Dissertation Title: Bringing it Home: How Family Values Shape Policing

Committee: Kristen Schilt, Robert Vargas, Eman Abdelhadi

In my dissertation, I illustrate how police power in the United States is sustained through its relationship with the white, heteropatriarchal, nuclear family. In it, I argue that “the family”—as both a discourse and a social structure—plays a central role in maintaining and reproducing police power, a phenomenon that is particularly apparent in instances of gender-based violence perpetrated by police. I use mixed qualitative methods to leverage three primary sources of data: I conducted 102 in-depth interviews with Chicago Police Department (CPD) officers; spouses of police officers in Chicago; and advocates responding to police violence. Using public records requests, I obtained administrative records from 552 complaints made against police officers that included gender-based violence. Finally, I triangulated these data using content analysis of online debates about gender-based violence and police legitimacy. I use these data sources to show how the logics of “the family” shape police power across interpersonal interactions, institutional bureaucracy, and public discourse.