Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines the tensions, temporalities, and forms of ideological labor latent in U.S. police diversity efforts. It argues that internal struggles around diversification represent an epistemological battle over entangled police futures and histories—one staged on grounds defined by police.

Paper Abstract:

Calls to diversify U.S. police forces, long dominated by white male officers, have often followed public spectacles of racist police violence. After the 1960s urban rebellions, the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, and recent Black Lives Matter protests, police departments across the U.S. renewed efforts to increase diversity in their ranks by recruiting more women and people of color. Diversity reforms are designed to render police more representative of the communities they serve, and to thereby cultivate trust and legitimacy among residents. In other words, reform advocates imagine that recomposing police workforces to mirror the bodies and “cultures” of the policed will beget less violent futures—even as such long-promised futures continually recede into the horizon. This paper will consider the tensions, temporalities, and forms of ideological labor latent in police diversity efforts. Drawing on ethnographic research with police workers in Arizona, USA, I examine how advocates for police diversification labor to maintain belief in its unrealized possibilities—against internal resistance and a recent tide of legislative attacks on diversity policies—by mobilizing utopian visions of an institution whose perfect synchrony with community desires, optics, and “cultures” spares it from public critique. I counterpose this labor to the dystopian imaginaries animating internal backlash to diversity policies, which often forecasts futures of white male disenfranchisement and ensuing occupational decline. I argue that these struggles around police diversification represent an epistemological battle over the constitutive entanglement between police futures and police histories—one staged upon grounds that remain defined by police.