Yasmiyn Irizarry, Associate Professor, African and African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas at Austin
Investigating Invisible Encounters: Mapping the Margins of Police Violence Against Black Women
Abstract: Police violence against black women is often overlooked in research on use of force, driven by data focused on fatalities, physical assaults, police stops, and demographic details. Legal estrangement exacerbates this, hindering efforts to track marginalized experiences like gender-based and sexual violence by police. As a result, current data and research systematically omit various types of force, private encounters, and heterogeneity among black women. This study addresses data invisibility in policing by combining black feminist epistemologies with critical race quantitative methods. Interviews with black women and an evolving local survey were used to develop recognizable measures spanning neglect, verbal and psychological abuse, sexual harassment, physical threats/assaults, and sexual coercion/assaults. Then, we conducted a nationally representative survey in 2020 with black women in the U.S. (n=1,603) to measure their lifetime risk by age, education, social class, skin tone, sexuality, gender identity, and immigration status. In taking an iterative, mixed methodological approach, we simultaneously challenge policing frames while mapping the margins of police encounters—ultimately showing that nearly half of black women experience police violence in their lifetime.
