Criminology Commons^™

Does Diversity Matter? Police Violence, Minority Representation, And Urban Policing, Maddy Mcvaugh

PPPA Paper Prize

This paper argues that, while increasing officer diversity may prove beneficial to some urban departments, for the majority, increased diversity within law enforcement does not substantially decrease the amount of violence towards racial minorities due to police culture and institutional practices. Specifically, I examine how structural policing methods target and excessively monitor Black and Hispanic communities, which leads to increased police encounters. Through police culture, these increased encounters then create further opportunities for acts of violence to be used against these minority communities. I begin by discussing several claims regarding the value of increased officer diversity. I then discuss why …

The Development And Validation Of The General Attitudes Toward Police (Gap) Questionnaire, Rachel Greis

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Previous studies have examined the relationships between various demographic characteristics (e.g., race/ethnicity, prior arrest experience, residential living area, political affiliation) and various measures of attitudes toward police (e.g., trustworthiness, legitimacy; Brown & Benedict, 2002; Hindelang, 1974; Rizer & Trautman, 2018; Schuck et al., 2008). However, a measure of overall general attitudes toward police has not been established. The main goal of the present research was to fill this gap in the literature by creating and validating a brief questionnaire that effectively captures respondents’ general attitudes toward police. In Study 1, a brief 14-item questionnaire that captured general attitudes toward police …

Tragedy, Outrage & Reform: Crimes That Changed Our World: 1983 – Thurman Beating - Domestic Violence, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

Can a crime make our world better? Crimes are the worst of humanity’s wrongs but, oddly, they sometimes do more than anything else to improve our lives. As it turns out, it is often the outrageousness itself that does the work. Ordinary crimes are accepted as the background noise of our everyday existence but some crimes make people stop and take notice – because they are so outrageous, or so curious, or so heart-wrenching. These “trigger crimes” are the cases that this book is about.

They offer some incredible stories about how people, good and bad, change the world around …

Tasers Help Police Avoid Fatal Mistakes, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

This op-ed piece argues that police will inevitably be placed in impossible situations in which they reasonably believe they must shoot to defend themselves but where the shooting in fact turns out to be unnecessary. What can save the police, and the community, from these regular tragedies is a more concerted shift to police use of nonlethal weapons. Taser technology, for example, continues to become increasingly more effective and reliable. While we will always have reasonable mistakes by police in the use of force, it need not be the case that each ends in death or permanent injury. Such a …

Criminal Justice And (A) Catholic Conscience, Leo E. Strine Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

This article is one person's reflections on how an important influence on his own sense of moral values -- Jesus Christ -- affects his thinking about his own approach to his role as a public official in a secular society, using the vital topic of criminal justice as a focal point. This article draws several important lessons from Christ's teachings about the concept of the other that are relevant to issues of criminal justice. Using Catholicism as a framework, this article addresses, among other things, capital punishment and denying the opportunity for redemption; the problem of racial disparities in the …

Tightening The Ooda Loop: Police Militarization, Race, And Algorithmic Surveillance, Jeffrey L. Vagle

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the role military automated surveillance and intelligence systems and techniques have supported a self-reinforcing racial bias when used by civilian police departments to enhance predictive policing programs. I will focus on two facets of this problem. First, my research will take an inside-out perspective, studying the role played by advanced military technologies and methods within civilian police departments, and how they have enabled a new focus on deterrence and crime prevention by creating a system of structural surveillance where decision support relies increasingly upon algorithms and automated data analysis tools, and which automates de facto penalization and …

Predicting Police Discretion: A Traffic Stop Analysis, Andrew Girard

Honors Projects

Examines Donald Black's (1976) theory of pure sociology with data from traffic stops collected over eight months during seventy hours of "ride alongs" with eight different police departments in Rhode Island. Posits that the social structure of each traffic stop is predictable based on observable characteristics of the parties involved and that distance in social space increases the likelihood of a police officer issuing a citation to a driver, while social characteristics similar to that of the police officer reduces the likelihood of a driver receiving a citation. Twenty-one variables throught to impact a police officer's discretion are analyzed. As …