Corsianos was born and raised in Toronto, Canada, as the daughter of first-generation Greek immigrants. She received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in sociology and criminology from the University of Toronto, and she earned her PhD in sociology with a concentration in criminology from York University, also in Toronto, Canada. She has taught at York University, and at Central Michigan University. Dr. Corsianos’ research interests include institutions of social control, public and private policing, power, and violence. She has studied the police in the U.S. and Canada, focusing on police ethics and corruption, gender issues, discretionary powers, and community policing, and more recently on the role of bias in the criminal court process. She is committed to pursuing social change by identifying exclusionary practices in the production of knowledge and identifying more equitable policing and legal systems. She is the author of several books, including Violence against Women in Pornography (2016), The Complexities of Police Corruption (2012), and the award-winning Policing and Gendered Justice (2009). Corsianos has been recognized by the Division of Feminist Criminology of the American Society of Criminology, with the 2015 Distinguished Scholar Award, for her outstanding contributions to the field of women and crime. She is also the recipient of the Ronald W. Collins Distinguished Research Award from Eastern Michigan University (2016), and the EMU MI-ACE Distinguished Woman in Higher Education Leadership Award (2022). Corsianos is the writer and producer of the documentary “Reasonable Doubt: The Role of Bias, Demeanor and Perception of Credibility in Wrongful Convictions” (2024) and is currently working on a book manuscript on the criminal court process, intersectionality and wrongful convictions.
Why are we interested in Marilyn Corsianos’ perspective? Because her life experience touches upon three countries, and because she reflects on her ethnic identity in a way that goes beyond standard narratives, acknowledging the class dimension of her heritage. Because she has a hybrid perspective as a criminologist, and because she has been doing research on one of the most pressing problems of North American (and western, more broadly) societies, studying the institutions of policing and the criminal legal system and the many injustices they propagate, cultivate, and generate. Because her work, although it has focused on the Canadian and US-system, can shed light on several dark areas of the Greek policing system and the violence it unleashes on marginalized communities and individuals. Because she has been teaching criminology in US public universities, situated in diverse communities that deal with police violence very often. We met virtually on December 29, 2023, while she was visiting her family in Toronto, while I was visiting mine in Athens. Our discussion took place in English (the Greek version is available in The PressProject greek edition) and the transcript has been edited for readability and conciseness.
The narrative of Greek identity, its class dimension, and Max Weber
Marilyn, was your Greek heritage a burden to you as you were growing up?
Quite the opposite! I feel very privileged to have had this Greek heritage, and to have been immersed in the Greek community here in Toronto. For my parents, it was very important that we – my siblings and I went to Greek school, and that we learned the language, the culture and the history. So even though we were attending regular school in the Canadian school system, we would also attend Greek school on the weekends and on one weekday afternoon, where the first half of the day was dedicated to learning the Greek language, grammar, history, the culture, and then in the afternoon we would learn Greek traditional dances. It was a great experience to be with other Greek Canadians. We would frequently put on performances for the parents and extended family, or gather for holiday celebrations such as Christmas. These events were frequent, so it brought a community of people together which was truly wonderful; I have many fond memories.
You grew up in Canada, as the child of Greek immigrants, you studied there, and later you moved to the US, where you have been living for the past several years. How many layers do you feel your identity has?
I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit. I think my ethnic identity is interconnected to a very particular narrative. And that narrative is shared by scores of Greeks who immigrated to Canada in the ‘50s and the ‘60s. And that’s the narrative of Greeks who had very limited formal schooling, who left Greece in search for a better life, who left Greece because of the scarcity of jobs, the lack of secure employment, and they came to Canada in the hope that they would find something better, some security and employment, the opportunity to make some money to support families back home. And I think for many of them the hope was that they would return to Greece at some point in the future. This is the story that I connect with. It makes me emotional at times, because many of these Greeks left everything they knew, everything that was familiar to them, their families, their country, their understanding of the culture, the people, and they came to a very foreign place. They didn’t speak the language, many of them came with a suitcase in their hands, and all their material possessions were in that one suitcase, and they came with a “sink or swim” mentality. They came here focused and driven with the hope that they would find secure employment. That story speaks to me, because that was the story of my parents and many Greek Canadians that I was surrounded by, as a child growing up in the city. I was born and raised in Canada, I was educated in Canada, but that connection to this Greek immigrant narrative is very much part of my consciousness. It’s an integral part of my identity.
So, when someone identifies, let’s say, as Greek Canadian, this doesn’t mean that they are equal part Greek, equal part Canadian. And that has to do with the individual experience of each person. Right?
