What do we study when we study the police? The corpus of policing ethnographies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries suggests that when we study the police, we study the peculiar organization of the dirty work of violence within the confines of democratic society; the unique organizational prerogatives, worldviews, and cultures attached to the state mandate of order maintenance and social control; the practical mechanisms by which one “becomes” a police officer; how police officers manage themselves vis-à-vis the public; and, finally, how policing does, or does not, reflect and reproduce broader identities and inequalities with respect to race, class, gender, sexuality, and other lines of difference. This scholarship reveals that ethnography is not merely a method of data collection; it is also an approach to data analysis that emphasizes the meaning-making mechanisms by which social worlds come to be reproduced and, at times, resisted. (Accordingly, I consider a range of methods—including observation and interviews—to be ethnographic by virtue of data analysis.)
Ethnography also implies a particular understanding of the self as researcher; the policing scholar Peter Kraska,1 for example, notes that his own engagement in paramilitary policing forced him to edge up to the limits of his own comfort with his masculine sense of self. He writes frankly about the raw enjoyment he vicariously experienced by virtue of participating in a particular police culture. Other ethnographers vary to the extent that they trouble, versus trade on, the context of policing as a risky endeavor for an academic to engage and immerse oneself in. The untroubled version of this presentation of the ethnographic self in the context of policing studies resonates with what Victor Rios calls “cowboy ethnography”: the tendency for ethnographers to treat their field sites as exotic spaces in which to excavate subtle and salacious “truths” that are hard won by virtue of the ethnographer’s unique grit and perspicacity.2 This framing of ethnography as a feat in which the highly trained and educated researcher enters an unfamiliar realm draws parallels between the ethnographic endeavor and the colonial impulse, whereby the heroism of ethnography is really the entitlement to exploitation. Indeed, as Rios and others note, the ethnographer often structurally occupies a privileged position vis-à-vis those whom the ethnographer studies; the ethnographer (and the ethnographer’s career) is also the one most likely to benefit, while study participants may even be harmed by the ethnographer’s “findings,” or subsequent appropriations thereof. Policing ethnographers hint of cowboy ethnography in the heroic, uncanny, risky, and even dangerous “tales from the field” they tell, but with a twist: the power differential between police and the people who study police is never clear, but it is most certainly not reducible to the prototypical cowboy ethnography involving the white, middle-class, educated suburbanite going “native” in a poor community of color.
As that white, middle-class, educated suburbanite, I found that my own encounters with police could not be pigeonholed into the schematics that sociologists typically use to outline researcher positionality vis-à-vis research subjects. In some cases, I found myself indeed facing interviewees who wielded profound power, especially as they did exactly what I asked them to do: speak frankly about the intersection of guns and policing. I recall one chief in particular who, during an interview, explicitly and cruelly disparaged people killed by the police and their families; it was unusually brash and disrespectful compared to every other chief I had interviewed. In a split second, I had to decide whether to push and probe, and how far, or to simply let the comments hang in the air, juggling the need to maintain rapport, maintain the data-collection process, and—most immediately—preserve my own composure, especially of my often overly expressive face. Other times, though, it was not me but my interviewee who had to fight the urge to squirm. If many police chiefs wielded the social and structural power to say what they wanted and how they wanted to say it and had practice doing so as the public face of their departments, a handful of chiefs seemed uneasy, not so much with the subject content but with the prospect of speaking about their life’s work. These were generally chiefs in smaller, more remote, and more insular towns, far removed from the concerns of the so-called big-city chiefs. They had less practice in interacting with the public; they often became a chief not because they had long aspired to be one but because the vacancy was open and they could competently fill it; they disliked the politics of policing. Other chiefs, nevertheless, clearly relished talking to me because of the politics; through their responses to my questions, these chiefs explicitly and implicitly recruited me to the project of expanding gun rights, of restricting gun access, or—especially in California—of identifying the hypocrisy of lawmakers. And finally, for a handful of chiefs, I was neither a threat nor an opportunity—I was simply an irritation; I recall one chief in particular who buried his head in paperwork as I asked him questions, signing documents as he blurted out pithy responses. Rather than a researcher or a writer, I was just another member of the public, spreading police resources thin by posing yet another request for service.
