Race/Ethnicity and Stop‐and‐Frisk: Past,Present, Future

Scholarly debates surrounding stop‐and‐frisk typically assess the effectiveness and lawfulness of stop‐and‐frisk. Notwithstanding these efforts, recent reviews have excluded some recent research that addresses its impact on racial and ethnic immigrants. Understanding how the practice of stop‐and‐frisk affects racial and ethnic immigrants is worth including in reviews of these policies, considering the recent growth of research involving crime and immigrants that largely finds that immigration does not result in higher levels of crime. This review includes recent work showing that overall enforcement – stops and arrests – is higher in immigrant communities despite their lower levels of criminal involvement and recent work exploring differences among first‐generation and second‐generation immigrants in perceptions of police stops. Finally, some suggestions for the future of stop‐and‐frisk research are considered.     

Racial Profiling and Traffic Stops: An Examination of Research Approaches and Findings in the War on Drugs

This article is a review of some of the main research approaches to understanding racial profiling as it manifests in the traffic stop. It orients the emergence of racial profiling as a product of the war on drugs philosophy guiding law enforcement in the late 20th century and discusses how the contemporary nature of racial profiling has origins in a long history of racialized policing in the United States. Theoretical and methodological approaches to the issue, particularly from mainstream criminologists, focus on quantitative assessment of exposure to law enforcement agents and rational choice-based arguments that it makes sense to target certain groups based on the hue of the criminal justice system. More critical approaches examined within complicate this notion by contextualizing racial profiling in contemporary times as a mere manifestation of historical efforts by the state to marginalize communities of color.     

“You Don’t Get Respect if You Give No Respect”: How Black and Latino Youth Make Sense of Encounters with Police

ABSTRACT

The study documents opinions about the police among black and Latino youth and explores how these assessments reflect differences in lived experiences and frames of interpretation of police encounters across gender and race/ethnicity. This specification is important to better understand how youth navigate interactions with law enforcement and how discrete experiences are interpreted in the context of other contacts of racial and gender inequality. We draw on interviews with 43 black and Latino youth, ages 13–21, compiled as part of a project on police stops in New York City. Although our findings indicate that youth tend to see the police negatively, we note considerable heterogeneity, with Latinos/as conveying more mixed views of law enforcement and females signaling more negative perceptions. We tie these differences to variation in the type, volume, and quality of encounters with the police, as well as the saliency of direct and indirect experiences.     

Racial Resentment and Attitudes Toward the Use of Force by Police: An Over‐Time Trend Analysis

On the heels of recent police shootings of an unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, and the death of Freddy Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, that stoked racial tensions, this article examines how beliefs about race and racial inequality influence whites’ attitudes toward the use of force by the police since the mid‐1980s. Our main dependent measure is a composite index (“Police Force Index”) constructed from four survey items from the 1986–2012 National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey (GSS). Results show that (1) beliefs about race do indeed significantly predict whites’ attitudes toward police use of force, and more importantly, (2) this effect has remained constant since the mid‐1980s. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of these findings and suggestions for future research.     

Restructuring Civilian Payouts for Police Misconduct

A person is killed by police every 20 hours in the United States. Office-involved killings have increased about 25% in the past 20 years despite violent crime decreasing. Even more troubling, Blacks are 3.5 times more likely than Whites to be killed by police even when they are not attacking or when they do not have a weapon. Civilian payouts for police misconduct cost local jurisdictions millions of dollars when taxpayer money could be spent in ways that help to close the achievement gap and create jobs. Policy solutions to close this racial gap and improve police-civilian relations have centered mostly on the implementation of body-worn cameras and implicit bias trainings. Although beneficial, I argue these policy solutions fall short because they do not address the lack of accountability that police departments have to the communities they serve. In this article, I recommend a restructuring of civilian payouts for police misconduct from taxpayer money to police department insurances. This restructuring will improve police-civilian relations as well as reduce justifiable homicides and officer-involved shootings by increasing the accountability that police departments have to the communities they serve.     