In my case it’s not necessarily the country that is central to this identity. It’s the experience of a class of people and the struggles that they represent, the challenges that they were confronted with, and their resilience and strong work ethic. I think a lot about that. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Max Weber’s book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In many ways the Greeks who immigrated to Toronto in the ‘50s and ‘60s personify what Weber talked about in his writings. They had this unwavering work ethic, and a commitment to accomplish something better than what they had left behind at home. And they worked endless hours as they tried to stay focused on their goals. If you look at the early Greek immigrants, many of them worked as laborers, in factories. They worked in construction or as cleaners. And they saved and saved and saved. The goal was to save to hopefully then move into entrepreneurial fields and open up their own businesses, and many of them did. Within a few years many of them were able to open up their own restaurants or ice cream parlors or grocery stores. And they were always committed to something better for their children. They were very family focused. And I think that speaks to me on so many levels, and I recognize how privileged we are because of the obstacles that immigrants, like my parents, had to confront and overcome in the pursuit of something better for their children, their family, and community. It is a Greek Canadian identity in the sense that this country (Canada) made it possible for me to not shy away from my Greek identity, not to hide it, not to conceal it, but to celebrate it. And Canada was also the country that opened its doors to my parents. When I was offered tenure track positions in the United States, my father was still alive at the time, and we talked about the irony of it that the US was offering me these positions because the US was the country that had denied him entry in the 1960s due to the national origins quota system that they had in place. Back then the formula used gave preference to people from Northern and Western Europe, but entry for people from Southern and Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East was drastically limited. So, Canada was the country that made many things possible for my parents, and by extension, my brothers and me. We were able to experience opportunities that were quite foreign to my parents when we look at where they were born and where they were raised.
The many ways to study crime, and data-centered vs experience-centered criminology
What motivated you to be a criminologist?
I’ve always been very intrigued by the various factors that lead people to violate laws. Equally, I’ve been very much interested in understanding who has the power to define what behaviors become criminal. Why do people commit certain types of crimes? Why are certain behaviors defined as criminal and others are not, and how context matters where you have the exact same behaviors in one situation being criminal, yet in another situation they’re viewed very differently, may be accepted as necessary or not deviant or even heroic. If you look at, for instance, the act of killing, in a time of war or in self-defense versus premeditated murder. What is the criminal legal system, why is the system structured the way it is, who benefits from the system, what’s the purpose of it? Is it punishment? Is it crime prevention? Is it rehabilitation? I’ve had these kinds of questions from a very young age.
When I started my undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto, I was working for an organization that provided support to women who were addicted to drugs and alcohol. I learned a lot from these women, hearing their stories. Many of them had been in and out of the criminal legal system. They had been incarcerated, put in jail for some time, put in prison. And it was very painful and at the same time insightful to see how they were impacted by the system, how the system failed to see how they were victims. They were being treated as offenders, but they were in actuality victims. Many of them had a history of violent victimization, they were survivors of sexual and physical assault. Many of them were doing what they could do or what they knew to do to survive and had been picked up by the police and put into the system. Prison was not the answer for these women, and yet the system was very punitive. During my undergraduate studies I did some volunteer work for a police department working as a victims’ advocate. I would respond to a scene when the police were investigating, and my role would be to offer support to victims of crimes, talk to them, find out what kinds of needs they had, some of them needed counseling, some of them wanted various social service agencies to intervene. Observing, hearing, and listening to the stories had an impact on me, but also equally impactful was observing the police. The time I spent with the police was a real eye opener in terms of how the police treated different groups of people differently. The abuse of powers that I witnessed, the way discretionary powers were abused, the lack of ethics at times. And working with some professors as an undergraduate student allowed me to learn from the different research that my professors were conducting at the time. I think all these factors contributed to my decision to ultimately pursue criminology as a field of study.
Do you feel that because of your multicultural background you have a hybrid way of looking at things as a criminologist?
Absolutely. I think when we’re immersed in different cultures, with intersectional identities, we’re committed to looking at things from many different angles. I think we tend to be critical of ethnocentric views that privileges a certain way of doing things. So, for instance, when we talk about criminology in the US, it’s very much focused on positivism. More mainstream criminologists in the US typically take the approach that there’s an objective reality out there to be studied, and they tend to privilege quantitative measures and statistical analysis in their studies. This is very different from my training in Canada, where we were exposed to more diverse methodological approaches in studying crime. In the Canadian context, and this is similar in the UK context and Australia, New Zealand, other English-speaking countries, positivism tends not to be privileged over other methodologies I’m well versed in quantitative as well as qualitative methodological approaches, for instance, conducting interviews, participant observation, ethnographic studies, experiments, interpretive sociology. So, this whole idea of studying how people construct meaning in their day-to-day lives, in the decisions they make, is important. But, in the US, quantitative data is often privileged in the field and you’re expected to accept the data at face value. But quantitative data must be interpreted. You cannot just accept them at face value. Statistics themselves are social constructs.
