Suchergebnisse

Abstract
The deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor brought discussions of race and policing to the forefront in the summer of 2020 in the United States, spurring protests and calls for policing reform. However, enacting successful reforms curtailing racially biased policing requires understanding whether bias is widespread, likely tied to systemic sources, or the work of a few racist officers. This study elaborates on these perspectives by drawing on theories of systemic and individual bias that may arise when bureaucrats have ample discretion. Using millions of traffic stops, I construct two measures to evaluate whether disparities are widespread—as indicated by the first perspective—or confined to a few officers—as suggested by the second. This study finds widespread racial disparities in who is searched following a traffic stop and that banning consent searches would alter policing patterns more than eliminating outlier officers in a set of paired t-tests.

AbstractHarsh, highly intrusive, personal contact with the criminal justice system has been shown to politically demobilize, but it is unclear whether less intrusive forms of police contact have any political effects. As the modal type of involuntary police–citizen contact is less invasive and more routine (e.g., a traffic stop), it is critical to understand the ramifications of lighter forms of contact. We argue that, unlike harsh police contact, light, personal, police contact can mobilize individuals, under certain circumstances. When a negative encounter with the police—even if it is minor—runs counter to prior expectations, people experiencing the contact are mobilized to take political action. Using 3 years of observational data and an original survey experiment, we demonstrate that individuals who receive tickets or are stopped by the police are more likely to participate in politics. These effects are most pronounced for individuals with positive evaluations of the police, often White respondents.

A frequently proposed "solution" to the problem of racially targeted policing is to diversify the leadership of a police department, such as instate a Black police chief. However, little is known about how and when such changes may alter policing outcomes. Here, we question whether this descriptive representation leads to a reduction in racial disparities in policing outcomes and how the political and social context may condition that relationship – captured by why a transition took place. To test this, we turn to traffic stop data from nine agencies in Illinois that had variation in chief race between 2004 and 2018. We find that who heads a police department – and why they were appointed (i.e., transition type) – is linked to search rates following a traffic stop, which has implications for work on race and policing, descriptive representation, and local politics.

Recently, we have witnessed the politicizing effects of police killings in the United States. This project asks how such killings might (de)mobilize voters at the local level. We draw on multiple theoretical approaches to develop a theory of community contact with the police. We argue that when a highly visible event tied to government actions occurs—like a police killing—it can spur turnout. This is especially true where public narratives tie such events to government and structural causes. By comparing neighborhoods near a killing before and after election day, we estimate the causal effect on turnout. We find a mobilizing effect. These effects are larger when they "trend" on Google, occur in Black communities, or if the victim is Black. Proximity to a killing also increases support for abolishing the police. We conclude that police violence increases electoral participation in communities where narratives about racially unjust policing resonate most.

AbstractElected representatives have more means of public-facing communication at their disposal than ever before. Several studies examine how representatives use individual mediums, but we lack a baseline understanding of legislators' relative use patterns across platforms. Using a novel data set of the four most widely used forms of written, constituent-facing communication (press releases, e-newsletters, Facebook posts, and Twitter tweets) by members of the US House of Representatives in the 114th (2015–2017), 115th (2017–2019), and 116th (2019–2021) Congresses, we generate a baseline understanding of how representatives communicate across mediums. Our analyses show that institutional, legislator, and district characteristics correspond with differential use of mediums. These findings underscore why medium choice matters, clarifying how a researcher's choice of mediums might amplify the voices of certain legislators and dampen those of others. In addition, they provide guidance to other researchers on how to select the medium(s) that best correspond with different research aims.