Marriage and Child Well-Being: Research and Policy Perspectives

Over the past decade, the linkages between marriage and child well-being have attracted the attention of researchers and policy makers alike. Children's living arrangements have become increasingly diverse and unstable, which raises important questions about how and why family structure and stability are related to child outcomes. This article reviews new research on this topic, emphasizing how it can inform policy debates about the role of marriage in reducing poverty and improving child outcomes. It also pays special attention to new scholarship on unmarried, primarily low-income families, the target of recent federal marriage initiatives, to appraise the potential contributions of family research to ongoing policy discussions.     

The racialized patterns of police violence: The critical importance of research as praxis

The tragic killing of George Floyd at the hands of the police resulted in hundreds of thousands of protestors marching in the streets demanding change. The call for change criticized the killing of Blacks by law enforcement and challenged White supremacy as an institution of social control and racial violence. A key component of the marches and protests was a message to the residents of the United States: “Black Lives Matter.” As society grapples with a reckoning, researchers studying police violence for the past 6 decades have been empirically and theoretically debating the reasons why use of force by law enforcement continues to have a higher proportion of Black and Brown victims compared to Whites. Although the research on fatal police killings was studied by only a small number of individuals prior to 2014, after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri the research in different areas of the country increased rapidly as did the forms of analysis and research disciplines making their own contributions. The Washington Post and Guardian news agencies established that deaths at the hands of the police were occurring for at least 900 to 1100 individual deaths per year for which firearms resulted in the greatest cause of death. As US government agencies failed to produce a national data source on police involved killings, the media took a leading role in providing greater national understanding. The authors examine what role academic researchers contribute to the discussion for solutions, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds. As protestors march, lawyers sue and defend, and politicians create new forms of legislation, researchers need to play a more important role initiating critical studies, making sense of the data, and providing a theoretical framework for which police violence can be understood. This article will provide an overview of the literature on racialized police violence, point out key patterns involving racial and ethnic disparities, and emphasize how researchers can play a more important role in advocating for change.     

Social media and policing: A review of recent research

Studies of social media's impact on policing have emerged in several disciplines, including criminology, sociology, and communications. Despite their insight, there is no unified body of knowledge regarding this relationship. In an attempt to synthesize extant work, bring coherence to the field, and orient future scholarship, this article summarizes research on social media's implications for practices and perceptions of order maintenance. It does so by identifying how social media's technical affordances empower and constrain police services. By offering new opportunities for surveillance, risk communication, and impression management, emergent technologies augment the police's control of their public visibility and that of the social world. However, they also provide unprecedented capacities to monitor the police and expose, circulate, and mobilize around perceived injustice, whether brutality, racial profiling, or other forms of indiscretion. Considering these issues promises to enhance knowledge on contemporary directions in social control, organizational communication, inequality, and collective action. Suggestions for future research are also explored.     

Social network engineering and race in a police academy: A longitudinal analysis

This research examined an attempt to facilitate racial integration by populating squads (i.e., workgroups) in a police academy with mixes of recruits that reflected the racial demographics of the larger cohort. This was part of the social infrastructure of the academy. Additionally, a fixed seating arrangement was considered as a second element of academy infrastructure capable of impacting racial integration. We examined the consequences of these academy components over time with regard to race by combining ethnographic accounts with social network data collected throughout the academy and using a variety of network analytic tools. These consequences with regard to race were examined as a part of social network evolution. The academy's social arrangements did accelerate the creation of social knowledge of recruits about each other and the formation of friendship ties both within and between races. However, our results point to clear limitations to such infrastructural engineering and have implications for both recruitment to police academies and dealing with race. They shed light also on processes of homophily and group composition over time and have implications for studying social networks.     

Minority Composition,Inequality and the Growth of Municipal Police Forces, 1960–71

Abstract

Recent studies, in finding that community variables such as percentage Black and income inequality have significant effects on police size and expenditures, call into question the findings of earlier research. However, these recent studies are themselves subject to serious methodological limitations and leave open the question of whether it is class or racial conflict which affects the deployment of police resources. In this study we estimate several simultaneous equation models of police size per capita in 1971 for 88 non-Southern cities. Bach of these models holds constant the effects of per capita police size in 1960. Racial composition and racial inequality are found to be the only significant predictors of the growth in the number of police per capita.     

