Race, Gender, and Responses to the Police Among Ferguson Residents and Protesters

A large body of research has examined police behavior toward citizens and shown that police practices are geographically patterned. Disadvantaged neighborhoods are more likely to receive punitive policing than more affluent communities. However, little is known about how citizens manage encounters with police when they occur and few studies have examined how gender intersects with race and neighborhood context in determining reactions to and outcomes of police encounters. Using Black feminist theory as an analytical framework, we draw from in-depth interviews with Black residents and protesters in Ferguson, Missouri to analyze men and women’s narrative accounts of involuntary police encounters to investigate how they respond to encounters with officers, how such tactics shaped police–citizen outcomes, and whether these patterns vary by gender. Our findings suggest that the strategies that citizens employed are common across both genders; however, the police–citizen outcome is demonstrably shaped by gender