Racial disparities in police-community encounters are well documented, with people of color exper... more Racial disparities in police-community encounters are well documented, with people of color experiencing higher levels of police scrutiny. Far less is known about how police officers perceive the racial dynamics at play in their work. As part of a 2016 study of traffic stops in San Diego, we conducted in-depth interviews with 52 city police officers. Despite evidence of racial disparities in SDPD practices related to post-stop outcomes, officers denied, minimized, or even condemned racial profiling during traffic stops; officers described operating under a neutral policy of “colorblindness.” Our analysis identifies cognitive and discursive mechanisms which explain this complex and contradictory picture. We find that officers’ accounts excuse, justify, or otherwise negate the role of race in routine police work, yet officers’ thoughts and actions are based on racialized and, at times, dehumanizing narratives about people and communities of color. These morally neutral accounts form a pattern of micro-racialized discourse, constituting a layering of racialized processes and practices that cumulatively produce racially disparate outcomes. We argue that rejection of explicit racism alone is insufficient to address the progressive micro-racial aggression that emerges at key points during police-community encounters. We discuss the implications for law enforcement policy and practice.
For criminalized people, particularly those who have been recently incarcerated, applying for and... more For criminalized people, particularly those who have been recently incarcerated, applying for and maintaining public assistance – cash aid and/or food assistance – is an immediate and crucial element of survival. Yet relative to a substantial body of research that documents pathways into and out of carceral citizenship, this aspect of post-incarceration work has received little scholarly attention. Likewise, front-line welfare workers are often simplistically portrayed as gatekeepers who restrict poor people’s access to public assistance. In this paper, we make visible the intersection of welfare and criminal-legal involvement by examining how criminalized clients are understood by welfare workers in one large, densely populated California county. Our data come from a larger ethnographic study of women’s post-incarceration experiences of public institutions, and include in-depth interviews with 19 front-line welfare workers and participant observation of welfare offices. We find that: a) criminal-legal awareness varies among welfare workers; b) workers engage in substantial invisible labor, in large part to counteract the carceral logics of the welfare system; and c) in absence of professional training, workers draw heavily on their own situated knowledge to manage the challenges of their work. Contextualizing these findings within a broader trend toward the deprofessionalization of welfare workers, we argue that the training and education of this workforce, particularly around criminal-legal issues, is an important avenue for social work advocacy.
This paper examines how residents of high-crime communities understand so-called "quality of life... more This paper examines how residents of high-crime communities understand so-called "quality of life" policing tactics and their effects on police-community relations. We demonstrate how focus groups offer a unique opportunity to understand how community members perceive police activity by giving research participants an opportunity to dialog with each other to collectively articulate the meanings of this complex issue. We draw on focus groups conducted in three New York neighborhoods with high levels of violence, police contact, poverty, and other indicators of concentrated disadvantage. One set of focus groups was conducted with Black and/or Latino males ages 16-20 living in each community, while another set was held with adult residents over age 30, who had lived in the community for at least 10 years. We closely examine how these two sets of community residents express concerns related to aggressive low-level enforcement actions in their communities and the concomitant issues of the over-policing of young men of color, the under-policing of what residents understand to be the primary threats to their personal safety, and the perceived lack of police accountability. We consider the implications of these findings for police-community relations more broadly.
Research has shown that Black and Hispanic drivers are subject to disproportionate stop and post-... more Research has shown that Black and Hispanic drivers are subject to disproportionate stop and post-stop outcomes compared with White drivers. Yet scholars' understanding of how and why such disparities persist remains underdeveloped. To address this shortcoming, this article applies a sequential approach to the analysis of traffic stop data generated by San Diego Police Department officers in 2014 and 2015. Results show that despite being subject to higher rates of discretionary and nondiscretionary searches, Black drivers were less likely to be found with contraband than matched Whites and were more than twice as likely to be subjected to a field interview where no citation is issued or arrest made. Black drivers were also more likely to face any type of search, as well as high-discretion consent searches, that end in neither citation nor arrest. The article concludes with a discussion of the findings and a series of recommendations.
Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society, 2018
This paper presents findings from an ongoing study of the use of police to manage the issue of st... more This paper presents findings from an ongoing study of the use of police to manage the issue of street homelessness in downtown San Diego, California. We situate our study among recent conceptualizations of policing and homelessness in post-industrial cities. We draw on data collected over the past two years through brief, structured interviews (n=195), focus groups (n=23), and in-depth, semi-structured interviews (n=20) with un-housed people about their experiences with law enforcement. Our findings show how un-housed people make sense of and attempt to maneuver within a system of policing that attempts to erase homelessness from the urban landscape and that consequently functions to further deepen the marginalization of this already vulnerable population. We find that un-housed people perceive police tactics as being driven by an assumption of the criminality or deviance of people living in homelessness. We also examine our participants’ perceptions and consider the implications of homeless outreach teams, a police-social service hybrid program model that has become widely adopted in U.S. cities. Our data suggest that while these outreach teams offer an important form of assistance for un-housed people in crisis, the lack of a clear pipeline from outreach to permanent housing reduces trust in and willingness to accept help from these teams. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings in relation to cities’ responses to homelessness, as well as to the changing nature of policing in post-industrial cities.
Tasked with a fractured institutional mandate of ensuring public safety while facilitating the re... more Tasked with a fractured institutional mandate of ensuring public safety while facilitating the rehabilitation of their criminalized clients, community supervision workers exercise a considerable amount of discretion in how to achieve these goals. Yet much remains unknown about these workers' strategies for doing so, which are informed by experiential knowledge and social identities–what I call the " personal touch. " Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted with California state parole agents and county probation officers as part of a larger ethnographic inquiry of prisoner reentry, I apply a feminist lens to analyze how workers leverage personal aspects of themselves that they value to manage the impossibilities of their work. My findings show how workers employ a personal touch to connect with clients in meaningful ways, but also how these approaches are built on normative assumptions about gender.
This paper outlines my approach to and lessons learned from an experiential learning project on h... more This paper outlines my approach to and lessons learned from an experiential learning project on homelessness in an undergraduate research methods course for criminal justice majors. Students receive training in research ethics as well as interpretivist research epistemology and methods, and then conduct structured interviews with un-housed individuals. Drawing on a thematic analysis of students’ research reflection papers, I discuss three ways in which this approach can enhance and expand learning outcomes beyond what is conventionally achieved in a methods course: 1) developing competency in conducting human subjects research; 2) challenging pre-existing views on social issues; and 3) increasing empathy and enhancing communication skills, which may be particularly important for aspiring law enforcement officers.
Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice and Criminology, 2017
Low-level enforcement activities such as pedestrian and traffic stops, the issuance of criminal c... more Low-level enforcement activities such as pedestrian and traffic stops, the issuance of criminal court summonses (tickets or citations), and misdemeanor arrests comprise the vast majority of police-citizen encounters relative to the policing of more serious, felony-level offenses. The complexities of these activities – particularly from the perspectives of the police officers who carry them out – have received relatively little scholarly attention. In an effort to more fully understand the nuances of low-level enforcement, in particular how such activities have changed over time and how police officers have experienced such changes, in-depth interviews were conducted with a small sample of retired New York Police Department (NYPD) officers. Findings shed light on how officers understand and experience proactive policing tactics and the pressures associated with data-driven accountability. The implications of this research for improving police-community relations are explored.
The largest scale effort to reduce our reliance on incarceration is currently taking place in Cal... more The largest scale effort to reduce our reliance on incarceration is currently taking place in California. Drawing on in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated women on two different forms of community supervision in one California county, this article makes two main contributions. First, I offer a conceptual framework for understanding how women experience the goals of community supervision. Because actual rehabilitation is often off-limits, I suggest that these institutional goals are organized around caring, control, and self-governance: Caring is exhibited by supervision officers in lieu of substantive assistance toward rehabilitation; control for the sake of public safety remains a key aim of community supervision; and self-governance is an unstated institutional goal through which women are forced to take on the invisible work of managing their own rehabilitation. Second, I assess how—if at all—California’s decarceration effort has shifted institutional goals, and what this means for women. I argue that decarceration’s continued emphasis on control for the sake of public safety impedes the transformative potential of efforts to restructure the crime-processing system.
As the pendulum swings away from mass incarceration, feminist criminologists must
be alert to the... more As the pendulum swings away from mass incarceration, feminist criminologists must be alert to the ways in which forms of invisible punishment continue to oppress and marginalize crime-processed women. Institutional ethnography is a mode of inquiry that examines work processes and how they are coordinated, often through texts and discourses. Through illustrative examples from a sample of formerly incarcerated women in post-realignment California, we demonstrate institutional ethnography’s importance as a feminist research tool that places the reentry work of crime-processed women in conversation with the invisible punishments imposed on them after and in lieu of incarceration.
