Policing, Criminal Justice, and the Culture of Revolution: An Interview with Victor Rios
“Oakland BLM Storefronts” (Annette Bernhardt/Flickr).
It’s far from premature to declare that the revolution has arrived. The last few weeks have cemented the notion that another world is indeed possible as we reconsider the future of policing, criminal justice, and systemic racial inequality in the United States. Moreover, the cultural shift heralded by the Black Lives Matter movement following the murders of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, and so many others is just the beginning.
Recently, the Latinx Project spoke with UC Santa Barbara sociology professor Victor Rios, who has researched and authored several books on the topic of youth criminalization, for some insight into the potential impact of this cultural shift on everything from disrupting the school to prison pipeline to social investment in the youth of marginalized communities around the country. We also discuss the need to address anti-Blackness within our Latinx community, as well as the responsibility of ethnographers to be more critical and reflexive in their approach to working in communities of color.
The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Néstor David Pastor (NDP): In terms of your previous work on policing and youth incarceration, what has stood out to you since the George Floyd protests began?
Victor Rios (VR): In 2011, when Oscar Grant was killed in my hometown of Oakland, California, right down the street by where I used to hang out as a teenager, killed by the BART (Metro) Police while he was handcuffed and shot in the back—this is where the kids for my first book, Punished, [also] hung out.
We protested, we advocated for changes in policing. Unfortunately, the police department's budget kept increasing. We've been over-investing in law enforcement over a 50-year period. And this is causing communities to be over-policed and hyper-incarcerated. Young people who have never had a criminal record are supervised by the criminal justice system and are treated as if they were part of it. So this school-to-prison pipeline—treating kids as if they were in prison when they're in school—hasn’t changed.
Scholarship is looking at those repercussions. But the powerful moment is that we're in a true revolution. And when you can call a revolution a revolution is when the culture has changed across the country. When you have entire cities on fire across the country, not just Ferguson, not just Oakland, not just New York City, but hundreds and hundreds of cities with masses of people lit up and protesting, this is a revolution and that's what has impacted my scholarship. In Punished, I predicted the mass movements of the hyper-marginalized were not going to come in an Occupy Wall Street kind of way. The movements of the masses are going to come from contesting racialized, punitive social control, hyper-incarceration, and police and state-sanctioned violence. So this is the revolution borne from contesting our over-investment in criminal justice, policing, and militarization of our society, our communities, and our world.
NDP: How has your perception of the current movement’s potential shifted and where might we go from here?
VR: I always imagined that the movement would stay grassroots. And that's how we would bring about change. What's changed in terms of my thinking is that now we've gone grassroots and grasstops and everything is meeting at the cultural level. And when you have an impact on national culture, that is powerful. Two years from now, we're going to be looking at policies, laws, hiring practices, community services, at the scale of the New Deal of the 1930s and the social programs of the 1970s, in communities where you would see artists being funded to paint murals on walls in New York City, Houston, Chicago and LA, and across the nation; where it was actual investment in communities by the government. I think this social programming kind of regime will begin to come into full force. All of a sudden these are like little nexuses and connections that are like, okay, now these proposals are viable. Whereas before revolutionaries were isolated, now it's like, “Oh, we need your proposals, Ocasio-Cortez, we need your proposals, Bernie.” And those are going to come together [to create] more support for communities. So I have an optimistic look of what's gonna go down in the next couple of years.
Oscar Grant Mural (elizaIO/Flickr)
NDP: How would you frame the conversation around defunding police departments and what is important to understand and acknowledge about calls to defund the police?
VR: People are afraid of this idea of divesting from police departments, defunding them, but it's actually a very pragmatic, non-radical idea. It's simple, it goes like this: police officers don't want to be solving domestic disputes. We need social workers and therapists to go and solve domestic disputes. Most officers don't like that job. Police officers don't want to be taking kids out of classrooms. They really don't. A lot of them don't, maybe a handful thrive off of it. But a lot of them don't want to be dragging a kid out of class because he got in a verbal fight with his teacher or an argument. We need counselors, BTDTs—been there, done that—homeys that grew up in the hood and come back, get an education, [and] are like, “I'm here to mentor you guys.” We need BTDTs or outreach workers, restorative justice experts. I go to schools and I do training with the school staff and I'm like, “Well, where are your success coaches?” They're like, “We don't have any.” And I'm like, “But you got six security guards in orange vests. Those are your success coaches.” Just change the title and retrain them so it's not a militarized way of dealing with kids. The security guards want to help the kids, they don't want to be security guards, they want to be success coaches. But officers, they want to be out there now solving crime, catching the big fish, whoever that is. But as a society, we've relied on officers to do what social workers used to do. We relied on officers to do what therapists used to do. We relied on officers to do what teachers and counselors used to do.
