About the talk:

Policing is violent. And its violence is not distributed equally: stark racial disparities persist despite decades of efforts to address them. Amid public outcry and an ongoing crisis of police legitimacy, there is pressing need to understand not only how police perceive and use violence but also why.

With unprecedented access to three police departments and drawing on more than 100 interviews and 1,000 hours on patrol, The Danger Imperative provides vital insight into how police culture shapes officers’ perception and practice of violence. From the front seat of a patrol car, it shows how the institution of policing reinforces a cultural preoccupation with violence through academy training, departmental routines, powerful symbols, and officers’ street-level behavior.

This violence-centric culture makes no explicit mention of race, relying on the colorblind language of “threat” and “officer safety.” Nonetheless, existing patterns of systemic disadvantage funnel police hyperfocused on survival into poor minority neighborhoods. Without requiring individual bigotry, this combination of social structure, culture, and behavior perpetuates police violence is the logical consequence of an institutional culture that privileges officer survival over public safety.

About the speaker:

Michael Sierra-Arévalo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. He also serves as the Associate Director of UT's Liberal Arts Honors Program and as a member of the City of Austin's Public Safety Commission.

Sierra-Arévalo's research on policing, culture, firearms, and violence is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Criminology, Law & Society Review, and the Annual Review of Law and Social Science. His writing and research are also featured in a range of popular outlets, including The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Slate, and NPR.  

His first book, The Danger Imperative: Violence, Death, and the Soul of Policing, uses ethnographic field work and interviews with police officers in three U.S. cities to show how policing's cultural preoccupation with violence and death shapes police practice and social inequality. The Danger Imperative received the American Sociological Association (ASA) Sociology of Law Distinguished Book Award (2024) and the American Society of Criminology (ASC) Division of Policing Outstanding Book Award (2024).