Rewriting the Tale of Two Cities: On Race, Policing, and Property Justice

This Article illuminates a crisis of racialized overpolicing occurring
in a societal context rife with disparities in economic opportunity and access
to property along vectors of race and class. These disparities separate heavily
policed neighborhoods of color and white residential areas and tell a “tale of two
cities,” a metaphor for inequality predicated on the reality of unequally resourced,
racialized communities coexisting within the same polity.
The disparities in resources between metaphorical cities within a city
are reflected and reinforced in their relationships with law enforcement. The
well-resourced city looks to local police forces to ensure overall public safety,
including safeguarding private property, ownership of which is itself distributed
inequitably. Burdened by stereotypical attributions of criminality, the underresourced city is overpoliced, while its own security needs and neighborhood
priorities do not receive the level of police attention and assignment of resources
afforded better resourced, predominantly white spaces.
Focusing on this larger societal context of disparity, this Article argues
that reforming systems that have effectively segregated low-income people of
color and perpetuated material inequality is critical to addressing the patterns
of racialized policing that plague the less-resourced of the two cities within a
city. Police accountability measures that seek mainly to reform police “culture,”
an amorphous concept, have limited effectiveness and will not on their own
resolve the problem of racialized overpolicing. The Article argues that a more
promising approach to reform is one that directly targets interconnected racial,
economic, and spatial disparities, and discusses specific measures—eliminating
single-family zoning, monetary reparations to redress housing discrimination,
and a 21st Century version of the Homestead Act—that can begin to address
these disparities. Such an approach, underpinned by the idea of property justice,
is needed to reconnect separate and unequal “cities within a city,” build the
conditions necessary for community-wide safety, and support the critical work of
transforming the relationship between policing and race.