The broader conversations in sociology about researcher positionality tend to underplay these more nuanced power dynamics that unravel in the context of data collection—as do human ethics review boards through which this project was vetted at the University of Toronto, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Arizona. In the case of human ethics review boards, the project’s approval required that I neither record police nor take signatures nor collect any identifiable data that could link data to individual chiefs. In addition to anonymizing biographical details that chiefs provided, I reminded them as part of the informed consent process that they could and should be guarded with any details that could identify them. I write “reminded” here instead of “informed” (as in “informed consent”) because police are almost always aware that they speak to the public at their own discretion, as are they aware of the stakes of speaking to the public, especially during the time period (2014–2017) in which these interviews were conducted. Indeed, in stark contrast to the research subject imagined by human ethics boards as deeply unaware of the risks (and, at times, rewards) of research participation, chiefs generally well understood what they were getting into. Interestingly, it was in the state where police had the most political power3—California—that police were most inquisitive with regard to me, my motivations, and my research project. One chief, I recall, participated only after I assured him that the research was not funded by George Soros or his ilk. Other California chiefs opened the interview by remarking on the vulnerability that they were exposing themselves to by virtue of talking to me—a seemingly absent concern in Arizona and Michigan. To the extent that California is popularly understood as a highly politicized “lawsuit capital of the country” (as one chief noted) and that chiefs I interviewed largely spoke out against the liberal consensus in the state, they were absolutely justified in their concerns. Power, risk, vulnerability—these are not axes that can be anticipated before research starts (as human ethics boards assume), nor could they be homogenized into a binary relationship between the researcher and her subjects (as even critics of cowboy ethnography often assume).
Although police ethnographers have provided a wealth of insight, especially on the racial dynamics of urban policing, they tend to focus on large, urban police departments that are not representative of the vast majority of police departments, which are located in small or medium-sized rural and suburban areas. My choice to engage in a variety of methods conducive to ethnographic analysis—in-depth reading of newspaper accounts and other media related to the National Rifle Association’s engagement with law enforcement; in-depth interviews with police chiefs in Arizona, California, and Michigan; and observations of gun boards in Michigan—reflects my attention to how meanings about gun violence, gun politics, gun policy, and gun law enforcement are forged in tandem, as well as a choice to capture the rich variations within and across different policing contexts within the United States.
Regarding my observations of gun licensing procedures, I was limited in terms of data availability; gun records are generally sealed from Freedom of Information Act requests, and most gun licensing decisions happen behind closed doors, beyond the purview of the public. Michigan’s gun board system—though now defunct—provided a crucial opportunity while it existed to understand not just what police thought but also what they did with respect to staking out the boundaries of legitimate violence in the form of lawfully carried guns. To collect data, I attended meetings of two county-level gun boards in Metro Detroit for five months in 2014. During my research, Wayne County met twice a month for morning and afternoon sessions; Oakland County met once a month for a morning session. As notetaking was not disruptive, I wrote detailed synopses of each case, including the demographics of the prospective licensee (race, gender, age); the initial sanction (denial, suspension, or revocation); the reason the claimant was called to the gun board (e.g., a disqualifying arrest, conviction, or referral); the conversation between gun board members and the claimant; and the outcome (approval, denial, suspension, revocation, or pending/reschedule). I compiled a database of 936 cases (106 from Oakland, 830 from Wayne) through my observations, treating each individual called before a gun board as a separate case. Most cases were resolved within minutes, depending on the presentation of proper paperwork and the eagerness of administrators to accelerate decisions, but some cases lasted as long as thirty minutes. I categorized the sanctions attached to these cases according to the emergent analytical themes: procedural pains; denials/threat of denial; and arrest/threat of arrest. See table 1.
The two county-level gun boards I studied served different populations: an urban, economically depressed area, which includes Detroit, that is disproportionately poor and African American (Wayne County) and a wealthier, whiter suburb (Oakland County). Nevertheless, gun carrying is common in both Wayne County and Oakland County. In these two counties, African Americans are issued concealed pistol licenses at rates slightly higher than their population rates, based on 2013 CPL data obtained from the Michigan State Police. However, even accounting for this slight increase in rates, African Americans still comprised a disproportionate number of claimants called to gun board. See table 2. Note that though the population of Wayne County was about 1.5 times that of Oakland County, about eight times the number of cases were processed at the Wayne County gun board meetings. Because people are called to gun board because of contact with the criminal justice system, this suggests Wayne County residents’ greater exposure to the criminal justice system.
