“You Don't Know That”: Refusals of Community Policing and Criminalization in California

Abstract

AbstractWhen a community policing program named Why'd You Stop Me (WYSM) was implemented in Salinas, California, in 2016, a result of a series of police homicides of local Latino men 2 years prior, residents of this persistently criminalized Mexican‐American community insistently refused it. Rather than accepting WYSM's securitized logic and affirming their own potential criminality, in their refusals and a series of related public actions, residents rendered legible the program's role in the lethal process of criminalization. While community policing strategies are often upheld as viable and empathic solutions for repairing fraught relations between officers and distrustful communities, they form a critical part of counterinsurgency tactics and occupy a key surveillance role in America's militarized and racialized policing project. America's racial empathy gap, as black feminist epistemologists have argued, is better conceived as an epistemology gap, an ignorance and unwillingness to know or accept as legitimate the experiences of communities of color both underserved and under siege by the state. This paper thus considers Salinans’ refusals as epistemological interventions, activist attempts to make palpable the production of criminalization—including in its occasional masquerading as empathy—in the efforts of decriminalizing residents and building a healthy, livable community.