TCRG Brown Bag Speaker Series 

CHANGE OF MEETING: Our monthly series is reorganized, temporarily, as remote-attendees-only webinar events. Webinar details available on the Eventbrite page. 

Topic: “We’re still dying quicker than we can effect change”: #BlackLivesMatter and the Limits of Policing Reform. 

Decades of sociological research has documented the pervasive fear and distrust of police violence in race-class subjugated communities. More recently, the explosion of Black Lives Matter (BLM) activism pushed these issues into mainstream discourses, expanding white Americans’ awareness of police violence and propelling jurisdictions to adopt police reform measures, often modeled off the Taskforce on 21st Century Policing recommendations.

We draw on mixed-methods interviews with 112 residents in a set of low-income neighborhoods in Minneapolis, MN, in 2017-2019 to ask how people of color and white residents in a heavily policed community made sense of the social problem of racialized police violence and the reform measures enacted to respond to these concerns. We document that there was increasing racial convergence on defining the problem of racialized police violence, driven in part by BLM protests. However, this convergence on the problem did not translate into agreement on the solution. While residents largely supported 21st Century Policing style reforms, white residents more often denied or minimized the scale of change needed, while Black residents saw reforms as deeply inadequate for addressing anti-Black racism inside and outside policing. Our findings highlight the enduring role of race in shaping orientations towards the police and the stark limits of the 21st Century Policing reform model.

Featured Presenter:  Michelle Phelps, Ph.D., is Associate Professor at University of Minnesota’s Sociology Department and the Robina Institute.

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