From Here On Out, We’re All Blue: Interaction Order, Social Infrastructure, and Race in Police Socialization

Abstract

Motivated by the complicated history of race relations in policing, this article offers a social network analysis of the formation of relationships between recruits in a police academy. While the quantitative analysis is the core of this article, it is framed by an ethnographic description of how the interaction order within the academy functions as a mechanism for maintaining racism within police organizations. The academy’s social infrastructure was designed to generate encounters between recruits of various races. Recruits were divided into subgroups, which generally reflected the overall demographics of the cohort, so recruits of different races could get to know each other. While this academy had some success in forming ties between Black, Latino, and White recruits, it fell short of achieving the stated ideal of “we’re all blue.” Our results suggest that achieving this ideal lies in a distant future.