How Things Fall Apart: Race, Gender, and Suspicion in Police-Civilian Encounters

Over the last couple of years, the Black Lives Matter movement has turned the nation’s attention to the too-often troubled relationship between black communities and the police. How do these encounters go so badly, so quickly? What role does race, gender, or bias play in these encounters? In this talk, Nikki Jones, associate professor of African-American Studies, University of California, Berkeley, draws on years of field research among Black residents in urban neighborhoods, along with interviews with police officers and findings from the analysis of video recordings of police-civilian encounters (both citizen video and video collected in collaboration with law enforcement) to illustrate how race, gender, and suspicion shape the earliest moments of police-civilian encounters.

Sponsored by the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement.