Documenting Contact and Thinking with Skin: A Dermatological Approach to the Study of Police Street Checks

Abstract

AbstractIn contrast to quantitative studies that rely on numerical data to highlight racial disparities in police street checks, this article offers a qualitative methodology for examining how histories of anti-Blackness configure civilians’ experiences of present-day policing. Taking theHalifax Street Checks Reportas our primary object of analysis, we apply an innovative dermatological approach, demonstrating how skin itself becomes meaningful when police officers and civilians make contact in the process of a street check. We explore how street checks become an occasion for epidermalization, whereby a law enforcement practice projects onto the skins of civilians locally specific histories and emotions. To think with skin, we focus on the narratives shared by African Nova Scotians, a group that has been street checked at higher rates than their white counterparts. By doing so, we argue that current debates about police street checks in Halifax must attend to the emotional stakes of police-initiated encounters in order to fully appreciate the lived experience of street checks for Black civilians.