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Examining The Role Of Evidence-Based Suspicion In Racial Disparities In Wrongful Convictions, Jacqueline Katzman Jun 2023

Examining The Role Of Evidence-Based Suspicion In Racial Disparities In Wrongful Convictions, Jacqueline Katzman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There are clear racial disparities in the rates of wrongful convictions, with Black exonerees disproportionately represented among the population of those exonerated, in DNA and non-DNA exonerations alike (National Registry of Exonerations, 2022; Innocence Project, 2022). This racial disparity also exists for those exonerees who were wrongfully convicted, at least in part, because an eyewitness mistakenly identified them. For decades, when eyewitness scholars explored racial bias, they focused on the cross-race effect or own-race bias among eyewitnesses, a bias positing that witness performance suffers when a witness is asked to make an identification of a cross-race face (Lee & Penrod, …


The Cop In Your Head: Criminal Justice Education, Liberalism, And The Carceral State, Nicole Haiber Jun 2022

The Cop In Your Head: Criminal Justice Education, Liberalism, And The Carceral State, Nicole Haiber

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis centers policing ideology in higher education and the way it is constructed and fortified through criminal justice programs. In 1968, the Law Enforcement Education Program (LEEP) made funds available to police officers to attend college and awarded grants to universities to create criminal justice programs. The program effectively funneled federal money into the project of professionalizing the police and developed criminal justice as a field devoted to conducting crime research, as defined by the federal government. Criminal justice programs exploded across the country with the availability of LEEP funding, and the City University of New York’s (CUNY) John …


Lgbtqia+ Individuals’ Encounters With Police: Contextual Factors, Help-Seeking, And Service Needs, Max Osborn Feb 2022

Lgbtqia+ Individuals’ Encounters With Police: Contextual Factors, Help-Seeking, And Service Needs, Max Osborn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This qualitative study examines LGBTQIA+ people’s experiences of navigating risk and safety, interacting with law enforcement, and utilizing support services. LGBTQIA+ people experience stigma, social marginalization, and resource access disparities, particularly individuals who visibly transgress gendered norms about appearance and behavior, or whose identities as LGBTQIA+ intersect with other marginalized social categories based in characteristics such as race and socioeconomic status. LGBTQIA+ people also report negative experiences with law enforcement and obstacles to accessing care. These experiences are consistent with the notion that police and other institutional actors maintain social control through the surveillance and targeting of populations seen as …


The Police And The State, Brandon Del Pozo Feb 2020

The Police And The State, Brandon Del Pozo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation offers a systematic account of the relationship between the police and the democratic state. It describes the role of the police, the powers the police use to discharge the requirements of their role, and the means by which they should justify the exercise of their powers. I argue that the role of the police is to produce a type of substantive, practical justice, and that it involves the exercise of three powers: (1) to protect and rescue third parties from harm, (2) to collect people and evidence and present them to the magistrate for adjudication, and (3) to …


Officers’ And Community Members’ Evaluations Of Police–Civilian Interactions, Mawia Khogali May 2019

Officers’ And Community Members’ Evaluations Of Police–Civilian Interactions, Mawia Khogali

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research suggests that civilian characteristics such as race, gender, and age may influence use of force decisions by police. The purpose of the current research is to determine whether these civilian characteristics influence officers’ and community members’ evaluations of police-civilian encounters along dimensions of resistance, disrespect, and the appropriate use of force. It also examines whether perceptions of resistance and disrespect mediate the relationship between civilian characteristics and police use of force. Four-hundred thirty police officers and 571 community members participated in this study. Overall, this study provides the beginning of a much-needed line of research investigating the role of …


Neighborhood Ecology And Recidivism: A Case Study In Nyc, Sarah Picard Fritsche Feb 2019

Neighborhood Ecology And Recidivism: A Case Study In Nyc, Sarah Picard Fritsche

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The last decade has witnessed unprecedented efforts to reform the criminal justice system and stem the tide of mass incarceration in the United States. Persistently high rates of recidivism among justice-system involved individuals, however, present a significant obstacle to the success of these efforts. Thirty years of research in the fields of social psychology and criminology has produced a shared understanding of the individual characteristics that drive recidivism, but less is known regarding the influence of social environment. This research makes several unique contributions to a growing body of scholarship examining recidivism in the context of neighborhood, including being one …


Electric Light: Automating The Carceral State During The Quantification Of Everything, R. Joshua Scannell May 2018

Electric Light: Automating The Carceral State During The Quantification Of Everything, R. Joshua Scannell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the rise of digitally-driven policing technologies in order to make sense of how prevailing logics of governance are transformed by ubiquitous computing technology. Beginning in the early 1990s, police departments and theorists began to rely on increasingly detailed sets of metrics to evaluate performance. The adoption of digital technology to streamline quantitative evaluation coincided with a steep decline in measured crime that served as a proof-of-concept for the effectivity of digital police surveillance and analytics systems. During the turbulent first two decades of the 21st century, such digital technologies were increasingly associated with reform projects designed …


Homeland Security And Community Policing: Shift In Federal Funding Post Sep. 11: From Community Policing To Homeland Security, Mohsen S. Alizadeh Feb 2015

Homeland Security And Community Policing: Shift In Federal Funding Post Sep. 11: From Community Policing To Homeland Security, Mohsen S. Alizadeh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the aftermath of the 9/11, Homeland Security became the major model of the American Policing system, thus superseding community policing model. The purpose of this research is to use "before and after study design" to follow the grant trends of policing systems in order to examine whether the catastrophic events of 9/11 had a positive or negative impact on the grant funds of the mentioned policing models. Preliminary analyses revealed that there is significant difference in the mean level of funding prior and after the event for Homeland Security, community policing, and general policing programs. Segmented and Stepwise Regressions …