We have to understand how meaning is created. Context matters. You ask one question to a group of people here, and that same question may be interpreted very differently by another group of people living someplace else or representing a different culture or different lived experience or a different upbringing. We have to understand the language that is used. Take for example a study that looks at rape victims to find out how many people have experienced rape. Your results are going to vary drastically depending on how your participants understand the word rape. For some people it may mean one specific form of violence, for others it may be more varied. Other participants may attach the word rape to an experience that involves someone who is a stranger, and not necessarily someone who is a so-called intimate or someone perhaps they’re married to or living with. The social construction of concepts is critical, and we constantly have to be interpreting the data in order to gain meaningful insight about the experiences of people. I feel very privileged to have been exposed to diverse theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches in the study of crime. We have to be open to presenting and understanding experiences in many diverse ways.
Do you have any idea of what might be the root cause for this difference between the US and Canada?
It’s a good question. The criminal legal system is enormous in the US. Many people are put into this system day in, day out. It’s an entire industry when you look at the people who are employed by the system, judges, lawyers, police officers, probation officers, parole officers, etc. And it’s also a huge business when you look at the amount of money that is generated by the criminal legal system. One in three US adults has a criminal conviction in the United States, that number is astounding! Μany of them are misdemeanors, and in many of these cases people, as part of their conviction, are required to pay fines. These fines bring in a lot of money to the city or to the State, a lot of money. And so, there’s a lot of emphasis placed on numbers, to show the need for this system. In order for policing as an institution to continue to exist, the police need to promote the image that they are a needed service. How do you ensure people are convinced that the police are a needed service? You ensure that people continue to feel insecure, continue to feel fear of becoming a victim of crime, buy into the idea that the possibility of victimization is likely. If you increase fear, it has real consequences. People are more likely to believe that the institution of policing must exist, that they’re there to protect us, and so people are less likely to see the abuses of power or the discrimination or the racist practices in play.
The second part to ensuring organizational survival when you look at policing is to convince the public that you are effective in doing what you claim to do. So, how do you ensure that you are perceived as a needed service and as an effective service? Numbers become the answer! Let’s show the data, the quantitative data of all the crimes that are taking place in our society and all the arrests being made by the police then very few people will question the role the police play in the narrative of crime. Very few people question how police directly impact both the data and the narrative of crime in the US context, because we fail to look at how police prioritize certain crimes over others, how they enforce particular laws against particular groups of people, and how they proactively police certain neighborhoods over others. And so, people walk away assuming that certain crimes are inevitable, and that we must take certain steps to avoid becoming victims of crime. And then, the numbers [are used] to show how the police are effective. So, if the police show that they made so many arrests, if they were able to “decrease crime in certain crime categories”, then they can promote to the public the idea that they are an effective service. This is organizational survival. Νumbers have become very important to the organizational survival of the criminal legal system. It’s a system intended to maintain the status quo and protect privileged positions, and unfortunately, crime is big business in the United States.
Social inequalities within the criminal legal system
A big part of your research is related to social inequalities within the criminal legal system, inequalities that have to do with race, class, and gender discrimination. Would you care to talk to us more about this, and maybe provide some examples of social inequalities that reside within the US system?
The criminal legal system in the US is replete with problems. It’s a system that privileges some over others. It’s a system that is applied often arbitrarily and discriminatorily. When you look at the groups of people who are disproportionately policed, arrested, charged, convicted, incarcerated, they are poor people, and people of color especially African Americans; they are disproportionately policed and disproportionately represented in prison. It’s a system that when you look at it from the level of policing, the kinds of crimes, the kinds of behaviors that become prioritized are largely low-level crimes or crimes that are disproportionately committed by poor people. So, the policing system doesn’t prioritize the crimes of institutions. It doesn’t prioritize corporate crimes or other types of white-collar crimes, but it’s a system largely focused on low level crimes. Police often proactively police drug users or low-level drug dealing, street prostitution, minor theft. When you look at the different types of behaviors that constitute violations of the law, the police proactively enforce a small subset of laws that largely translate to policing poor people and marginalized communities.
