Anne Gray Fischer, "The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification" (UNC Press, 2022)

Aug 5, 2024

Anne Gray Fischer, an author known for her work on the intersections of sex work, policing, and state violence, shares her insightful journey through research. She discusses how sex workers shaped her understanding of policing tactics and systemic injustice. Fischer highlights the historical context of sexual policing and its disproportionate impact on women of color. The conversation also touches on the complexities of feminist activism, shifting police legitimacy, and the urgent need to reclaim women's narratives in modern discussions about race and violence.

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Intro

00:00 • 1min

Unpacking Policing and Sex Work History

01:30 • 14min

The Dynamics of Police Power and Racialized Morality

15:31 • 5min

Power Dynamics in Policing: Institutional Pressures and Control

20:59 • 2min

Policing, Race, and Gender in Urban America

22:57 • 25min

Controversial Perspectives on Sex Work and Policing

47:44 • 18min

Reclaiming Narratives: Violence, Feminism, and the Legacy of Eileen Wournos

01:05:24 • 5min

Anne Gray Fischer speaks about her path to and through research, including how sex workers informed her analysis of policing and state violence, the role of law enforcement in struggles over economic development, and the intellectual and practical factors of research design.

Men, especially Black men, often stand in as the ultimate symbol of the mass incarceration crisis in the United States. Women are treated as marginal, if not overlooked altogether, in histories of the criminal legal system. In The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification (UNC Press, 2022)--a searing history of women and police in the modern United States--Anne Gray Fischer narrates how sexual policing fueled a dramatic expansion of police power. The enormous discretionary power that police officers wield to surveil, target, and arrest anyone they deem suspicious was tested, legitimized, and legalized through the policing of women's sexuality and their right to move freely through city streets.

Throughout the twentieth century, police departments achieved a stunning consolidation of urban authority through the strategic discretionary enforcement of morals laws, including disorderly conduct, vagrancy, and other prostitution-related misdemeanors. Between Prohibition in the 1920s and the rise of broken windows policing in the 1980s, police targeted white and Black women in distinct but interconnected ways. These tactics reveal the centrality of racist and sexist myths to the justification and deployment of state power. Sexual policing did not just enhance police power. It also transformed cities from segregated sites of urban vice into the gentrified sites of Black displacement and banishment we live in today. By illuminating both the racial dimension of sexual liberalism and the gender dimension of policing in Black neighborhoods, The Streets Belong to Us illustrates the decisive role that race, gender, and sexuality played in the construction of urban police regimes.

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