UC Santa Barbara

21st century police departments in the US actively promote a “community policing” model based on mutual trust and cooperation, with a focus on increasing the racial diversity of their workforce. While past studies of Black police officers and Latinx police officers show that racialized officers face discrimination, tokenism, community criticism, and conflicts of identity formation, virtually no research exists on the racialization processes and self-perceptions of Asian Americans, the fastest growing racial/ethnic group in the US. Because the controlling images associated with Asian American men (non-threatening, bookish, rule-oriented) align with ideal characteristics of a “softer” community policing ethos, we might expect this group to become increasingly desirable workers in this field. Through 26 semi-structured interviews, I find that Asian American police officers position themselves as ideal officers by framing their cultural values of hard work, respect, and cooperativeness as suitable for guardian-style policing. I develop the concept of model carcerality, which I define as a cultural schema that specifically casts Asian American men as ideal police officers by utilizing model minority tropes and gendered and racialized stereotypes that model carceral actors perform, contest and invest in to varying degrees. Respondents use cultural schemas as social facts to make claims about ideal police officers by symbolically and morally distancing themselves from Black, Latinx and women officers. Model carcerality demonstrates how even within a diversifying field in a multicultural space like Los Angeles County, police departments sustain and repackage carceral logics new ways and onto different bodies. While applied to the field of policing in this article, this theoretical framework carries implications for other occupations and racialized organizations where Asian American men are constructed as “model” in opposition to women and other racialized people.