And then it’s a system where – if you are arrested- if you have the resources, if you’re somebody from the middle class or the middle upper class, you have the resources to hire attorneys who are going to work harder to represent you, and if you are falsely accused, chances are you’re going to not settle for any plea bargain, and you’re going to be adamant about going to trial and fighting these charges. When you don’t have the resources, a court-appointed attorney is provided for you, but the court-appointed attorneys are overwhelmed with cases. They are overworked, and oftentimes what we see is they try to get their clients to plea bargain, to agree to plead guilty on a lesser charge in exchange for having other more serious charges dismissed. And it’s amazing to see how often, and I’ve seen this in my own research, how often people who are innocent, who have been wrongfully accused but just don’t have the resources, they will settle for pleading guilty to a lesser crime because they don’t want to spend the next 5, 6, 8 months sitting in jail waiting for trial, because they have children to take care of, they have jobs to go back to. They have rent to pay, they have food to put on the table, and they are forced to plead guilty, pay the fine and return to their homes.
And what happens when a case reaches the courtroom?
A poor person coming into the system expects not to be believed. A middle upper-class person who is charged comes into the system expecting to be believed when they go to court, and they are able to tell their story. You know, when you look at jurors, oftentimes they tend to be very different than who defendants are, just by the nature of who gets disproportionately policed. And when you look at jurors who tend to be more privileged, you might have people who were able to take time off work and be there, and be part of the courtroom, as a willing participant in the system. Oftentimes there’s a disconnect in the lived experiences of jurors versus the lived experiences of defendants, and the implicit biases on the part of jurors,, even if they have the best intentions, and think they can be neutral and not biased against a particular defendant. We know from psychology that implicit biases play out in many different ways in terms of the way jurors read people, the way they see people, the assumptions they make because of perhaps someone’s race, or because of someone’s disability, or because of someone who presented as angry during the trial. Or maybe they’re not showing the “appropriate emotions” that are expected of a particular victim. So, the system is replete with problems. It’s inherently biased. It’s inherently racist. It’s inherently discriminatory. This is why I don’t refer to the criminal legal system as the criminal justice system, because there’s rarely justice in the system. I refer to it as a criminal legal system or the criminal processing system because it is processing people day in, day out. It’s a huge industry.
I was wondering about gender discrimination within the criminal legal system. Could you elaborate on this?
Oftentimes, when we look specifically at women as a category, we see that women were rarely studied prior to the ‘60s and ‘70s. The predominantly male criminologists in the US relegated women to the margins because they thought, well, women aren’t committing as many crimes. So, the focus was primarily on men, or they assumed that the studies focusing on men could be applied to women, too. And it wasn’t until feminist criminology as a discipline was born in the ‘70s that women started to become centralized in studies. The contributions by feminist criminologists have been huge. When we looked at how women are treated in the criminal justice system, we started to see differences in experiences along gender lines. For instance, women who were privileged, like upper-class white women, oftentimes were shown chivalry. There was a sense, by predominantly male criminal justice agents, to not want to arrest these women who may have violated certain laws, or if they were arrested and charged, there was a reluctance on the part of judges to convict these women, whereas poor women or women of color were not shown this kind of chivalry. In fact, to the contrary, they were treated much more harshly, much more aggressively. Similarly, and we see this today, too, women who are accused of crimes that tend to violate dominant gender norms, in other words women who are accused of committing excessively violent crimes, or they’re accused of committing crimes against family members, primarily children, if they’re convicted, they tend to be treated much more harshly by the system in comparison to their male counterparts who are convicted of similar crimes against family members.
Yes, because that falls outside of what’s expected of them socially. Correct?
Exactly! Approximately 10% of the US prison population is women, so people will say that women are getting an advantage in the system. But the reality is that women commit fewer crimes in comparison to men. And when we control for specific types of crimes, we do see gender differences. And women are treated more harshly in comparison to their male counterparts for similar crimes, when women are perceived as violating the dominant gender norms, by being excessively violent, or again committing crimes against family members. But when women are victims of certain types of crimes, there’s a tendency for women to not be believed. We see that with women who are survivors of sexual violence, for instance. And it’s only been recently with the #MeToo movement that there’s been more of a national recognition, increased consciousness, bringing to light experiences of victimization that scores of women have experienced. When you have ten different women saying they’ve been victimized by person X, and they’re telling similar stories, who are you going to believe? Are you going to believe the one male saying, “they’re making it up”? Or are you going to believe these survivors, who are all saying the same thing? But, unfortunately, too frequently survivors have not been given a voice in the system. Too often, sexual violence perpetrators are not held accountable, and too often victims continue to be blamed for their victimization or are treated as if they’re not “credible” victims.
I also do a lot of research in the area of policing, and I’ve published a couple of books on gender and policing, where I look at the experiences of women officers, and how oftentimes the culture of policing makes it very difficult for women to be integrated because of the emphasis on hyper masculinity and the brotherhood of policing, where women are often seen as the outsiders within the system.
Crime committed by poor people is prioritized over corporate or institutional crime
I’d like to go back to the class discrimination issue. Besides what you described earlier, where else in the criminal legal system can we see a strong bias against poor people?
