Institutional interactions and racial inequality in policing: How everyday encounters bridge individuals, organizations, and institutions

Racial disparities in policing are profound and accompanied by equally persistent gaps in trust. Analyses of these and other racial inequities are often bifurcated between institutional and individual levels of analysis. Here, I describe how everyday contacts between the public and doctors, teachers, or police officers—institutional interactions—can bridge these levels. Organizations direct and coordinate these agents' individual discretion; at the same time, individual agents relate to the public in ways institutions themselves cannot. The dual nature of these encounters links individual and dyadic processes to organizational and institutional ones. Using police stops as a paradigmatic example, I illustrate how institutional interactions contribute to racial gaps in police-community trust, how they can be used as a platform for changing the relationship between law enforcement and the public, and how they can inform research on racial inequality in a range of institutional contexts, including health and education.