|
TABLE 1. Gun Board Cases by Analytical Theme |
||||
|
Total Cases |
Procedural Pains (% of Cases) |
Denial / Threat of Denial (% of Cases) |
Arrest / Threat of Arrest (% of Cases) |
|
|
Wayne County |
830 |
340 (41%) |
75 (9%) |
24 (3%) |
|
Oakland County |
106 |
40 (38%) |
17 (16%) |
1 (1%) |
|
TABLE 2. African American Representation at Gun Board Cases |
||
|
Wayne County |
Oakland County |
|
|
African American % of Population |
40 |
14.4 |
|
African American % of Issued Gun Licenses (2013 MSP data) |
43 |
21 |
|
African American % of Those Called to Gun Board (2014 observational data) |
72 |
58 |
If gun board observations zeroed in on one specific context (Metro Detroit), interviews with police chiefs allowed me insight into a diversity of jurisdictions across three states. Although most studies of policing tend to focus on one, or a handful, of jurisdictions, this research engages chiefs across more than six dozen jurisdictions, peeling away at the social reality that most police departments do not look like the kinds of departments featured in most ethnographic studies of policing. To do so, however, I would not be able to engage in the preferred method for qualitatively studying police (that is, embedded ethnography) but, instead, would have to rely on a different method: in-depth interviews. In some ways, my choice in research methods no doubt reflected the practical exigencies of my own research objectives.
That said, interviews were not chosen simply for their practical convenience. Interviews, as the sociologist Allison Pugh has argued,4 allow researchers to tap into emotional valences, social anxieties, and wrought expectations in ways that neither participant observation nor survey methods facilitate. Because interviews permit researchers to understand not just how research subjects feel but also “how it feels to feel that way,”5 interviews give researchers a glimpse into the “emotional landscape” (to use Pugh’s term) in which a given culture is emboldened, bent, and sometimes broken by those for whom culture does work. It matters not just to recognize that police cope with conflicting cultural demands with respect their objectives and prerogatives as police—including “dueling”6 racial frames that animate those demands, objectives, and prerogatives. It also matters how they coped—for example, that police conjure up emotions of domination, thrill, and adventure in some contexts (i.e., urban gun violence) but emotions of shame, devastation, and inadequacy in others (i.e., active shooters). Interviews allowed me a window—always framed and thus always partial—into how police feel as they navigate these imaginaries and how these imaginaries, in turn, are mobilized to reproduce (and at times resist) the conditions that fuel the conflicts police face.
Public law enforcement agencies are complex organizations. I chose to interview those at the top of these organizations: police chiefs. These are people within law enforcement who typically have decades of policing experience as well as unique insight into policy implementation as both managers and frontline workers. Their years of experience allowed me to examine how dramatic changes in gun policy over the past several decades have affected police. Furthermore, chiefs must interact with the public, especially on issues such as the use of force, and thus are illuminating interview subjects with regard to the popular justificatory narratives regarding gun policy, gun politics, and gun violence.
The interviews with police chiefs took place from 2014 to 2017 in Arizona (2017), California (2015–2016), and Michigan (2014–2015), a period when issues of police use of lethal force became increasingly salient as a public issue. See tables 3, 4, and 5 for the geographic breakdown of sampled jurisdictions. Across all three states, the modal police chief was an older white man who had decades of police experience (see table 6). Note also that one in four police chiefs nationwide are members of the NRA,7 whereas in my data, roughly one in six California and Michigan chiefs and one in three Arizona chiefs are members. These figures undercount support for the NRA, however; many more chiefs expressed support for the NRA (e.g., “I’m not a member of the NRA, but I think they do a lot in terms of education of kids about gun safety, education about hunting”). At the same time, NRA members also cited grievances and/or lukewarm feelings about the organization (“I’m a member of the NRA.… And I don’t support everything they do, obviously, but I join them because I’m against the slippery slope” or “I’m not a big NRA guy, but I had to join to teach their courses”).