For people who have just been released from incarceration, the work of getting out and resuming l... more For people who have just been released from incarceration, the work of getting out and resuming life on the outside often includes numerous institutional contacts. Applying for and maintaining public assistance–cash aid and food stamps, commonly referred to as welfare–is a central component of what I call “reentry work.” I argue that discourses around welfare and punishment have perpetuated the erasure of formerly incarcerated women’s experiences. Utilizing an institutional ethnographic perspective, I show how the work of applying for and maintaining welfare is organized around a standardized textual discourse of children–and women as caretakers of children. Formerly incarcerated women do not fit easily into such a category, thus they are systematically excluded from the assistance they need. I examine the multiple layers of unrecognized work juggled by these women, and suggest avenues for welfare reform.
Journal of Health and Human Services Administration, 2020
Homelessness is among the most urgent crises facing the United States. In addition to tents or sl... more Homelessness is among the most urgent crises facing the United States. In addition to tents or sleeping bags on urban sidewalks, many people experiencing homelessness exist outside of public view, along rivers and other waterways, and elsewhere "out in nature." This paper explores reasons individuals live near waterways, specific health and human service needs of this population, and why these needs remain largely unmet. We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 84 individuals experiencing homelessness, 56 of whom were currently residing or had previously resided near the San Diego River or in nearby canyons, as well as seven key informant interviews with homelessness services and environmental conservation organizations. Our findings reveal that people live near urban waterways for several reasons, including the competing influences of systems designed to ameliorate the impacts of homelessness, such as criminal justice systems, public health systems, and the emergency shelter system.
Racial disparities in police-community encounters are well documented, with people of color exper... more Racial disparities in police-community encounters are well documented, with people of color experiencing higher levels of police scrutiny. Far less is known about how police officers perceive the racial dynamics at play in their work. As part of a 2016 study of traffic stops in San Diego, we conducted in-depth interviews with 52 city police officers. Despite evidence of racial disparities in SDPD practices related to post-stop outcomes, officers denied, minimized, or even condemned racial profiling during traffic stops; officers described operating under a neutral policy of “colorblindness.” Our analysis identifies cognitive and discursive mechanisms which explain this complex and contradictory picture. We find that officers’ accounts excuse, justify, or otherwise negate the role of race in routine police work, yet officers’ thoughts and actions are based on racialized and, at times, dehumanizing narratives about people and communities of color. These morally neutral accounts form a pattern of micro-racialized discourse, constituting a layering of racialized processes and practices that cumulatively produce racially disparate outcomes. We argue that rejection of explicit racism alone is insufficient to address the progressive micro-racial aggression that emerges at key points during police-community encounters. We discuss the implications for law enforcement policy and practice.
For criminalized people, particularly those who have been recently incarcerated, applying for and... more For criminalized people, particularly those who have been recently incarcerated, applying for and maintaining public assistance – cash aid and/or food assistance – is an immediate and crucial element of survival. Yet relative to a substantial body of research that documents pathways into and out of carceral citizenship, this aspect of post-incarceration work has received little scholarly attention. Likewise, front-line welfare workers are often simplistically portrayed as gatekeepers who restrict poor people’s access to public assistance. In this paper, we make visible the intersection of welfare and criminal-legal involvement by examining how criminalized clients are understood by welfare workers in one large, densely populated California county. Our data come from a larger ethnographic study of women’s post-incarceration experiences of public institutions, and include in-depth interviews with 19 front-line welfare workers and participant observation of welfare offices. We find that: a) criminal-legal awareness varies among welfare workers; b) workers engage in substantial invisible labor, in large part to counteract the carceral logics of the welfare system; and c) in absence of professional training, workers draw heavily on their own situated knowledge to manage the challenges of their work. Contextualizing these findings within a broader trend toward the deprofessionalization of welfare workers, we argue that the training and education of this workforce, particularly around criminal-legal issues, is an important avenue for social work advocacy.
