Model Guardians: The Gendered Racialization of Asian American Police Officers

Abstract

21st century police departments in the United States actively promote a community policing model based on mutual trust and cooperation, with a focus on increasing the racial diversity of their workforce. This article focuses on the racialization processes and self-perceptions of Asian American men police officers in Southern California. Drawing on 26 semi-structured interviews, I find that Asian American men police officers, citing their cultural values of hard work, respect, and cooperativeness, position themselves as modern ideal officers, what I call model guardians. Bringing together literatures on police masculinity, Asian American masculinity and model minority politics, I illustrate how Asian American men use model minority capital to symbolically distance themselves from Black, Latinx, and women officers, thereby accumulating status. Even as Asian American men officers experience marginalization, they incorporate their struggles into a model minority perseverance narrative while also claiming relatability to the racialized people they police. Model guardian ideology demonstrates how even within an ostensibly diversifying field, police officers sustain and repackage carceral logics in racialized and gendered ways.