Racial categories and visual descriptions in police emergency calls

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Abstract
Taken‐for‐granted presumptions about race are incorporated into the operating logic of many institutions. In emergency police calls, racialization is routinely used to accomplish visual descriptions of persons of interest. This use of racial categories relies on and reproduces inferences about race as visually discernible. These inferences are bound up in colonial histories and ongoing racist violence and discrimination. Our discursive psychology study documents how participants make links between racial category membership and visual appearance and orient to racialization as a delicate but necessary part of an emergency call. We thus show how examining racialization can illustrate the workings of racial inferences even in the absence of overt orientations to prejudice. Understanding how racialization is built into the institutional infrastructure provides an important ‘upstream’ perspective on issues of racialized policing and is a necessary first step in moves towards social justice.

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