At every level! Beginning with the laws in place, and the way we respond to crimes of institutions and corporations versus the crimes of the poor. Behaviors that lead to violence against citizens, when they’re done by corporations or institutions are very rarely thought of as criminal, and yet violent actions committed by the poorest members in society are automatically treated as criminal and are proactively policed and enforced.
Are you referring to economic crime or other types of crime, like physically violent crimes?
Both. During the economic crisis in 2008, who was held responsible for that? I mean, people lost their jobs, they lost their livelihood, they lost their homes, people committed suicide. Who was held responsible for the actions of big banks and big corporations? So, economic crimes for sure, but also violent crimes. When pharmaceutical companies make drugs available to the public that lead to serious health risks, or when a product is released to consumers that CEOs have knowledge that it could potentially malfunction and lead to the death of people; these have violent consequences when people are harmed, maimed, or end up being killed. When are corporations and institutions held accountable? They very rarely are. When we look at policing as an institution, and you look at the number of innocent civilians who have been killed at the hands of the police, how often has policing as an institution been held accountable? Individual police officers are held accountable rarely, and only very recently. But for decades and decades, thousands of people have been killed or have been seriously injured at the hands of police, innocent people. So that’s what I mean about the crimes of institutions and corporations.
So, let’s go back to your original question, beginning with the laws. You see how class is privileged; this is central in the way our legal system defines certain behaviors as criminal and others as not. The policing system protects the status quo, the policing system operates to create the illusion that the police are keeping society safe, that they’re out there “fighting the bad guys”. But in actuality the so-called bad guys tend to be the poorest members in society, tend to be the ones who will not bring direct harm to the majority of people in society. It’s other spaces, other institutions that oftentimes bring the most negative consequences to people’s lives, people’s livelihoods. But that remains less visible or hidden by the system of policing that’s in place.
Could you give us an example of implicit biases after a case has reached the court?
There’s been a whole body of research done on implicit biases and explicit biases, how judges bring their own lived experiences to the courtroom, and that ultimately plays out in how they perceive a particular defendant, or how they perceive a particular witness. The jurors are integral in the process in how they perceive a witness or a defendant. As a juror, you are instructed to look at the demeanor of a witness and make a decision as to whether you’re going to believe that witness. This is not the case in several European courts. Oftentimes they’re given the exact opposite directive, “do not look at the demeanor of a witness”, try to focus on what is being said, try to look objectively at the evidence that’s being presented. In the US it is quite the opposite. So now you’re looking at the demeanor of someone. And this has a huge negative impact on working class folks. People who don’t have formal schooling, who aren’t articulate, aren’t expressing themselves in a way that oftentimes middle-class jurors or judges are expecting. And that also impacts people with various disabilities. I mean, there’s been a lot of interesting research done looking at folks who are on the spectrum, not presenting the “set of emotions” that are oftentimes expected by mainstream society, of someone who is a “legitimate victim”, or someone who is expected to be seen as “credible”, the subjectivity of it all. It plays out in very different ways with oftentimes devastating consequences for individuals if the way they present themselves is outside the norm. And oftentimes it has a huge impact on people from different cultures, too. Different ethnicities understand people differently depending on the cultural context. And certainly, we see this with people who violate dominant gender norms, defendants who are, for example, transgender.
Criminalization of entire social groups: the process of othering
In Greece there have been numerous incidents of police officers shooting and killing male Romani, predominantly teenagers, in a way very similar to how US police officers have been treating young black males. And I’m sad to say this, but it’s true, many Greek people still think that Romanis are a source of crime, and that maybe violence against them is justified. I know this is a broad topic, but would you care to speak to us about the process of criminalization and demonization of entire communities?
This is a great question, but I feel that the answer would take an entire book! So, I will try to just hit some points. I think the process of demonization occurs when people in privileged positions engage in the process of othering. In other words, when they construct the other group as different from themselves, as less valuable. And they strip away the other group’s humanity. If the other group is constructed as different from them, whose values are different than the ones of the privileged group, if they’re constructed as a group that doesn’t have humanity, that doesn’t have feelings, then they are stripped away of any kind of emotions. We know this from psychology. You create a space where you can pretty much justify the most egregious acts against that group of people, because you’ve stripped them of humanity, and you convince yourself that they are different. And you have constructed them as somehow being less valuable, less worthy of care, of support, of services, of opportunities. And then it becomes easy to blame and to target, and it becomes easy to police, and it becomes easy to abuse and even kill. And we see this in war, too! When soldiers commit an act of killing against the other group, they can emotionally and psychologically justify their actions. When you construct the other group as the enemy, you are thinking that they are not like us, their values are different from us, and therefore they are beneath us. They are less valuable. We see that happening right now, with the different wars happening in the world. If you can demonize, if you can construct them as “the other”, as the opposite of you, when the police shoot and kill members of that group, you can justify it because the people harmed are seen as less worthy, less valuable. Their lives don’t matter because of this process of “othering”.
