African American Studies Commons^™

Racial-Spatial Politics: Policing Black Citizens In White Spaces And A 21st-Century Uprising, Andrea S. Boyles

Faculty Scholarship

I had been at the library for hours, going over the last edits on my first book (Boyles 2015), when I received a distressing phone call: a police officer had killed a Black male teenager in the city of Ferguson. The caller said protesters were assembling at the scene and suggested that I go there immediately. Well, I responded accordingly. I went, ultimately embarking on an unanticipated, extraordinary three-year empirical journey. As a sociologist and critical criminologist, I had been researching and writing about conflict between Black citizens and police in the suburbs of the St. Louis region for five …