Police Reforms in Child Abuse Investigation: Their Success and Limitations in the Struggle to Uphold Children's Rights

SUMMARY. The past decade has shown increased awareness, concern and understanding about the extent of child abuse, particularly sexual abuse, and the caring agencies response to listen to and to support the young victims. This article looks at the response of the police service over that decade to meet such demands and to work jointly and responsively with social services to further the welfare and protection of children. It also examines the constraints and limitations of the police and social services when they attempt to uphold the rights of child victims and to gain redress through the criminal justice system     

Black,Blue, and Blow: The Effect of Race and Criminal History on Perceptions of Police Violence

This research aims to determine the situational and individual factors that shape perceptions of whether police violence against citizens is justified. Drawing on research on the racialization of crime, modern racism, and the stigma associated with a criminal history, we hypothesize that individuals will view police violence as more justified when targeted at black citizens and those with criminal histories. We further hypothesize that individuals who have higher levels of racial prejudice will view police violence as more justified. Results from a survey experiment using a sample of 595 white respondents show a consistent effect of criminal history, with individuals viewing violence as more justified against a citizen with a previous criminal background. Further, interaction effects indicate that only white respondents who score highly on racial prejudice view violence against a black citizen as more justified compared to violence against a white citizen. These results underscore the importance of how a criminal record serves as an enduring stigma that shapes how individuals are perceived. Additionally, our results are consistent with theories of contemporary racism and show that negative evaluations of black Americans are limited to whites with high levels of racial prejudice.     

Racial Profiling/Biased Policing

Media and legal attention to the issue of racial profiling in the United States intensified in the 1990s, with numerous studies from a wide range of jurisdictions revealing evidence of biased policing. This article briefly examines the history of biased policing in the United States, discusses the results of some of the more recent studies as well as studies of biased policing in other countries, and also devotes considerable attention to important theoretical and methodological issues in conducting research on racial profiling. These issues include how race/ethnicity should be coded, how to establish an appropriate denominator/benchmark in racial profiling studies, and what factors in addition to race/ethnicity need to be considered in analyses of bias in citations/arrests/and searches. Although attention to racial profiling waned somewhat after the September 11, 2001, attacks, recent events suggest a renewed interest in this problem.     

A post‐genomic surprise. The molecular reinscription of race in science,law and medicine

The completion of the first draft of the Human Genome Map in 2000 was widely heralded as the promise and future of genetics‐based medicines and therapies – so much so that pundits began referring to the new century as ‘The Century of Genetics’. Moreover, definitive assertions about the overwhelming similarities of all humans' DNA (99.9 per cent) by the leaders of the Human Genome Project were trumpeted as the end of racial thinking about racial taxonomies of human genetic differences. But the first decade of the new century brought unwelcomed surprises. First, gene therapies turned out to be far more complicated than any had anticipated – and instead the pharmaceutical industry turned to a focus on drugs that might be ‘related’ to population differences based upon genetic markers. While the language of ‘personalized medicine’ dominated this frame, research on racially and ethnically designated populations differential responsiveness to drugs dominated the empirical work in the field. Ancestry testing and ‘admixture research’ would play an important role in a new kind of molecular reification of racial categories. Moreover, the capacity of the super‐computer to map differences reverberated into personal identification that would affect both the criminal justice system and forensic science, and generate new levels of concern about personal privacy. Social scientists in general, and sociologists in particular, have been caught short by these developments – relying mainly on assertions that racial categories are socially constructed, regionally and historically contingent, and politically arbitrary. While these assertions are true, the imprimatur of scientific legitimacy has shifted the burden, since now ‘admixture research’ can claim that its results get at the ‘reality’ of human differentiation, not the admittedly flawed social constructions of racial categories. Yet what was missing from this framing of the problem: ‘admixture research’ is itself based upon socially constructed categories of race.     

Framing diversity: A qualitative content analysis of public relations industry publications

This qualitative content analysis used framing theory to examine how gender and diversity have been framed over the past decade in modern public relations industry publications. Findings revealed that diversity is most often set aside in its own issue or column and not integrated throughout the whole of the publications. Most articles about diverse populations mentioned primarily Hispanic or Latino populations and Blacks or African Americans. Diversity is framed as different, a journey or process, a language problem, a responsibility, inclusion, transforming workplace culture, enhancing the profession, resource intensive, power driven, needing to be justified, and impacting the bottom line. Disparities in public relations still exist among gender, racial, and ethnic groups with less power and must be addressed more fully in public relations professional publications.     