|
TABLE 3. Geographic Breakdown of Interviewee Jurisdictions in Michigan (N = 23) |
|
|
Greater Detroit Area |
35% |
|
Greater Lansing Area |
22% |
|
Western Michigan |
30% |
|
Northwestern Michigan |
13% |
|
TABLE 4. Geographic Breakdown of Interviewee Jurisdictions in California (N = 36) |
|
|
Bay Area |
19% |
|
Greater Los Angeles Area |
33% |
|
Inland Empire |
14% |
|
Central Valley |
33% |
|
TABLE 5. Geographic Breakdown of Interviewee Jurisdictions in Arizona (N = 20) |
|
|
Greater Tucson Area |
15% |
|
Greater Phoenix Area |
15% |
|
Greater Prescott Area |
20% |
|
Northern Arizona |
25% |
|
Southern Arizona |
25% |
|
TABLE 6. Chief Demographics by State |
||||||
|
State |
% Male |
% White |
Average Age |
|||
|
Arizona |
95 |
95 |
52 |
|||
|
California |
97 |
86 |
53 |
|||
|
Michigan |
96 |
91 |
55 |
|||
In California, there are more than three hundred jurisdictions; I focused on jurisdictions from San Diego County in the south to Sacramento County in the north. In Arizona and Michigan (Lower Peninsula), because there are fewer jurisdictions, I contacted every public law enforcement agency with publicly available contact information. This resulted in a total sample of 20 Arizona chiefs (of 66 Arizona agencies contacted; 30 percent response rate); 23 Michigan chiefs (of 104 Michigan agencies contacted; 22 percent response rate); and 36 California chiefs (of 208 jurisdictions contacted; 17 percent response rate). I rarely received an explicit decline from police chiefs who did not participate in the study; therefore, I have no way of knowing whether chiefs received information about the study and decided against participating or whether my initial contact was screened and/or deleted (in many jurisdictions, the contact method was a generic police contact email or online form). Although the chiefs I interviewed hailed from diverse jurisdictions, my sample likely skewed toward jurisdictions that had a greater emphasis on community policing because such jurisdictions are more likely to have an online presence, provide a variety of ways of contacting police, actively monitor community input and contact, and be responsive to community communication. (For that matter, the high response rate in Arizona may very well reflect a broader, state-level cultural emphasis on police-community relationships as compared to the more professionalized police forces in states like California.) Interviewees’ jurisdictions were also probably more likely to be, if not resource-rich, at least not resource-strapped; while I interviewed chiefs in many smaller and less resourced jurisdictions, at the very least, police chiefs needed the resource of time to meet with me. Lastly, my interviews likely skewed away from jurisdictions experiencing scandal or public relations crisis; while I did not contact chiefs who were currently under investigation, I had no way of knowing the internal politics of jurisdictions.8
As compared to survey methods and observation, interviews allowed police chiefs to frame their own politics of guns—whether private or public guns. Interviews were semi-structured to cover a consistent range of topics, allow for probing, and enable interviewees to direct the interview as warranted. Topics focused on policing background, experiences with violence (as victims and perpetrators), attitudes on and experiences with enforcing gun regulation, and opinions on gun policy measures (see appendix C for the interview guide). I gave each chief the choice of interview location; all but two chose to meet at their respective headquarters. Interviews lasted between thirty minutes and two hours.
As with all data, interview data are shaped by the context in which they are gathered. My presence and positionality, as well as the research setting, shaped how police chiefs talked about guns to me. At times, police chiefs imputed identification with me and my aims by alluding to my middle-class identity and my presumed affiliations with either side of the gun debate. Occasionally, police skirted on the edge of flirting, conveniently conjuring up examples that would put me in the role of girlfriend. Likely, my gender reduced any perceived threat I might pose to these men, but my race and class status aligned with the power structure—indeed, as a white woman in her early and mid-30s, I was the ideal victim on whose behalf projects of police protection are often enabled. Sitting at this particular juncture likely enhanced my ability to talk to largely “law-and-order” conservative men. But I was also aided by another set of factors: my previous research on guns gave me broad knowledge not just about policing and gun law enforcement but also about firearms and gun culture, and the conservative sensibilities that the latter entails. Somewhat unexpectedly—as I had not anticipated the deep overlap in sensibilities between police chiefs and concealed gun carriers—I pivoted my previous expertise on gun carriers to this new interview setting. Given that I am not a member of the law enforcement community, I relied on my knowledge about firearms, firearms law, and gun politics to establish rapport with interviewees. At times, this meant engaging in small talk regarding gun mechanics and self-defense techniques to demonstrate that I wasn’t an outsider to the world of firearms; at other times, it meant referencing examples from my previous research on gun carriers to show that I understood the subtleties of gun law. Needless to say, I had much to learn from the police chiefs I interviewed, and thus I also built up my ability to probe over the course of my research, reviewing and recoding interviews throughout the process to identify and pursue emergent patterns.
