Privilege in a Police Car: The Story of my Unresolved Ride-Along

This paper focuses on the events of a Friday evening in the winter of 2012 wherein I went on a police "ride-along" and accompanied a police officer as he went through the normal duties of his shift in a medium-sized city in the Pacific Northwest. During our time together, the officer arrested a 16-year old boy, and had him admitted to the local juvenile detention center. The officer also arrested an adult male who, during the process of being arrested, injured the officer such that the officer required medical attention. Additionally, I witnessed another officer performing an analysis of a suspected illegal substance. Drawing from critical autoethnographic methods, this paper details the events of the evening from my first-person perspective and is threaded with analyses of various facets of my privilege that emerged. The nagging questions that grew from these recognitions of unearned privilege are posed both to myself (as author) and also to readers, with the invitation to ponder the issues with me. Keywords: Autoethnography, Privilege, Police, Ride-AlongWithin my professional practice as a teacher educator, I strive to act with fealty to supporting the future teachers in my classes in adopting the most critical and proactive counter-hegemonic stances possible (Apple, 2004). To this end, students in my courses are asked to move through and then beyond engagement in "courageous conversations" (Singleton & Linton, 2005) and "cultural plunges" (Houser, 2008), and to make themselves vulnerable, naming unwarranted privileges, challenging injustice, and speaking in solidarity with (but never for) the oppressed. Duncan-Andrade (2010) describes this by stating, "We must be willing to stand boldly in solidarity with our communities, sharing the burden of underserved suffering. We cannot treat our students as "other people's children" - their pain is our pain" (para. 1).While including a concentrated focus on race, class, and gender, pre-service teachers entering my multicultural education course are asked to step outside this familiar "other-ness" canon (Gorski, 2008) and stretch it to include topics that may be less comfortable and more taboo. In doing so, they take on the role of researchers and examine their own conceptions of difference, and explore how these may shape their work as educators. Focusing on the metaphorical pressure-points that cause psychological discomfort, my students are asked to examine the origins of their beliefs about what they consider "normal" and to attempt to parse about where those ideas came from.In working to shift the margins of comfort, the student-researchers in my course are asked to reflect upon their own constructions of borders and their reactions to trespass, and to consider the ways they, as future educators, may have already been primed to "defend" certain boundaries (Anzaldua, 1987). These acts of perceived trespass and defense are then problematized, and examined not with the binary framework of normal/ different, but rather, contextualized in family, community and cultural belief systems (Marshall & Toohey, 2010). Students are urged to identify, consider and create shades of gray, looking for personal, fine-grained "tipping points" where something moves from good to bad, acceptable to unacceptable, friendly to foul-and then to consider why those points exist and how they came into being.Further exploring this tension around identifying "normal," students in the course are asked to examine the power relationships they participate in, and how these hierarchical relationships were established and are maintained (Vaandering, 2010). Building from this thinking and theorizing, students are asked to "warp the lens" to attempt novel views of their roles as educators in ways that may "move the margins" of normal and different in their classroom communities (Ullucci & Battey, 2011).Informed by critical theory, this work intends to be an effort which, "recognizes power-that seeks in its analyses to plumb the archaeology of taken-for-granted perspectives to understand how unjust and oppressive social conditions came to be reified as historical "givens" (Cannella & Lincoln, 2012, p. …