Chapter 9: Black on Blue: A Qualitative Examination on How African American Collegians View Law Enforcement

Since the emergence of slave patrols in eighteenth century South Carolina, African Americans have had chaotic relations with police officers (Chaney & Robertson, 2015). The majority of scholarship in this area has examined the strained relationship between police and African Americans (Chaney & Robertson, 2013; Embrick, 2015; Hall, Hall, & Perry, 2016). However, few studies have examined how college students view police (Lewis, Wilks, Geiger, Barthelemy, & Livermore, 2017; Wu, Sun, & Triplett, 2009). Lewis et al. (2017) focused on the different attitudes about police held by White and Black college students, but none of the aforementioned studies has emphasized the perceptions of police held by African American students. We hope the present chapter starts a new trend of scholarship that focus on how Black college students view police with the primary goal of improving interactions between these two groups. In this chapter, we focus on the perceptions of police held by 30 African American¹ college students who attend a Historically Black College/University (HBCU) in the South. The foundational question for this research is, “In general, how do you view the police?”