Suchergebnisse

An up-close account of policing during the Ferguson protests, providing insights from both police officers and members of the communityPolicing Unrest presents the frontline experiences of police officers during the intense three weeks of protest, vigils, looting, violence, and large civil demonstrations in and around Ferguson, Missouri, following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer. Looking closely at the lived experiences of police officers and community residents, Tammy Rinehart Kochel raises important questions about police-community relations and the role of police as peacekeepers in support of social justice.Drawing on interviews with dozens of police personnel who policed the protests, Kochel offers insight into their shared experiences and provides compelling personal accounts of how they performed their jobs during the protest. The book covers a range of topics such as police-community relationships and community policing principles; how factors such as police subculture and organizational culture stacked up against social identity during this crisis; the role of an officer's characteristics, especially an officer's race, play in an officer's self-legitimacy; and the implications for police recruitment and training. Kochel's unique access allowed her to provide a balanced perspective on police officers' cynicism and public protests against police that were rampant in the year following Ferguson against the need to restore police-community relations and police legitimacy through increased transparency, accountability, and procedural justice. Policing Unrest explains how the Ferguson protests ushered in an era of police reform and reveals what it is like being a police officer facing public unrest, particularly in the wake of widely publicized incidents of police brutality around the country

In the wake of significant media coverage of officer involved shootings and civil unrest to protest police behaviors toward Black suspects, policing is confronting a time where public perceptions of police are central to effective policing, especially views by racial minorities. Efforts to understand these views have largely been conducted within urban contexts. Moreover, many studies have relied on quantitative survey data to examine racial differences in views about police; thus, scant research has used qualitative approaches to understand racial differences. Based on qualitative in-person surveys administered to 238 residents in a small Midwestern town, we aim to understand residents' expectations and assessments of police legitimacy. Contrary to research conducted in urban areas, we do not find a racial gap in views about police. Other than a stronger preference among White residents on the role of police as crime fighters, differences are subtle. These small-town residents appear to be like-minded in their assessments and view police positively. However, nontrivial, albeit nonsignificant, differences by race include minority residents emphasizing treatment by police in making legitimacy judgments, likely explained by the group position thesis and accumulated experiences, while it seems White residents based their responses on global views about the ideal police officer.

Many respondents to opinion surveys say that the citizen's race influences how police officers treat the public, yet recent expert social‐science panels have declared that research findings are too contradictory to form a conclusion on whether American police are biased against racial minorities. We perform a meta‐analysis of quantitative research that estimates the effect of race on the police decision to arrest. Screening nearly 4,500 potential sources, we analyze the results based on 27 independent data sets that generated 40 research reports (both published and unpublished) that permitted an estimate of the effect size of the suspect's race on the probability of arrest. The meta‐analysis shows with strong consistency that minority suspects are more likely to be arrested than White suspects. Depending on the method of estimation, the effect size of race varied between 1.32 and 1.52. Converting the race effect size to probabilities shows that compared with the average probability in these studies of a White being arrested (.20), the average probability for a non‐White was calculated at .26. The significant race effect persists when taking into account the studies' variations in research methods and the nature of explanatory models used in the studies. Implications for future research are presented.