Of course, as you said, the reasons why there is the need for othering a certain group could be a huge discussion on its own.
Yes, absolutely. The process of “othering” distracts people from the actual source of the problems; from understanding political systems, social structures and power imbalances that produce the structural inequalities that serve and privilege some groups at the detriment of others.
Police violence, social inequalities, and militarization of the police
How are police violence and police brutality linked to social inequality at large?
I think there are many, many factors at play here once again. These are not easy questions! For one, there’s the culture of policing that plays an integral part in police brutality, in the way that police culture oftentimes condones police violence. In my research, I have found that when police commit violence, oftentimes, if they’re able to hide the egregious acts of other police officers, they will do so, especially in the absence of so-called evidence, like, if there is a cell phone recording of the act that catches the police officer assaulting a citizen. Or if people who have filed a complaint against the police are members of marginalized communities, then those complainants will not be believed by mainstream society, they will not be deemed credible. The tendency by the police is to hide, conceal the abuse and protect fellow officers. So, when you look at the tenets of police culture, for instance, the so-called brotherhood of policing, there is this sense of protecting police officers. A sense of us versus them mentality, us, the police, and them, the society. And they ensure that their solidarity remains intact within the police culture. So oftentimes it’s that culture that operates in a way that condones police violence and hides it; And in instances where they cannot hide it, because, for example, the complainants are people from, let’s say, the middle upper class, where the police know that they will be perceived as more “legitimate victims” or “legitimate complainants”, then what tends to happen here is that members of the upper management will come out and make a public statement. They’ll invite the media, and they will construct the individual officers involved in the abuse as anomalies as “bad apples” who are the exception. They will say, this does not represent policing. Think back to what I said earlier, organizational survival is very important in order to ensure that policing as an institution remains intact! That’s why they will take the steps to terminate that police officer and respond in a way that will appease the masses, the public, if you will.
You mentioned earlier the term “hypermasculinity”, what did you mean and how is it connected to police violence?
Police violence and hyper masculinity go hand-in-hand with the policing system. You know, policing in the US context is very much focused on aggressive crime control. There is a punitive approach to responding to communities. It values hyper masculinity in the way that violence is condoned, sometimes promoted, sometimes celebrated. And police are often expected to be aggressive, to show emotional detachment from victims of crimes. There also tends to be a sense of authoritarianism on the part of police officers, “I am the law” or “we are the police, we know better, we are the experts in fighting crime”. So, it’s a very masculine, very privileged, entitled position. Policing as an institution cannot be separated from this crime-control model that requires the police to respond aggressively and where violent means are too frequently condoned. Even the history of formal policing [points in that direction]. Some of our earlier examples of a formal policing system in the US go back to slave patrols in the south, when they would look for runaway slaves to return back to plantation owners. And even in the northeast, the way policing developed in the early years, in the 1800s, was very much centered on using violence or the fear of violence to control the behavior of the masses while protecting politicians, and the assets of property owners, businesses, and maintaining the status quo.
Today, the police system is structured like the military. It’s militaristic, it’s very hierarchical, there’s a command structure, and you’re expected as an officer to not break rank, and go to the rank above you. Any problems you have, you should go to your immediate supervisor, oftentimes referred to as your superior. Unfortunately, this emphasis on militarized approaches to responding to communities too frequently leads to violent outcomes when, for instance, an unarmed citizen is seriously injured or killed by police. But to the contrary, the emphasis should be on de-escalating potentially violent situations and on building a sense of community while working with citizens to find out what are the problems in the communities. Instead, what we see too frequently is the police assuming that they know what the problems are and what the solutions are. So, when you look at the individual police officers, there’s a lot of autonomy in their day-to-day policing duties. Police officers have a lot of autonomy in how they patrol, where they patrol, the decisions they make on the streets. There isn’t a whole lot of oversight of police officers on patrol, and that also creates the space for a lot of abuse of powers, especially against people representing marginalized communities. There isn’t this sense of accountability that we tend to see when police are responding to middle-upper class communities.
I’m thinking of a situation which has been happening way too often, when a police officer decides to just shoot at the person who’s running away from them because of a minor violation they have just conducted. And I think, okay, why don’t you let them go! I mean, is it so important to arrest this person that you decided to shoot and eventually kill them because they ran away? What’s more important, the police to make an arrest or for this person to live?
