Locating the New Lavendar Scare: Tracing the Structural Sources of LGBTQ Disparities in Arrest by Kris Rosentel
Kris Rosentel is a PhD candidate in Sociology and an MS candidate in Statistics at Northwestern University. His research examines the causes and consequences of LGBTQ inequalities in the criminal legal system, with a particular focus on how neighborhoods, mobility, and social networks shape these disparities.
Covalent Logics: Policing, Family Values, and the Reproduction of Inequality by Anna Fox
How do organizations justify their role in reproducing inequality when established institutional logics have been delegitimized? Police have historically relied upon seemingly colorblind logics of danger and criminality to frame their work, yet mass movements like Black Lives Matter have revealed the racism implicit in these logics, forcing police to adopt alternative frameworks to justify and legitimize police racism, misconduct, and violence. Drawing on interviews with 52 Chicago police officers and data from 552 police complaint files, this article illustrates how police make use of a surprising framework—family values. Police compared the department to an idealized family to demand loyalty and suppress whistleblowing among police; blamed families of color for social disorder to displace responsibility for police violence; and framed themselves as surrogate parents to civilians to justify disciplinary intervention. By using family values, police legitimized instances of police violence, naturalized police power, and obscured institutional racism and gender inequality. I argue that institutional actors may strategically deploy overlapping institutional logics—a phenomenon I term “covalent logics”–to obscure inequality and maintain legitimacy in the face of large-scale contestation.
Anna Fox is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Chicago who uses interview, archival, and geospatial methods to examine questions about gender, family, race, and violence in the empirical context of policing. Across several projects, Fox investigates how police violence shapes and is shaped by different structures of gender and sexuality, and how this dynamic relationship relates to racial inequality.
