. According to an analysis of 2011–2014 data by the anthropologist Cody Ross, unarmed African Americans are 3.49 times more likely to be shot than unarmed whites, holding crime rates constant.89
Most of the scholarship, public debate, and punditry regarding racial disparities in policing in particular and criminal justice more broadly has focused on the war on drugs. This chapter aims to start a similar conversation regarding the racial politics of gun law enforcement. Although the police and the public overwhelmingly question “tough on crime” policies for addressing drug crime and drug addiction, the war on guns enjoys broad approval. Among the police chiefs I interviewed, support for “tough on crime” gun laws is bound up with a broader understanding of legitimate violence (gun militarism) and allegiance to a particular police identity (the Warrior). Gun militarism envisions a distribution of legitimate violence that emphasizes police firepower and that marshals racialized imageries of the “bad guy with a gun”—gangbangers, drug dealers, and superpredators—to justify this aggressive gun law enforcement. This suggests a state monopoly on violence even stronger than that envisioned by the classical sociologist Max Weber,90 who saw states monopolizing not legitimate violence itself so much as the prerogative to define the limits of legitimate violence. Perhaps, then, U.S. policing can be understood as “Weber with a Vengeance,” where the racial politics of crime and crime control combine with a militarized police force to ramp up the potential for escalated violence, antagonize police-civilian relations, and transform the police-citizen relationship into one of soldier-enemy combatant.
But alongside gun militarism and the Warriors who animate it, there is another strain of policing, one that represents a distinct politics of race and that elicits a different distribution in legitimate violence across state and society: gun populism. In order to understand gun populism, we must understand not just the politics of black criminality but also the power of white innocence in relation to a racialized threat that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century: the active shooting.