Hunting for “Dirtbags”: Why Cops Over-Police the Poor and Racial Minorities

2 | Setting the Stage: Stonesville and Seaside

c h a p ter t wo SETTING THE STAGE Stonesville and Seaside We do things different around here. —Seaside officer n this chapter we describe how our study was conducted and providerelevantcontextualinformationforthefollowingchapters .1 The primary data sources for this research are observations and interviews with “Stonesville” and “Seaside” police officers . We do not to use the names of the actual cities nor identify by real name any of the officers observed or interviewed. Stonesville is a pseudonym for a medium-sized city in California and Seaside is a pseudonym for a large East Coast city in an unnamed state.2 The Stonesville interviews and observationswere conducted from the beginning of July through November 2000 (with one in-depth interview and ride-along in June of 2001) resulting in 25 in-depth interviews and 147 observational periods or ride-alongs.3 In Seaside the interviews and observations were completed between late May and August 2010, based on 163 ride-alongs. Not only does the research benefit from including very different cities, but it also allows for an analysis both pre- and post-September 11, 2001. While all locales differ to some degree, there is no indication that these cities are outliers in terms of how criminal justice professionals make discretionary decisions. Their economic conditions at the 22 hunting for “dirtbags” time of each period of research are also typical to other similarly sized cities. During the combined ride-alongs in both cities, we observed 310 police mobilizations, which included both dispatches to citizen calls for service and proactive contacts. The shortest period observedwasalittleundertwohours,butsometimesweinteracted with officers for an entire ten-hour shift. The average amount of time spent with each officer was almost six hours, for a combined total of over 310 hours of observation. There were differences between the two sites regarding how long the officers let us ride with them. In Stonesville, officers were more generous with their time. But even with less time spent observing, we saw more mobilizations in Seaside than in Stonesville, which is likely because of the differences in the cities’ sizes and demand for police services. While the data was collected ten years apart, little had changed in those ten years in the Stonesville Police Department. The Department ’s policing strategies and the ways it deploys officers are the same. The city’s demographics also have changed only minimally . The true test, however, of the relevance of the 2000 Stonesville data is the degree to which it is comparable to the 2010 Seasidedata .Inalmostallrespects,weobservedthesamebehaviorsin Seaside as we had in Stonesville. Officers interviewed in Seaside in 2010 had similar comments and opinions about proactive policing as officers in Stonesville in 2000. Chapters 3 and 4 clearly illustrate that discretionary proactive policing was the same across the decade and on the two coasts. Although we officially rode with fifty officers (twenty-five in Stonesville and twenty-five in Seaside), we observed many additional officers at different mobilizations. For each police mobilization , the number of officers on the scene and often the names of the additional officers were recorded. Between citizen calls and proactive activities, and because most police mobilizations setting the stage 23 included more than one officer, a total of 279 different officers were observed. Overall, over 600 different citizen-officer interactions were witnessed. The fifty officers who were observed and interviewed varied in manyimportantways.Theethnicityofthefiftyofficersroughlyestimated the diversity of both patrol forces. Sixteen percent of ridealongswerewithfemaleofficersand32percentwerewithminority officers (14 percent Black, 10 percent Latino, and 8 percent Asian). Overall,ourimpressionwasthatintervieweesroughlyrepresented the force, however, representational deficiencies were somewhat addressed in the opportunity to observe and interact with 279 different officers. Hence, while only nine Black officers were interviewed in depth, we observed and talked at varying lengths to many other Black officers. The officers observed varied in years of service on the force from twenty-nine years to one year, with an average of 5.6 years. Overall, the Stonesville patrol force averaged less than four years of service, compared to Seaside, where officers Table 2.1. General Characteristics of Police Mobilizations and Police Officers in Stonesville and Seaside Stonesville Seaside Number of police mobilizations observed 147 163 Number of reactive police mobilizations 117 115 Number of proactive police mobilizations 30 48 Average time of ride-along 7+ hours 5+ hours Total observation time 201 hours 111 hours Number of officers observed 25 25 Average years of officer experience 3+ years 7+ years...