Publication
California Law Review
Volume
112
Page
755
Year
2024
Abstract
The problems of racialized policing have come into renewed focus over the past decade. The advent of viral bystander videos has not only forced a popular confrontation with moments of both routine and extraordinary policing violence but also sparked protests, uprisings, and grassroots movements to challenge current practices in policing and determine what must be done to transform it. And yet, even after the mobilization of one of the largest racial justice movements in American history, transformative change remains elusive. This Article offers an answer to this puzzle by foregrounding White people’s collective relationship with policing and describing how this relationship colors current debates on how to best address policing’s racial disparities.
The Article asks: “How might we reconcile White people’s articulated commitments to racial equality with their continued acquiescence in and support for a system of policing that continues to produce such stark racial disparities?” I answer with the theory of legal endearment, which suggests that groups who benefit disproportionately from systems of legal power tend to develop critical attachments to the institutions that maintain such unequal arrangements. For White people, policing is one such institution. Their attachment to policing provides at least a partial explanation for why meaningful police reform has been difficult to achieve.
White people’s legal endearment results from four significant and interrelated aspects of their relationship to policing: the experiential, the symbolic, the structural, and the social. First, unlike many people of color, White people generally believe that police exist to “serve and protect” them because that is their general experience of policing. Second, whereas Black people and other people of color have had to worry about how policing positions them symbolically as criminally suspect and dangerous, White people generally have not. Instead, White people have largely benefited from their positive symbolic positioning as law-abiding and innocent. Third, policing responds to and reproduces a broader set of structural arrangements—including racially segregated spaces and social spheres—that have benefitted White people through the maintenance of White towns, suburbs, and neighborhoods, acting to racially circumscribe access to material resources. Finally, the multiple ways in which White people are socialized to ignore the material realities of race and to view race through the prism of colorblindness facilitates an affective relationship between White people and the police. By taking stock of these dimensions of White people’s relationship to policing and considering how these elements contribute to legal endearment with the police, we can begin to understand how legal endearment has operated as an unmarked barrier to achieving transformative police reforms.
Recommended Citation
Emmanuel Mauleón, Legal Endearment: An Unmarked Barrier to Transforming Policing, Public Safety, and Security, 112 California Law Review 755 (2024)