It is tempting to present my interview skills as uniquely capable of collecting the kind of data I was able to obtain for this project. In some cases, I know that interviewees talked to and encouraged one another to talk to me—a feather in my cap that I was effectively interviewing them. At the same time, most of my interviews came from contacting prospective interviewees through publicly available contact information; though many surely searched the Internet for my online footprint, few had any reason to talk to me other than interest in the project. For that reason, I believe that the primary skill I brought as an interviewer wasn’t my deftness in posing questions about guns, gun policy, and gun politics to police—it was that I had even bothered to ask these questions in the first place. Furthermore, despite an abiding liberal presumption—at least as I’ve seen among sociologists—that Americans don’t or won’t talk bluntly about “sensitive” topics such as race, police (and, in my experience, Americans more generally) are rather open about their attitudes on a wide variety of topics.9
My positionality shaped not only how I served as a collector of data; it also shaped my analysis process. I take a perhaps uniquely ambivalent view on the American project of guns, gun culture, and gun politics. On the one hand, I am disgusted by the heinous distribution of gun violence in the United States: the nearly 40,000 gun deaths that occur annually, and the attempts of some gun advocates to discount nearly 24,000 (according to the CDC data for 2017) of these as suicide (read: not gun crime) and to discount the nearly fifteen-fold greater risk10 of gun homicide victimization for black men as compared to white men as “black-on-black crime” (read: not “our” problem); the prevalence (if dramatically reduced over the past hundred years) of accidental or negligent shootings alongside some prosecutors’ disparate readiness to criminally charge children of color and their parents for these acts; and the legalization, institutionalization, and normalization of justifiable homicide, especially in the form of Stand Your Ground laws that have been shown to increase the likelihood that alleged defensive shootings involving black victims will be deemed justifiable as compared to those involving white victims.11 On the other hand, I am well aware that people must navigate social contexts not of their choosing. Unlike those tenured professors in academia who have one of the few remaining stable and secure jobs in an economy now defined by flexibility (if you are an apologist) and precariousness (if you are a realist), most Americans do not live in the proverbial gated community—or their gates are getting very, very rusty. Attempting to navigate their own personal realities of vulnerability, whether that be based in criminological, social, political, economic, or other kinds of insecurities, many Americans have made a calculated decision to include guns in their lives as a stopgap for the failure of other security apparatuses such as police. They recognize that having a gun entails certain risks—but so does not having a gun. And for many Americans, the political valence of guns—their association, for example, with white supremacy, police violence, and so forth—is crowded out by the personal valence of security they provide and the alternative meanings that are also associated with guns. If we look over the course of American history, they are not wrong: while guns have emboldened white supremacists and empowered projects of racial cleansing, guns have also provided a modicum of security, political power, and civic dignity to the most disenfranchised Americans in the form of the negro militias, the Deacons for Defense, the Black Panthers, and other groups. As Maj Toure, an African American and self-proclaimed “black guns matter” activist, notes of the ambivalence of the Second Amendment: “I don’t give a f*** who they meant it for. It’s mine now.”12
Accordingly, I am aware (and readers should be aware, too) that as with any analysis, my personal background, my academic training, and my social standing have shaped my ability—sometimes as binoculars, sometimes as blinders—to cull contradictions, identify patterns, and suss out linkages across the micro-, meso-, and macro-level social dynamics shaping the intersection of the politics of the police and the politics of guns. During my data analysis for this book, I took an abductive approach that iteratively moved me through, and back to, multiple literatures that ranged from directly to obliquely related to my central research questions. This happened both while I was “in the field” (whether that meant sitting in a police chief’s office or observing gun licensing proceedings) and long after it. Likewise, I turned to trusted colleagues—particularly colleagues I knew would bring a different background, both intellectual and personal, to bear on this project—to identify blind spots, encourage me to refine an analysis further, or to abandon a line of inquiry altogether. As such, my research approach embraced a “sociological double-consciousness approach.” As the sociologists Victor Rios, Nikita Carney, and Jasmine Kelekay note, “The sociological double-consciousness approach urges researchers to acknowledge and operationalize our power-blindness and our implicit and explicit biases, and to embrace messy, kaleidoscopic data and experiences.”13
I began the data analysis process as many qualitative researchers do—with the assistance of qualitative data analysis software, in this case Atlas.ti. I deductively developed codes in tandem with the major themes of the interview guide for interview data (e.g., “gun carry”; “gun bans”; and so forth) and with respect to major existing theories related to gun ownership, policing, and race for both interview and gun board observation data. Nevertheless, I largely developed my codebook based on coding and recoding of my data, adding codes to reflect empirically derived themes. Furthermore, my analysis approach reflected the different kinds of qualitative data I used in this study; for the nearly one thousand gun board cases I analyzed, it was easier to develop clear-cut categorizations of different kinds of cases based on violation, demographics of the claimants, and outcomes. For this reason, I relied more on quantitative descriptors when presenting these data as compared to the interview data. Alternatively, the seventy-nine chiefs I interviewed across three states provided an empirically robust window into the politics of guns from the perspective of police, but this was a theoretically motivated, rather than empirically representative, sample of police chiefs. Accordingly, I relied more heavily on qualitative descriptors as compared to my discussion of gun board data to emphasize the processes and patterns in meaning-making that characterized the multiple ways that police chiefs wrestled with the intersection of guns and policing.