This paper examines how residents of high-crime communities understand so-called "quality of life... more This paper examines how residents of high-crime communities understand so-called "quality of life" policing tactics and their effects on police-community relations. We demonstrate how focus groups offer a unique opportunity to understand how community members perceive police activity by giving research participants an opportunity to dialog with each other to collectively articulate the meanings of this complex issue. We draw on focus groups conducted in three New York neighborhoods with high levels of violence, police contact, poverty, and other indicators of concentrated disadvantage. One set of focus groups was conducted with Black and/or Latino males ages 16-20 living in each community, while another set was held with adult residents over age 30, who had lived in the community for at least 10 years. We closely examine how these two sets of community residents express concerns related to aggressive low-level enforcement actions in their communities and the concomitant issues of the over-policing of young men of color, the under-policing of what residents understand to be the primary threats to their personal safety, and the perceived lack of police accountability. We consider the implications of these findings for police-community relations more broadly.
Research has shown that Black and Hispanic drivers are subject to disproportionate stop and post-... more Research has shown that Black and Hispanic drivers are subject to disproportionate stop and post-stop outcomes compared with White drivers. Yet scholars' understanding of how and why such disparities persist remains underdeveloped. To address this shortcoming, this article applies a sequential approach to the analysis of traffic stop data generated by San Diego Police Department officers in 2014 and 2015. Results show that despite being subject to higher rates of discretionary and nondiscretionary searches, Black drivers were less likely to be found with contraband than matched Whites and were more than twice as likely to be subjected to a field interview where no citation is issued or arrest made. Black drivers were also more likely to face any type of search, as well as high-discretion consent searches, that end in neither citation nor arrest. The article concludes with a discussion of the findings and a series of recommendations.
Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society, 2018
This paper presents findings from an ongoing study of the use of police to manage the issue of st... more This paper presents findings from an ongoing study of the use of police to manage the issue of street homelessness in downtown San Diego, California. We situate our study among recent conceptualizations of policing and homelessness in post-industrial cities. We draw on data collected over the past two years through brief, structured interviews (n=195), focus groups (n=23), and in-depth, semi-structured interviews (n=20) with un-housed people about their experiences with law enforcement. Our findings show how un-housed people make sense of and attempt to maneuver within a system of policing that attempts to erase homelessness from the urban landscape and that consequently functions to further deepen the marginalization of this already vulnerable population. We find that un-housed people perceive police tactics as being driven by an assumption of the criminality or deviance of people living in homelessness. We also examine our participants’ perceptions and consider the implications of homeless outreach teams, a police-social service hybrid program model that has become widely adopted in U.S. cities. Our data suggest that while these outreach teams offer an important form of assistance for un-housed people in crisis, the lack of a clear pipeline from outreach to permanent housing reduces trust in and willingness to accept help from these teams. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings in relation to cities’ responses to homelessness, as well as to the changing nature of policing in post-industrial cities.
Tasked with a fractured institutional mandate of ensuring public safety while facilitating the re... more Tasked with a fractured institutional mandate of ensuring public safety while facilitating the rehabilitation of their criminalized clients, community supervision workers exercise a considerable amount of discretion in how to achieve these goals. Yet much remains unknown about these workers' strategies for doing so, which are informed by experiential knowledge and social identities–what I call the " personal touch. " Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted with California state parole agents and county probation officers as part of a larger ethnographic inquiry of prisoner reentry, I apply a feminist lens to analyze how workers leverage personal aspects of themselves that they value to manage the impossibilities of their work. My findings show how workers employ a personal touch to connect with clients in meaningful ways, but also how these approaches are built on normative assumptions about gender.
This paper outlines my approach to and lessons learned from an experiential learning project on h... more This paper outlines my approach to and lessons learned from an experiential learning project on homelessness in an undergraduate research methods course for criminal justice majors. Students receive training in research ethics as well as interpretivist research epistemology and methods, and then conduct structured interviews with un-housed individuals. Drawing on a thematic analysis of students’ research reflection papers, I discuss three ways in which this approach can enhance and expand learning outcomes beyond what is conventionally achieved in a methods course: 1) developing competency in conducting human subjects research; 2) challenging pre-existing views on social issues; and 3) increasing empathy and enhancing communication skills, which may be particularly important for aspiring law enforcement officers.
Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice and Criminology, 2017
Low-level enforcement activities such as pedestrian and traffic stops, the issuance of criminal c... more Low-level enforcement activities such as pedestrian and traffic stops, the issuance of criminal court summonses (tickets or citations), and misdemeanor arrests comprise the vast majority of police-citizen encounters relative to the policing of more serious, felony-level offenses. The complexities of these activities – particularly from the perspectives of the police officers who carry them out – have received relatively little scholarly attention. In an effort to more fully understand the nuances of low-level enforcement, in particular how such activities have changed over time and how police officers have experienced such changes, in-depth interviews were conducted with a small sample of retired New York Police Department (NYPD) officers. Findings shed light on how officers understand and experience proactive policing tactics and the pressures associated with data-driven accountability. The implications of this research for improving police-community relations are explored.