Suspect Citizens offers the most comprehensive look to date at the most common form of police-citizen interactions, the routine traffic stop. Throughout the war on crime, police agencies have used traffic stops to search drivers suspected of carrying contraband. From the beginning, police agencies made it clear that very large numbers of police stops would have to occur before an officer might interdict a significant drug shipment. Unstated in that calculation was that many Americans would be subjected to police investigations so that a small number of high-level offenders might be found. The key element in this strategy, which kept it hidden from widespread public scrutiny, was that middle-class white Americans were largely exempt from its consequences. Tracking these police practices down to the officer level, Suspect Citizens documents the extreme rarity of drug busts and reveals sustained and troubling disparities in how racial groups are treated

AbstractTemporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) was born out of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in the backdrop of highly racialised and otherizing fears about the mythical "welfare queen." However, the perception of Black exploitation of public benefits to White detriment is not exclusively a modern phenomenon. One of its original manifestations can be found in White reactions to the Freedmen's Bureau during the post-Civil War period of Reconstruction. We therefore argue that state decisions to allocate spending towards cash assistance and coercive programmes designed to motivate work participation and regulate private behaviour are shaped by the imprint of this historic institution. Using TANF spending data from 2001 to 2019 and data on Freedmen's Bureau field offices, we find evidence of a link between these offices' historic prevalence and contemporary, coercive allocations. However, we find little evidence that this link extends to spending towards cash assistance.

AbstractWhile widespread agreement that policing in the United States needs to be reformed arose in the summer of 2020, little consensus about specific reforms was reached. A common theme that arose, however, is a general lack of trust in the police. One response has been to increase agency diversity in terms of both officer race and officer gender. However, important questions exist about when – and what type(s) of – diversity shape citizen trust in and willingness to cooperate with the police – especially when considered in conjunction with agency performance and policies. To answer these questions, we use two conjoint experiments to evaluate whether citizens consider diversity when evaluating police agencies. We find that while both racial and gender diversity can influence public evaluations sometimes, these effects tend to emerge in the context of only the most (least) diverse institutions and are muted compared to the effects of agency policies and performance.

AbstractPolitical scientists have increasingly begun to study how citizen characteristics shape whether—and how—they interact with the police. Less is known about how officer characteristics shape these interactions. In this article, we examine how one officer characteristic—officer sex—shapes the nature of police‐initiated contact with citizens. Drawing on literature from multiple fields, we develop and test a set of competing expectations. Using over four million traffic stops made by the Florida State Highway Patrol and Charlotte (North Carolina) Police Department, we find that female officers are less likely to search drivers than men on the force. Despite these lower search rates, when female officers do conduct a search, they are more likely to find contraband and they confiscate the same net amount of contraband as male officers. These results indicate that female officers are able to minimize the number of negative interactions with citizens without losses in effectiveness.

Legislative activity—whether votes or communications—is often represented in a single partisan or ideological dimension. But as lawmakers communicate in various venues (e.g., traditional, direct, or social media), the extent to which these estimates are interchangeable—reflecting a common underlying dimension—is unclear. We estimate a partisan dimension in members' tweets, Facebook posts, e-newsletters, press releases, and one-minute House floor speeches for the 116th U.S. Congress and test the extent to which representations remain consistent across different venues. We find that while Democrats are consistently separable from Republicans, members' relative intra-party positions frequently shift between venues. This is likely driven by differences in the affordances and audiences present in each venue, as venues with more nationalized audiences (such as social media) show higher levels of rhetorical polarization than venues with more local audiences (e-newsletters). These results suggest that the level of polarization we observe depends on where we look, and that the scholars of congressional communication should explicitly consider the input they use to measure partisanship.

AbstractRacial disparities in traffic stop outcomes are widespread and well documented. Less well understood is how racial disparities may be amplified or muted in different contexts. Here we focus on one such situational factor: whether the initial traffic stop was related to a traffic safety violation or a (broadly defined) investigatory purpose. This is a salient contextual characteristic as stop type relates to different levels of assumed discretion and purpose. While all traffic stops involve some officer discretion, investigatory stops are more easily used as justifications to conduct a search based on an officer's diffuse suspicion; traffic safety stops are more often just what they seem. Using millions of traffic stops from several states, we show that black male drivers are more likely to be searched and less likely to be found with contraband and that this relationship is amplified where the initial stop purpose is investigatory. One implication of this is that one path to alleviating disparities in traffic stops for agencies is emphasizing traffic safety, rather than using stops as a supplemental investigatory tool.