Evaluating Policing and Inequality: Making Evaluative Claims in Toronto Police Board Meetings During 2018-2023


Jimmy Xing, University of Toronto

This paper is about how the cultural repertoires people draw on to evaluate urban policing shape and are shaped by peoples understanding of inequality. Evaluation is a cultural process that contributes to the production and reproduction of inequality. (Lamont et al. 2014). Threads of empirical evidence that support the claim that evaluation helps create the conditions from which inequality takes shape are often drawn from private sectors and the labour market. That is, how evaluative practices on the organizational level during different stages of hiring, recruitment and promotion discriminate against or favour certain groups of employees (Castilla and Benard 2010; Rivera 2012). In turn, the existing literature often overlooks state institutions and how the evaluative claims aimed to scrutinize or reinforce state legitimacy can provide insights into the relationship between repertoires of evaluations and inequality. In an effort to dive into this less-studied area, I turn to police board meetings as my data source as previous studies that utilized police board meetings or police-organized community meetings suggest that nonenforcement practices involved in these public forums can promote inequality (Cheng 2022). More specifically, I draw on six years of Toronto Police Service Board meeting transcripts (2018-2023) to identify the cultural repertories meeting participants use to evaluate policing and to articulate their normative ideals about justice, inequality and community wellbeing, as well as how these repertories changed before, during and after George Floyd protests in Toronto. How people draw on empirically diverse repertoires of their evaluations is at the core of research in French pragmatic sociology (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006). The theoretical framework I use to code and analyze the data follows the line of work that explores the cultural repertories and economies of worth people marshal in various contexts to articulate values and evaluations (Lamont et al. 2016) as well as how orders of worth, which are systems of evaluations, provide actors with cultural repertoires for them to sustain their claims (Levi et al. 2020). I find that participants of police board meetings mainly draw on two economies of worth to evaluate local policing (civic and domestic) and the evaluations both shape and are shaped by meeting attendees changing understandings of inequality. On the one hand, people care about whether police practices are procedurally just and the civility of policing. They invoke repertories of fairness and equality to judge the quality of services the police provide. On the other hand, people are also mindful of local circumstances and draw on repertories of community and locality to evaluate how and if police tailor practices to ensure the neighbourhood and residents they police feel empowered, dignified and respected. I also find that since the wave of protests in 2020, evaluative narratives sustained by domestic order of worth experienced higher engagement rates in this particular local political forum. The implication of this trend will be discussed in the paper. This work aims to contribute to the literature on culture and inequality by looking at what institutionalized processes and cultural repertoires are in place to reinforce and challenge existing urban inequality. Moreover, because systems of evaluation are established through the availability and usage of cultural repertoires, the present paper also hope to offer insights into the politicizing process of cultural repertories that social movement activism supplies and its implications on the ground. 

This paper will be presented at the following session: