Race, Place, and Suburban Policing: Too Close for Comfort

The deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray at the hands of police officers along with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement have drawn national attention to recurring incidents of police brutality and violence. Largely, the media’s focus on the problem has been narrow, and our national conversations have been reductive; we blame these incidents of violence on the random behavior of ‘‘bad seed’’ individual police officers and suggest improved training to ameliorate the problem. Rarely do we scrutinize the persistent inequalities between white and black America at the root of these social problems. It is in this context that Andrea Boyles’ book Race, Place, and Suburban Policing is so timely. She argues that both race and placebased biases shape how black communities are policed, reflecting historical patterns of discrimination and domination. Pulling from two years of interactions and openended interviews with 30 adult residents of a low-income black community called Meacham Park, Boyles shows how racial segregation and place-based inequalities shaped community-police interactions and experiences. Meacham Park is a segregated black enclave located in suburban St. Louis. It is one of the oldest and last remaining suburban black settlements in the area and suffers from poverty, blight, and disadvantage. In 1991, Meacham Park was annexed by the neighboring white middle-class community of Kirkwood; as a result, police jurisdiction over Meacham Park transferred from St. Louis County to the City of Kirkwood. A central theme of this book is that policing of black communities intensifies as their proximity to white communities increases. Black residents of Meacham Park did not feel welcome in Kirkwood, and whites did not want to go to Meacham Park; so although they technically joined as one community, the racial divisions reinforced by decades of segregation and racial discrimination remained salient. In spite of the long and strained racial history, both communities largely supported annexation. Meacham Park residents hoped that through their incorporation with Kirkwood they would access some of the advantages that their affluent neighbors enjoyed, including improvements to infrastructure, increased police and fire protection, and job opportunities. But annexation proved to be a Faustian bargain for Meacham Park. Although some improvements were made, including updates to water and sewer lines, provisions such as job opportunities for Meacham Park residents never materialized. In the end, annexation turned out to be more of a land grab for Kirkwood than an investment in the economically marginal Meacham Park. Through eminent domain and developers pressuring residents to sell their homes, two-thirds of Meacham Park was transformed into the Kirkwood Commons, a shopping center accessible to Kirkwood residents. Meacham Park residents felt manipulated and disempowered by this loss of community space. ‘‘As a result, division and distrust became the mantra of relationships between some of the residents of Meacham Park, and even more so, between their neighborhood and the larger part of Kirkwood’’ (p. 76). Kirkwood’s annexation of Meacham Park brought the two communities into increased proximity with one another, which Boyles argues led to more intensified policing of Meacham Park residents. According to Boyles, this intensified policing was a form of social control: to very literally keep an impoverished minority population in their place and out of white, middle-class neighborhoods. One result of the spatial reorientation of Meacham Park was to limit access to the community to one point: one way in, one way out. This access point became the bottleneck where many interactions between police and Meacham Park residents took place. Meacham Park residents reported a litany of negative experiences with police, many of which were quite severe. Some respondents reported being followed by police without Reviews 727