While I produced a neat if elaborate coding scheme that helped me to arrange data points into a coherent, book-length argument, I became increasingly aware of the reality that any particular sociological point of mine was almost always eclipsed by the singularity of any particular data point—especially with regard to the interview data. After all, each of us contains multitudes—even, perhaps especially, the police chiefs who spend much of their time distilling the complexities of policing for both their agencies and the outside world.
As I grappled with what this meant for data analysis, I decided to attend a creative writing workshop, largely with the intent of enhancing my writing techniques. But as that workshop delved deeper into questions of narrative, tone, and mood, I grew increasingly aware of the God Trick—to use the feminist theorist Donna Haraway’s term14—often embedded in ethnographic writing, or what the policing ethnographer John Van Maanen labels the realist tone.15 I came to appreciate that rather than merely allowing the reader into an unfamiliar world, ethnographic writing just as much serves to construct the author as intellectual—such that the narrative objective is often not just about providing a particular experience for the reader; it is also about advancing the career goals of the author by consolidating her “voice” as an intellectual (hence the professional tragedy that academics may feel compelled to make decisions about their first books based on tenure expectations rather than intellectual ingenuity).
This creative writing workshop also provided the tools to escape this conundrum. It gave me a different approach to thinking about the analytical process, one in which I could pause to prioritize the narrative voice of respondents before leveling up that voice into my own analysis. I integrated a new stage into my data analysis process; after coding and writing analytical memos about major themes and trends within the coded data, I opted to write composite memos that illustrated—based on key data, but in narrativized, composite form—the core dynamics I was uncovering in my analysis. Doing so allowed me an opportunity to play with different narrative voices and to inhabit the worldviews of interviewees in a different way. It allowed me to differently imagine myself as author; in embracing this move, my goal was not simply to “give voice” to my research participants but also to force myself to keep coming back to the social world they inhabited. These memos helped ensure that my analysis would not pull the data “off the rails” of the social realities I intended to capture.
To illustrate, then, I close this methodological appendix with three of these memos: one on gun militarism, one on gun populism, and one on police reform. If abductive analysis places emphasis on theoretically resolving contradictions and ambiguities within data as a means of generating sociological insight, then I found that these narrative memos provided a practical means of wrestling with these contradictions and ambiguities, forcing me to sit with them rather than “jump the gun” to analytical resolution. To be clear: I wrote these memos as evocative, messy, deeply ambivalent—with the goal not of “resolving” them through a neat sociological analysis but by providing space to sit with the discomfort that these data necessarily pose. They are composites of multiple chiefs, rather than reflecting a single research subject or interviewee. As such, these memos harness the power of fiction in the service of data analysis. As envisioned by the sociologists Josh Page and Phil Goodman, “Fiction is suffused with disruptive potential; it can force us to question assumptions that affect how we elicit and interpret research subjects’ stories.”16 Sociologists, by virtue of the work they do, tend to cut up social lives and social worlds into discrete data points, but narrativizing, and renarrativizing, these data points provide a crucial means to reckon with the inherent discomfort of the sociological enterprise in the hopes of forging a more genuine sociology.
On Gun Militarism: Discarded Lives
Chief Richardson grew up in a house of strict discipline. He knew never to touch his father’s gun, let alone play with it. He rode dirt bikes. He played in the woods. He watched good old spaghetti Westerns and the early cop shows, like Adam-12. He still liked the drama of good and evil, but he hated the gratuitous violence. He doesn’t like to watch a whole lot of television anymore.
After all, he had spent enough years working in the high-crime, high-minority town, and he had spent many years teaching in the police academy. He found the change palpable, especially over the last few years. So much killing. Is it violent video games? Social media? These days, people don’t understand that guns kill. They think guns are cool, that you pick one up, shoot off a few rounds, and it’s like a movie. They don’t realize that this is permanent. This isn’t a video game, where you can kill an alien 100 times, and then you regenerate.
