Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Redefining Disproportionate Arrest Rates: An Exploratory Quasi-Experiment That Reassesses The Role Of Skin Tone, Soren G. Brockdorf

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The New York Times reported that Black Lives Matter was the third most-read subject of 2020. These articles brought to the forefront the question of disparity in arrest rates for darker-skinned people. Questioning arrest disparity is understandable because virtually everything known about disproportionate arrest rates has been a guess, and virtually all prior research on disproportionate arrest rates is questionable because of improper benchmarking (the denominator effect). Current research has highlighted the need to switch from demographic data to skin tone data and start over on disproportionate arrest rate research; therefore, this study explored the relationship between skin tone and …