Motherhood in the City: Parenting, Police, and Legal Ambivalence

Abstract

One line of research has shown that legal cynicism, or a sense of estrangement from the law, is pervasive among residents of poor, black neighborhoods. However, another line of research shows that, controlling for crime rates, residents of poor, black neighborhoods call police at higher rates than whites and residents of middle-class neighborhoods. Ethnographic research suggests that mothers in particular sometimes exact social control over partners and children through police notification. Given these divides in the empirical literature, how might researchers better understand how legal cynicism and occasional reliance on police fit together? Drawing on interviews with poor African-American mothers in Washington, DC, this Article argues that the way to draw these divergent findings together is to through the lens of situational trust. This concept expands the literature on police trust by emphasizing its situational contingency. Mothers use at least four strategies to justify momentarily relying on the police: officer exceptionalism, domain specificity, therapeutic consequences, and institutional navigation. These strategies shed light on the contextual meanings of safety and legitimacy.