He felt older than the passing years, and had a harder and harder time understanding the people he ran into on the job, the suspects, the parents, the kids. He could even see it in the younger police recruits who are used to video-game violence: the kids watch the media that glorifies guns, they play the video games, and they all want to have toy guns, BB guns, air softs. And sometimes even real guns, too. That’s why he wanted to bring back the most severe punishments, across the board, for anything involving a gun to teach these damn kids a lesson.
But because he knew he was dealing with kids who didn’t know any better, sometimes he managed to offer some fatherly—stern fatherly—compassion. After all, he had responded recently to a weapons call. Someone saw a weapon—a brandished weapon. The caller didn’t realize that it was just thirteen-year-olds, three African American kids, playing. He arrived on the scene, and two of the boys ran off, leaving one of the boys frozen in step, clutching the gun in his hands. Deer in the Headlights. The boy tried to turn toward the chief, tried to mouth words, tried to get something to come out that was audible, but the boy was just too stunned. And the chief sensed this. So he tried to jolt him back to life in the best way he knew: “One more step, and I’m going to drop you.” The chief liked to remind himself that he could have, and he told himself he would have been in the right, to shoot. But he didn’t have to; the boy let go of the gun.
His dilemma came down to this: how do we get the kid who sees guns as so glamorous, and fun, and cool to not grow up to be a piece of crap who is threatening people’s lives?
His very first time in court was for an arraignment for a kid who had been charged with murder in the second degree. For the second time. It took a few minutes for the judge to understand that this was his second trial for second-degree murder in less than a year because the kid got probation. The shock of that moment in court still stunned him. Over time, he only became surer of it: those people need to go away. They need to be gone. If we are not going to incapacitate those people, what is the point of our prison system? As far as he could tell, there was only one answer: zero tolerance for a gun that crosses the line, and truth in sentencing.
He felt like his whole career was learning a lesson over, and over, and over that he still couldn’t totally accept: the capacity of so many people to have such a total disregard for the value of life, and the incapacity of the criminal justice system to do much at all about it.
On Gun Populism: Shame on Us
Though the sting had dulled over the years, the snap of Chief Clarkson’s gun in his holster still pricked him with failure.
He wasn’t directly involved. As luck would have it, the tragedy had just barely missed him: he was working in Colorado at the time, and had friends who were there, but his agency hadn’t been part of the response that day. He hadn’t personally secured the exterior of the suddenly infamous high school. He hadn’t waited for a specialized unit, one that everyone was sure had specifically trained for these kinds of events (though he hated calling them “events”), one that would certainly minimize the foul scene playing out in the mind of every parent who waited at the caution tape staked out in the muddy April soil. He hadn’t had to explain to these parents that the police knew how to handle what was going on, that they were trained to negotiate in these kinds of circumstances, and that the experts would do their jobs. He hadn’t had to stand there, he hadn’t had to hear the kids screaming, and he hadn’t had to wonder at that visceral moment whether police really knew what they were doing.
Back then, he was Officer Clarkson, not Chief Clarkson. At that early point in his career, he hadn’t trained other officers, he hadn’t been on SWAT, and he certainly hadn’t had a hand in directing his agency’s policy on responses to shooting massacres. That would all come later.
Looking back on that April day, though, Clarkson can’t help but kick himself. He knew the protocol wasn’t right. They all knew it wasn’t right. And they all felt the same sense of failure, of having failed society, because they let all those kids down.
Twenty years later, he still couldn’t shake the feeling of stinging failure.
That sting had followed him, and probably made him more apprehensive than he otherwise would be about “following the rules” when he got tested in the field. He hadn’t had the chance to make a whole lot of life-or-death decisions while on the force—his entire career had been spent in affluent suburban areas and sleepy rural towns, the kinds of places where everyone knows there just isn’t a whole lot of violence. Normal places with normal people. Well, maybe not so normal. He’d never look at a place as normal again, not after Columbine, then Virginia Tech, then Aurora, then Sandy Hook, then Orlando, then San Bernardino.
Despite the appearance of complacency that he had developed over his years of policing sleepy suburbs and small towns, he had reckoned with the fact that there is a time, a place, and a reason to shoot first: and that time was April 20, 1999; that place was Columbine High School; and that reason was the unshakable weight of having contributed to the screaming, the bleeding, the dying, all because you were waiting for someone else to arrive. That’s no time to sit around and “secure the area.” He was done with passing responsibility on to someone else. He felt, they all felt, like failures—and that’s because they were failures.
