Safe Routes to School? Black Caribbean Youth Negotiating Police Surveillance in London and New York City

Abstract

In this article, Derron Wallace examines how Black Caribbean youth perceive and experience stop-and-frisk and stop-and-search practices in New York City and London, respectively, while on their way to and from public schools. Despite a growing body of scholarship on the relationship between policing and schooling in the United States and United Kingdom, comparative research on how students experience stop-and-frisk/search remains sparse. Drawing on the BlackCrit tradition of critical race theory and in-depth interviews with sixty Black Caribbean secondary school students in London and New York City, Wallace explores how adolescents experience adult-like policing to and from schools. His findings indicate that participants develop a strained sense of belonging in British and American societies due to a security paradox: a policing formula that, in principle, promises safety for all but in practice does so at the expense of some Black youth. Participants in the ethnographic study learned that irrespective of ethnicity, Black youth are regularly rendered suspicious subjects worthy of scrutiny, even during the school commute.