The Five I's of Five-O: Racial Ideologies, Institutions, Interests, Identities, and Interactions of Police Violence

The relationship between police violence and race is one fraught with both specific historical and contemporary tensions (i.e., white police profiling, beating, and murder of people of color) and with ambiguity (e.g., what is meant by race and how do we operationalize and measure violence at the hands of law enforcement?). Defining the concept of race as a multidimensional process of oppression and justification for social inequality can shed light on why and how police violence often descends upon black and Latino populations as well as why such brutality and state surveillance is supported by many whites yesterday and today. In this article I analyze the relationships between police violence and race as an ongoing feedback loop: race produces violence and inequality while violence and inequality (re) forms race. Their intertwined formation reproduces the dominant meanings and structural location of racial groups in five key domains: ideologies, institutions, interests, identities, and interactions - what I call The Five I's.