So he found it offensive, intolerable, that some people thought they could fix this just with gun control. They let society down. They were the ones who failed. Background checks were not useless, not at all, and it’s true that the teachers, the counselors, and even the parents, too, could have done something to prevent all of this. But if it wasn’t guns, it would have been bombs. Or cars. Or something else. Look at France! And whatever that was, the police—not the parents, not the teachers, not the counselors, not even the gun carriers, although he was happy to have their help if he needed it—were really the only ones absolutely obligated to do something. Because when it came right down to it, he knew that police are the only first responders, the only ones responsible for those casualties counts. That’s not to say police can save everyone. But if police abdicate their responsibility to those kids, those screaming, bleeding, dying kids in Columbine, in Sandy Hook, or in who-knows-where-next?
A police officer can’t change the world, but he can carry his gun. And that’s why he never left home without it.
On Reform: At the Pinnacle of Privilege
Chief Williams started at the beginning. His beginning.
As he told it, his dad was a bit of a crook—he had to move around because his dad had cheated the wrong people. They were poor. They shared flats with other families, attending schools where there was a lot of poverty. His parents, poor and white, quite frankly did not have the luxury of thinking themselves to be superior to anyone.
But then they all moved to Northern California, and suddenly he went from a school in a poor black neighborhood to a bubble. He was one of the poorest kids there, and as soon as he could, he got a job so that he could buy a sweater, a shirt, and pants to look like the other kids. And as soon as he could do it again, he did. That’s when he started realizing: it isn’t about your color. It’s about what happened to you because of your color.
When he came of age in the late 1960s, he didn’t have much to set himself up for life—a driver’s license and a high school diploma. He turned to public law enforcement because it was the best pay and best benefits he could find. But even so, he realized a profound truth: he was at the pinnacle of privilege. I was a twenty-one-year-old white male. What a lucky deal! So what about the kid whose parents took him across the border and he’s “illegal” here? What about the black kid?
That’s why he’s not so interested in changing the law. Changing the law is just changing the rules. He thinks we need to do something different: we need to change the game, and change who gets to play. He doesn’t care about drugs; he thinks that all of that just echoes the Puritans. He’s sure that we should be rehabilitating people. But not just that. We need to start understanding people. We should be asking them who they are, where they come from, what they are about. And we should be doing this even for violent offenders. He’s especially worried about the young people—the people, as he sees it, who are simply not yet in control of their destiny, but who have bad influences that bring them into crime.
He ponders: If I was king and I wanted to affect crime, I would stop thinking about prisons. I would go to Oakland, and spend a gazillion dollars. For at least two generations. I’d get those kids a nutritious breakfast. Then I’d buy them lunch. Then I’d have them do after-school programs. Then I’d get them dinner. Then I’d take them safely home. I’d show them the way out. You and I cannot imagine what it is like to be a nine- or ten-year-old, scared to go to school because there might be drive-bys. I would give them scholarships. I would do whatever I could to give them the stability that they need.
It’s do-able, he insists, but you’d have to do it for a few generations. He’s aware, though, that people don’t follow through. We have no will. People just don’t get it. And the cops don’t get it, either. He thinks about the Oakland Police Department: I strongly believe that part of the training in Oakland—or anywhere else, for that matter—should be immersion with black families. These new recruits should eat dinner with them. Get immersed. And if you can’t do that—fine. You just won’t be hired.
Or how about this: you tell your new recruits to walk to a certain address, say, the No Tell Motel. And there you’ll find a panel of black people, just everyday people, who talk to you, who feel you out, who figure out what kind of officer you might become. And sure, you could do it with panels of Asians, Hispanics. Even white people—but they’d have to be at the Marriott! Or how about you have a big ball, and you invite your average residents. Including the homeless guy hanging out in front of the hotel. You get everyone in a room, and you parade the new officers on the stage, and everyone can vote, and that’s how the hiring decision can happen! I’m riffing here, but if you want to change anything, you have to change hiring. Gun laws are nothing compared to that.
He couldn’t care less about gun laws as compared to getting officers to just listen to people. Talk to them. Go door to door—and, sure, it might freak out people to have police officers at their door asking questions. But he’s not doing it for those people. He’s doing it for the officers, so they can see that not everyone who lives in a particular area or looks a certain way is a criminal.
We don’t all live life according to the same fee schedule.
It was his warning for anyone willing to listen.