Use of evidence-based substance use treatment practices in Mississippi

Over the past decade, substance abuse treatment professionals have begun to implement evidence-based practices (EBPs) into the treatment of substance use disorders. There is a growing body of research on the diffusion of EBP in addiction treatment; however, less is known about individual state initiatives to implement EBPs among community providers. The current study aimed to evaluate the progress of an initiative of the Mississippi Department of Mental Health (MDMH) to increase the implementation of evidence-based substance abuse treatment practices by certified providers. In addition, the study examines potential barriers to implementing these practices. To accomplish this goal, we reported the findings of two surveys of Mississippi addiction professionals conducted in 2010 and in 2013.     

Marital Processes and Parental Socialization in Families of Color: A Decade Review of Research

Research published during the past decade on African American, Latino, and Asian American families is reviewed. Emphasis is given to selected issues within the broad domains of marriage and parenting. The first section highlights demographic trends in family formation and family structure and factors that contributed to secular changes in family structure among African Americans. In the second section, new conceptualizations of marital relations within Latino families are discussed, along with research documenting the complexities in African American men's conceptions of manhood. Studies examining within‐group variation in marital conflict and racial and ethnic differences in division of household labor, marital relations, and children's adjustment to marital and family conflict also are reviewed. The third section gives attention to research on (a) paternal involvement among fathers of color; (b) the relation of parenting behavior to race and ethnicity, grandmother involvement, neighborhood and peer characteristics, and immigration; and (c) racial and ethnic socialization. The article concludes with an overview of recent advances in the study of families of color and important challenges and issues that represent research opportunities for the new decade.     

Lethal Policing: Making Sense of American Exceptionalism

Thanks to the creation of a national database of police killings, the social distribution, causes, and consequences of police violence are finally amenable to analysis. This article focuses on why the rate of police killings in the United States towers over that in other industrialized nations. Elevated police lethality is deeply rooted in two distinctive aspects of American society and culture. Police violence is both a tool and product of strategies to maintain racial segregation and inequality. However, racism cannot explain the fact that police lethality is greatest in states where African Americans are least prevalent. Elevated police killings are also rooted in America's prevailing ideology (and mythology) of self‐reliance and limited government. Neoliberal ideology helped some politicians cut gaping holes in the social safety net, leaving ill‐equipped and fearful police officers to deal with desperate people who lack adequate treatment and support, yet who have easy access to weapons. It also limits the legislative and regulative authority that centralized policy actors exert over policing. Nevertheless, police overreliance on deadly force is increasingly understood as a national problem requiring large‐scale solutions.     

Divorce,Repartnering, and Stepfamilies: A Decade in Review

This article reviews key developments in the past decade of research on divorce, repartnering, and stepfamilies. Divorce rates are declining overall, but they remain high and have risen among people older than age 50. Remarriage rates have declined, but the overall proportion of marriages that are remarriages is rising. Transitions in parents' relationships continue to be associated with reduced child well-being, but shifting patterns of divorce and repartnering during the past decade have also reshaped the family lives of older adults. We review research on the predictors and consequences of these trends and consider what they reveal about the changing significance of marriage as an institution. Overall, recent research on divorce, repartnering, and stepfamilies points to the persistence of marriage as a stratified and stratifying institution and indicates that the demographic complexity of family life is here to stay.     

Ethnic–Racial Socialization in the Family: A Decade's Advance on Precursors and Outcomes

In the current decade, the U.S. population reached historically high levels of ethnic–racial diversity and reelected the nation's first Black–White biracial President. Simultaneously, scholars also documented significant ethnic–racial inequities in education, increased xenophobia, and a racial climate that revealed deep-seated ethnic–racial tensions. Given this backdrop and acknowledging the significant role that families play in youths' abilities to navigate their social contexts, the current review focused on the literature on families' ethnic–racial socialization efforts with youth from the 2010 decade. Our review of 259 empirical articles revealed that there has been an exponential increase in research on family ethnic–racial socialization in this decade. Furthermore, although it is clear that family ethnic–racial socialization is a robust predictor of youths' adjustment, the associations between socialization and adjustment must be considered with attention to specific socialization strategies, the confluence of strategies used, and the unique contexts within which families' lives are embedded.