The largest scale effort to reduce our reliance on incarceration is currently taking place in Cal... more The largest scale effort to reduce our reliance on incarceration is currently taking place in California. Drawing on in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated women on two different forms of community supervision in one California county, this article makes two main contributions. First, I offer a conceptual framework for understanding how women experience the goals of community supervision. Because actual rehabilitation is often off-limits, I suggest that these institutional goals are organized around caring, control, and self-governance: Caring is exhibited by supervision officers in lieu of substantive assistance toward rehabilitation; control for the sake of public safety remains a key aim of community supervision; and self-governance is an unstated institutional goal through which women are forced to take on the invisible work of managing their own rehabilitation. Second, I assess how—if at all—California’s decarceration effort has shifted institutional goals, and what this means for women. I argue that decarceration’s continued emphasis on control for the sake of public safety impedes the transformative potential of efforts to restructure the crime-processing system.
As the pendulum swings away from mass incarceration, feminist criminologists must
be alert to the... more As the pendulum swings away from mass incarceration, feminist criminologists must be alert to the ways in which forms of invisible punishment continue to oppress and marginalize crime-processed women. Institutional ethnography is a mode of inquiry that examines work processes and how they are coordinated, often through texts and discourses. Through illustrative examples from a sample of formerly incarcerated women in post-realignment California, we demonstrate institutional ethnography’s importance as a feminist research tool that places the reentry work of crime-processed women in conversation with the invisible punishments imposed on them after and in lieu of incarceration.
For people who have just been released from incarceration, the work of getting out and resuming l... more For people who have just been released from incarceration, the work of getting out and resuming life on the outside often includes numerous institutional contacts. Applying for and maintaining public assistance–cash aid and food stamps, commonly referred to as welfare–is a central component of what I call “reentry work.” I argue that discourses around welfare and punishment have perpetuated the erasure of formerly incarcerated women’s experiences. Utilizing an institutional ethnographic perspective, I show how the work of applying for and maintaining welfare is organized around a standardized textual discourse of children–and women as caretakers of children. Formerly incarcerated women do not fit easily into such a category, thus they are systematically excluded from the assistance they need. I examine the multiple layers of unrecognized work juggled by these women, and suggest avenues for welfare reform.
Journal of Health and Human Services Administration, 2020
Homelessness is among the most urgent crises facing the United States. In addition to tents or sl... more Homelessness is among the most urgent crises facing the United States. In addition to tents or sleeping bags on urban sidewalks, many people experiencing homelessness exist outside of public view, along rivers and other waterways, and elsewhere "out in nature." This paper explores reasons individuals live near waterways, specific health and human service needs of this population, and why these needs remain largely unmet. We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 84 individuals experiencing homelessness, 56 of whom were currently residing or had previously resided near the San Diego River or in nearby canyons, as well as seven key informant interviews with homelessness services and environmental conservation organizations. Our findings reveal that people live near urban waterways for several reasons, including the competing influences of systems designed to ameliorate the impacts of homelessness, such as criminal justice systems, public health systems, and the emergency shelter system.
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Papers by Megan Welsh
be alert to the ways in which forms of invisible punishment continue to oppress and
marginalize crime-processed women. Institutional ethnography is a mode of inquiry
that examines work processes and how they are coordinated, often through texts
and discourses. Through illustrative examples from a sample of formerly incarcerated
women in post-realignment California, we demonstrate institutional ethnography’s
importance as a feminist research tool that places the reentry work of crime-processed
women in conversation with the invisible punishments imposed on them
after and in lieu of incarceration.
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles by Megan Welsh
be alert to the ways in which forms of invisible punishment continue to oppress and
marginalize crime-processed women. Institutional ethnography is a mode of inquiry
that examines work processes and how they are coordinated, often through texts
and discourses. Through illustrative examples from a sample of formerly incarcerated
women in post-realignment California, we demonstrate institutional ethnography’s
importance as a feminist research tool that places the reentry work of crime-processed
women in conversation with the invisible punishments imposed on them
after and in lieu of incarceration.