That’s a very good point. And it speaks volumes about the frame of mind that many officers operate from. And that is related to the way officers are trained, to the culture of policing, how they perceive themselves as police officers, as the “crime-controllers”. And it’s critical because it doesn’t translate to an understanding of the people who you are policing, who often tend to be the most powerless in society. There is a frame of mind on the part of many officers that you need to arrest that person, because “we are the law enforcers”, and by arresting the person, “we’re protecting society”. And they’re not concerned or not aware of the consequences to these actions; that [by arresting that person] and putting them into the criminal legal system, there are serious repercussions for those individuals. These police responses do not address the structural inequalities in society. You’re not addressing the reason that person who you’re chasing committed the crime in the first place, which oftentimes is linked to socioeconomic struggles, lack of opportunities, systemic racism, discrimination, etc. Whether they shoplifted or they wrote a bad check and therefore committed minor fraud in order to buy groceries to feed their children, or whether they’re using drugs as a coping mechanism because of the impoverished conditions that they’re living under or the violence that they may be subjected to in their home, we are not treating the issues. We have a system that’s responding aggressively to people’s actions without addressing the causes of what led them to commit a particular crime.
Moving toward a meaningful change of the policing system
You mentioned earlier that one thing the police aren’t doing is working with the communities to better understand the needs of people. Would that be a way to build a more equitable police system?
You know, when I started my research in the ‘90s, there was a lot of work being done in the area of community policing. Community policing in the ‘90s was presented as a new model in policing. In both the Canadian context and the US context community policing was presented as revolutionary. So, when you look at the community policing model as it was being presented back in the 90s and early 2000s, there was a lot of focus on trying to create a less hierarchical system. There was this idea that the police were now going to take more initiatives, not just sitting in their police cars parked, but rather getting out there doing foot patrol, getting out there on bicycles, going door to door to get to know the people who worked in their communities, who lived in their communities, who perhaps went to school in those communities, had businesses, ran church groups. The community policing model was a realization, I think, that especially in a big city with very diverse populations, the problems in one area were not necessarily shared in another part of the city. The idea was that you would have different community policing officers working in different parts of the city, interacting with residents in those communities to collectively identify the concerns and collectively identify possible solutions to those problems. Also, part of this model was this idea that police were going to engage in more proactive policing, not just reactive, waiting for a 911 call to come, but rather proactively taking the initiative to identify crimes by getting to know the people. So, people in the community become the eyes and ears of the police, and the police may be doing some undercover work, and ultimately preventing a crime from taking place. So, as we started to do more and more research, at least in the Canadian context, criminologists were much more critical of community policing, because we realized that oftentimes it was simply rhetoric that was used by members of upper administration to present policing as somehow having changed. But in actuality police patrols had not changed, the types of crimes that were being policed had not changed, the types of communities that were disproportionately being policed did not change. In fact, we saw a very different kind of service, if you will. Community policing took a very different form in middle-class, upper-class neighborhoods, where residents were much more pleased with community policing because they tended to have more of a voice. On the other hand, community policing in poor communities translated to aggressive crime patrols, not the kind of service that was being presented in this community policing model. So, you had very different forms of policing depending on who the community was, who the residents were. Their class mattered, their race mattered. And police still very much remained paramilitaristic in terms of the kinds of policing approaches that were rewarded and celebrated within police circles. It wasn’t the individuals engaging in community policing initiatives [that were rewarded], but rather the ones who were making many arrests, and those were the officers that would get promoted and would get awards, etc.
So what would a more equitable police system look like? Is this even possible in a society full of inequalities?
I think if we have to work within the current policing system, there are things we can do to try to limit some of the abuses, to try to create accountability mechanisms, and I can speak a little bit about that. But at the same time, I’ll also say that, if we want meaningful change, then the entire institution of policing has to change; we need a very different system.
If we’re working with the current policing system, I think education is important. I think requiring police officers to have at least a four-year university degree should become part of hiring. Too many police officers in the United States have only a high school diploma. It is not required to have a university degree for most local police departments. I’m not saying education is the answer for everything, but it’s an important step, and it exposes an officer to diverse ways of thinking, especially if you encourage officers to have classes on social stratification, race relations, ethnicity, diversity, gender. It just makes police officers more informed, more aware. I think moving away from this emphasis on hyper masculinity, especially in the US context, is critical, and instead placing value on critical thinking, effective communication, offering more training on de-escalation of potentially violent situations, increasing police accountability and promoting ongoing engagement between the police and diverse communities. The police culture has to change. We have to move away from the sense of brotherhood of policing, this us versus them mentality. And I think there could be accountability mechanisms put in place, where we begin by tracking the day-to-day activities of police officers, and I know some police departments have databases, but there’s no uniformity in those databases in terms of what kinds of information is collected. In some police departments they will collect information on how many stops the police officer made, motorists or pedestrians stopped by individual police officers, what was the race, what was the ethnic identity, what was the gender of the of the motorist stopped, or of the of the pedestrian, was there an arrest made, how many complaints are filed against a particular police officer? Are there lawsuits pending against that particular police officer? Did they draw their weapon, did they assault the citizen? What was the level of injury? Did the citizen require hospitalization? Those are just some examples of the different kinds of information that can be collected and put in a database for each individual officer, because, as I said earlier, there’s a lot of autonomy on the part of individual police officers when they’re out there on patrol. If we created a uniform database system that collects all these pieces of information and was implemented by all police agencies, then that would increase the likelihood that a corrupt or abusive or potentially “problem officer” would be flagged by the system leading to the officer being terminated, disciplined, or required to undergo more training or further education depending on the patterns and types of behavior. So those are just some examples of what can be done within the policing system.
