The Institutional Role of Campus Policing for Black Undergraduate Students: A Critical Race Phenomenological Study

Abstract

Since the 1900s, researchers have probed the sociological intersections between race and policing in the United States. Several 20th century social movements scrutinized an intractable tension related to racialized experiences with the police (Schafer, Huebner, & Bynum, 2003), and extensive research has explored Black and African Americans’ experiences with policing within diverse environmental contexts (e.g. Brunson & Miller, 2006; Brunson, 2007; Bizer, 2008; Callanan & Rosenberger, 2011; Peck, 2015). The recent proliferation of raced policing incidents has reintroduced police relations into the public discourse. However, very few studies have empirically examined this phenomenon within the context of higher education. This dissertation study explores the ways that Black undergraduate students experience, interpret, and make sense of campus policing at a large, predominately White, public, research university. In this study, I conceptualize campus police officers as “institutional agents” (e.g. Stanton-Salazar, 2011) to better contextualize the practical implications of campus policing in students’ institutional experiences. Drawing upon critical and philosophical theories of race, this research centralizes the social constructs of race and antiblack racism, while interrogating intersections of marginalization. Semi-structured interviews generated the primary data, which yielded four overarching themes illustrating the racialized contexts that framed participants’ experiences with and interpretations of campus policing. These themes include: 1) precollege experience and socialization, 2) the racialized frame of campus policing, 3) conceptions of safety and protection, and 4) the role of institutional climate.