The embeddedness of the right arm of the state, the punishing arm of the state on the nurturing arm of the state is so powerful that right now the revolution is trying to decouple it. And that's what these activists mean when they say we just have to translate for them when they say, like defunding the police, right? Bring back the nurturing arm, take some of the resources you've over-invested in departments. I believe that communities need to have the resources and the ability to take care of their problems of having internal ways of addressing conflict and violence and crime of allowing people to reintegrate back into the community. And I think that's a long term strategy, and it's a viable strategy.
NDP: There’s a reckoning within the Latinx community in regards to both acknowledging our blackness and African ancestry, and confronting our deeply rooted anti-blackness. What are some of the pitfalls for the Latinx community moving forward?
VR: There are still a lot of colonizers in our community. [Colonialism] became cultural, too. Because you no longer need the European colonizer to perpetuate ideas of whiteness. So there is anti-blackness. And I think of it as very specific to the way in which in the US, there's a current of micro- and macro-aggressions and violence towards black communities.
White passing Latinos get a lot of privileges. And some of us in the Latinx community don't see Black Lives Matter as part of us. But many of us are of African origin. And to say Black Lives Matter is that and Latinx is this, is to perpetuate that whiteness, because we have to assume that Latinx folks have African heritage. And that some of us are living it in ways that police can't tell if you're Dominican or if you're Black. And so I think that colonialist mentality and culture is still very real, and some Latinx people could be the worst in perpetuating this colorism. And, frankly, the revolution revolutionizes the counter revolutionaries. And that's the next phase that we're going to start to see, counter-revolutionaries are going to try to start their own revolution against the revolution. It's hard for them to do but we will see consequences from that like crackdowns, law and order, more state violence—as we've seen—and then people within the Latinx community taking sides and so an education campaign needs to happen. And it has to be multilingual and multicultural.
NDP: You’ve often critiqued the whiteness of ethnography and the fetishization of communities of color by white ethnographers. Can you provide recommendations for scholars who are researching and writing about youth of color and communities of color?
VR: The big trend is always to study our people. And it's still happening. It's not as bad as it used to be, but it’s still happening where people are building careers off of studying marginalized populations and not being critical, not being reflexive about it. So for those scholars out there, I just say that we need perspectives from different angles, we need perspectives from people that come from those communities, and we need perspectives from people that are outsiders. I would just say that when you come in, whether you're an insider or outsider, just be humble, be honest, be reflective—and not just when you're there. When you leave and you're writing, how are you perpetuating racism, microaggressions, stereotypes, and really, the neoliberal state? If you're reflecting on that in your writing, then you're likely to produce something that's not going to be voyeuristic. But instead trying to lay out the processes taking place in these communities so that people understand that we need multiple perspectives on how the state is impacting these communities and how these communities have agency and are able to take on the state. Another approach I think is crucial is that people need to study top down, people need to embed themselves in police departments, embed themselves in criminal courts, like Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve has done, embed themselves in government offices, political offices, embed themselves in institutions and study up. How are these people perpetuating inequality and abusing power so as to be a call to continue supporting marginalized communities, but then to go and understand these systems that are responsible for their marginalization. Across the Social Sciences I always hear other professors say that there are not enough qualified job candidates for professor jobs. I think that is BS. There are plenty of qualified scholars out there but there is also plenty of racism that allows liberals to sideline our scholars. Faculty in academia need to make concerted efforts to create a pipeline for undergrads of color to go to grad school and to become professors.
Select publications by Victor Rios:
Rios, V.M. (2017) Human Targets: Schools, Police, and the Criminalization of Latino Youth. University of Chicago Press.
Rios, V.M. (2011) Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys. New York University Press.
Rios, V.M. and Mireles-Rios, R. (2019). My Teacher Believes in Me!: The Educator’s Guide to At-Promise Students. Five Rivers Press.
Rios, V.M., *Prieto G., *Ibarra J. 2020. “Mano Suave—Mano Dura: Legitimacy Policing and Latino Stop and Frisk.” American Sociological Review.
Mireles-Rios, R., Rios, V.M., *Reyes, A. 2020. “Pushed Out for Missing School: The Role of Health Disparities and High School Truancy.” Education Science.
Cobbina, J., Soma C., *Conteh, M., & Rios, V.M. 2018. “I Will Be Out There Everyday Strong!” Protest Policing and Future Activism among Ferguson Protesters.” Sociological Forum.