But I think if we’re ever going to see significant differences, meaningful differences in our society, we need to reimagine policing. We need a policing system that embodies what I would call a policing by consent, by consent of the people, where everyone has a voice in the system, where one group of people is not privileged over others. When certain groups of people don’t end up being disproportionately targeted, policed, harassed, arrested, put into the system, injured, killed. You need a system that doesn’t value and prioritize punishment or aggressiveness, but something that’s very much focused on the fact that people are going to make mistakes. Human beings make mistakes! So, we need a system that is going to support people and help people. A system that is focused on being restorative is very important. A collectivist system that’s designed to help people lead intact lives, peaceful, successful lives. Not a system that is designed to hurt and destroy. And we also need to recognize that the system itself is run by human beings. Human beings are inherently flawed; they have implicit and explicit biases, and these are the people who are our judges, jurors, police officers and so forth. So, it’s not surprising then, under the current system, to end up with scores of innocent people who are falsely arrested, falsely accused, falsely convicted. We have people who have spent decades in prison for crimes they never committed.
And people are even executed without having actually committed a crime.
So, if you create a system that is restorative and supportive, that also rules out the possibility of innocent people being deprived of their liberties and being destroyed. It requires us to think outside the box, and it requires us to be very bold and think of what policing by consent would look like. I really think that we need to slowly start moving in that direction if we want to see a meaningful difference in the world we live in.
I am thinking that if we were to reimagine the entire police system, then most probably this would require us to rethink other institutions, as well. Because each institution doesn’t work in a vacuum, it is interconnected with an entire system of social values. And it all boils down to applying pressure in a bottom-up approach. This is where change will come from, the people, right?
Yes, many other institutions will need to change too, like the education system in the US. The phenomenon of the school-to-prison pipeline speaks volumes about how schools now have become the arm of the criminal legal system in many ways, where schools are far too frequently relying on the police to respond to problems or situations between students that should be handled at the school level. And instead, schools are increasingly concerned with being sued. They’re concerned about liability, and the tendency is to call in the police and let the police respond, and they wipe their hands clean without looking at the consequences of their actions. You see how class and race are also integral in this?
Because when a middle upper-class student perhaps is involved in a physical confrontation with another student in school, and the police are called in, that student’s parents have the means to hire attorneys, to threaten to sue the school, to call in the media, to be heard, to be seen as credible, to be seen as “legitimate”, and get the results they want. A student who perhaps is being raised by a single mom who’s working three jobs to make ends meet, who has limited formal schooling, will be put into the system. And now [this student] ends up being arrested, convicted, sent to juvenile detention, or even suspended from school for a few days if there is no arrest. That often gets them in more trouble if they’re now out of school on their own without adult supervision. They can even end up getting expelled from the school where they end up waiting a couple of months before a new school will admit them. And then it just becomes this big cycle that keeps kids into a system and oftentimes increases the likelihood that they’ll become adult offenders after that. So, it’s a horrible reality to be confronted with, something that should be handled internally at the school level, becomes a police issue, where unfortunately, the police are seen as the solution to the problem. There are children who come from very different backgrounds, have faced different economic struggles, and don’t have the social or cultural capital as some of the privileged students in the school. The teachers and school staff and school administrators cannot make the assumption that students should know how to behave in particular social settings at school. And it should be the school’s job to help students gain that social and cultural capital, to be successful, rather than waiting for students to behave in a way that violates school rules, and then to respond aggressively, calling in the police. That ends up putting kids down a path that has devastating consequences to their lives.
Marilyn, I would like to thank you for your time and willingness to talk to me about all this. It was a truly compelling and thought-provoking conversation.
Thank you, Eleni!
All photos are courtesy of Dr. Corsianos. Here you can watch a ~4min video of Dr. Corsianos and her co-author Dr. Walter S. DeKeseredy presenting their book “Violence against women in pornography”.