Private Policing in Town: Reflections on Discussions among Police Officers, Serving the Client, and ‘race’ in Public Space

 The neighbourhood of Hyde Park, in Chicago, is home to one of the most important private universities in the US. The site holds a unique position in the history of policing public space, for it has been a theatre of change: police officers deployed by the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD: a private police force) have gradually supplanted their public colleagues. The signing of municipal contracts has given the UCPD the possibility of managing the territory both inside and outside the campus. Following exploratory ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in Chicago in 2013, this article analyses the attitudes of UCPD police officers to policing public space, as well as to the populations in their jurisdiction. These populations include the overtly white members of the academic communities that they are bound to serve, and the university community residents, the majority of whom also live in the surrounding historically black ghetto. Semistructured interviews as well as participant observation, the latter conducted whilst with the police, together show how ‘classical’ police practices have been adapted to the local context of Hyde Park. This transpires clearly in the combined use of racialised terms and colourblind, euphemistic puns, which refer to local categories while masking ethno-racial boundaries. This ‘screen’ vocabulary helps distinguish individuals who are perceived as legitimate clients from non-legitimate users, and so demonstrates the still present weight of invisibilised institutional racism.