University Calendar

Analyzing Racialized Discourses of  De/Escalation in a Traffic Stop
Sonia Das (New York University)
Discussant: Jason Williams (Justice Studies, MSU)

During a routine traffic stop in South Carolina in April 2018, a white police officer puts on his blue lights to pull over a car with missing tag lights, initiating the recording function on his dashboard camera. The officer also turns on the body camera affixed to the front of his uniform. Expressing suspicion about an elderly white man driving in a car with two young black men, the police officer questions the civilians to learn that the car belongs to one of the black men. He also discovers two rocks of crack cocaine near the passenger window and accuses one black man of trying to flick the drug out of the window, despite this action not being captured on body-cam or dash-cam. Although the white man insists he is an addict and that the crack belongs to him, the officer also pins the crack based on proximity to the black man whose interactions with the officer escalate and de-escalate, arresting him and the white man while ignoring the other black man who ingratiates himself with the officers. By focusing on the spoken language and gestures of eight participants – an elderly white and two young black male civilians and five white police officers – I analyze this interaction as part of a larger non-publicly disclosed corpus of video footage of more than four years of interactional data of police-civilian interactions released by traffic stop subjects to our research team. I identify patterns in the subtle and not so subtle signs that substantiate the racializing discourses which, in turn, inform the de-escalation and escalation practices of police-civilian interactions, producing predictable outcomes of racial bias in arrests.