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Recognition gaps and economies of worth in police encounters

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Abstract

This paper examines what arrested individuals expect from the police, and the moral grammars they rely on to evaluate police behavior. Drawing on interviews with recently arrested suspects in the Cleveland city jail, we analyze the moral grammars, or common worlds, that residents invoke to reflect on interactions with law enforcement. We find that respondents care about two different moral dimensions in policing. At one level, they want police to treat them with civility and politeness, and to respect their rights—thereby treating them equally with other residents in the city. Yet at a second level, they want police to show care and empathy for their local situation, and to recognize that policing the neighborhoods in which they live is different than policing other parts of the city. As a result, we find that residents who are arrested by the police deploy two orders of worth: a civic order, grounded in fairness, legal rules, equality, and civic belonging in the polity; and a domestic order, based on a politics of community and difference, emphasizing empathy, local knowledge, and personal experience. We demonstrate how individuals assess and test the moral promise of institutions to offer moral recognition, redress, and repair.

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Notes

  1. Each of these orders of worth articulates a legitimate, alternative, appeal to the common good, to morality, or to justice. While originally conceived of as exclusive of each other, recent work demonstrates that actors may deploy multiple justifications at once, particularly in situations of uncertainty (Stark 2009).

  2. This research was also reviewed and approved by our university ethics board.

  3. Approximately 20% of the detainees we approached declined to be interviewed. Some did so because we could not offer legal assistance, while others did so without declaring a reason.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Michèle Lamont, Lois Presser and Talia Shiff for their comments on this research, along with participants in the workshop on Law, Inequality, and the Politics of Moral Worth, held in May 2019 at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs as part of the Weatherhead Research Cluster on Comparative Inequality and Inclusion.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, 315 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON, M5S 0A7, Canada

    Ron Levi

  2. Department of Sociology, University of Alberta, 5-21 HM Tory Building, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2H4, Canada

    Holly Campeau

  3. Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto, 315 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON, M5S 0A7, Canada

    Todd Foglesong

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  1. Ron Levi
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Correspondence to Ron Levi.

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Levi, R., Campeau, H. & Foglesong, T. Recognition gaps and economies of worth in police encounters. Am J Cult Sociol 10, 87–109 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-020-00109-8

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