Professor Bell will examine how predominantly African-American samples of parents and youth in three American cities—Washington, DC; Cleveland, Ohio; and Baltimore, Maryland—understand police presence in their everyday lives. In reexamining this issue, Prof. Bell’s work reveals the deep and often overlooked complexity in the relationships between marginalized communities, the police, urban neighborhoods, and the state that are rarely considered in popular conversations about police reform and transformation. As an analytical framework, this project develops the concept of legal estrangement, which focuses on perceived group inclusivity or exclusivity of law and legal authority. This focus on signaling exclusion operates in contrast to concepts like legal cynicism or legitimacy. The project ultimately proposes that social solidarity should be recognized as a central aim of law and a means of evaluating policy and engaging in legal analysis.