Rios, V.M., *Carney, N., *Kelekay, J. 2017. “Ethnographies of Race, Crime, and Criminal Justice.” Annual Review of Sociology.
For further reading, see below:
Boyles AS. 2015. Race, Place, and Suburban Policing: Too Close for Comfort. University of California Press.
Brunson RK. 2007. “Police Don’t Like Black People”: African-American Young Men’s Accumulated Police Experiences. Criminology & Public Policy. 6(1):71–101
Brunson RK, Stewart EA. 2006. “Young African American Women, The Street Code, and Violence: An Exploratory Analysis.” Journal of Crime and Justice. 29(1):1–19
Brunson RK, Weitzer R. 2011. Negotiating Unwelcome Police Encounters: The Intergenerational Transmission of Conduct Norms. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. 40(4):425–456
Comfort M. 2008. Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.
Contreras R. 2013. The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence, and the American Dream. Univ of California Press.
Duck W. 2015. No Way Out: Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Durán R. 2013. Gang Life in Two Cities: An Insider’s Journey. Columbia University Press.
Golash-Boza T. 2015. Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor and Global Capitalism. NYU Press.
Henne K, Shah R. 2015. “Unveiling White Logic in Criminological Research: An Intertextual Analysis.” Contemporary Justice Review. 18(2):105–120
Irwin K, Umemoto K. 2016. Jacked Up and Unjust: Pacific Islander Teens Confront Violent Legacies. University of California Press.
Lopez-Aguado P. 2016. “The Collateral Consequences of Prisonization: Racial Sorting, Carceral Identity, and Community Criminalization.” Sociology Compass. 10(1):12–23
Macias-Rojas P. 2016. From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America. NYU Press.
Martinez C. 2016. The Neighborhood Has Its Own Rules: Latinos and African Americans in South Los Angeles. NYU Press.
Payne YA. 2008. “Street Life” as a Site of Resiliency: How Street Life–Oriented Black Men Frame Opportunity in the United States. Journal of Black Psychology. 34(1):3–31
Potter H. 2015. Intersectionality and Criminology: Disrupting and Revolutionizing Studies of Crime. Routledge
Ralph L. 2015. THE LIMITATIONS OF A “DIRTY” WORLD. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race. 12(2):441–451
Rogers A. 2015. “How police brutality harms mothers: Linking police violence to the reproductive justice movement.” Hastings Race & Poverty LJ. 12:205–235
Shedd C. 2015. Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice. Russell Sage Foundation.
Smith JM. 2014. “Interrogating whiteness within criminology.” Sociology Compass. 8(2):107–118
Solis C, Portillos EL, Brunson RK. 2009. “Latino youths’ experiences with and perceptions of involuntary police encounters.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 623(1):39–51
Stuart F. 2016. Down, Out, and under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row. University of Chicago Press.
Van Cleve NG. 2016. Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court. Stanford University Press.
Vargas R. 2016. Wounded City: Violent Turf Wars in a Chicago Barrio. Oxford University Press.
Whitehead SN. 2015. “The specter of racism: exploring White racial anxieties in the context of policing.” Contemporary Justice Review. 18(2):121–138
Victor Rios is Associate Dean of Social Science and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005. His research agenda focuses on the role of social control in determining the well-being of young people living in poverty; tracking the social consequences of the punitive practices and punitive social control, across institutional settings; and examining young people’s resilience and responses to social marginalization. He is the author of Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (New York University Press 2011) and Human Targets: Schools, Police, and the Criminalization of Latino Youth (University of Chicago Press 2017). He is also co-editor of the Latina/o Sociology Book Series with New York University Press. Rios has worked with school districts to train educators on restorative justice, cultural proficiency, the achievement-opportunity gap, and what he terms “educator projected self-actualization.” His programs have been implemented in various institutions including, Los Angeles County Office of Education; Omaha Public Schools; Santa Barbara Unified School District; and juvenile detention facilities. His Ted Talk “Help for Kids the Education System Ignores” has garnered over 1.1 million views. Rios’s work is featured in a documentary film funded by Sundance, the Ford Foundation, and Soros. The film (thepushouts.com) aired on national television (PBS) in 2019. Rios is currently writing a book, Opportunity Gaps: Teacher Support, Race, and The Future of Public Education, based on a recently completed two-year study at a large, racially and economically diverse Southern California, High School. Rios participated in The Joyce Foundation DC convening on gun violence, policing and mass incarceration at the Obama White House in 2015.