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1. Laundering Militarization: Preparedness, Professionalism, and Police Common Sense

   https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a913522  

   Katzenstein, Jessica (December 2023, American Quarterly)

   US police militarization is commonly understood as military violence abroad flowing to domestic policing, where it does not belong. Despite years of reform efforts, attempts to demilitarize local police have thus far failed to effect substantive change. This essay builds on the history of US policing, as well as sixteen months of ethnographic research with police in Maryland, to suggest that the ideological labor of policing contributes to these failures. Specifically, I examine two elements of what I call police common sense: preparedness as moral practice and violence as professional technique. In so doing, I demonstrate how policing metabolizes militarization as an apolitical technical craft that counterintuitively reduces violence, and that allows officers to fulfill their primary ethical role as stewards of public crises. Demilitarization reforms function in tandem with the political work of preparedness and professionalism to consecrate “good” militarization as commonsensical and legitimate. These reforms thus inadvertently lend power to the notion of police as the “thin blue line” between extreme violence and innocent (white) society. 

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2. The Usual, Racialized, Suspects: The Consequence of Police Contacts with Black and White Youth on Adult Arrest

   https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spaa042  

   McGlynn-Wright, Anne; Crutchfield, Robert D; Skinner, Martie L; Haggerty, Kevin P (October 2020, Social Problems)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract Research on race and policing indicates that Black Americans experience a greater frequency of police contacts, discretionary stops, and police harassment when stops occur. Yet, studies examining the long-term consequences of police contact with young people have not examined whether criminal justice consequences of police contact differ by race. We address this issue by examining whether police encounters with children and adolescents predict arrest in young adulthood and if these effects are the same for Black and White individuals. The paper uses longitudinal survey data from 331 Black and White respondents enrolled in the Seattle Public School District as eighth graders in 2001 and 2002. Our findings indicate that police encounters in childhood increase the risk of arrest in young adulthood for Black but not White respondents. Black respondents who experience contact with the police by the eighth grade have eleven times greater odds of being arrested when they are 20 years old than their White counterparts. 

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3. Identifying misconduct-committing officer crews in the Chicago police department

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267217  

   Jain, Akshay; Sinclair, Rajiv; Papachristos, Andrew V. (May 2022, PLOS ONE)

   Jackson, Jonathan (Ed.)

   Explanations for police misconduct often center on a narrow notion of “problem officers,” the proverbial “bad apples.” Such an individualistic approach not only ignores the larger systemic problems of policing but also takes for granted the group-based nature of police work. Nearly all of police work is group-based and officers’ formal and informal networks can impact behavior, including misconduct. In extreme cases, groups of officers (what we refer to as, “crews”) have even been observed to coordinate their abusive and even criminal behaviors. This study adopts a social network and machine learning approach to empirically investigate the presence and impact of officer crews engaging in alleged misconduct in a major U.S. city: Chicago, IL. Using data on Chicago police officers between 1971 and 2018, we identify potential crews and analyze their impact on alleged misconduct and violence. Results detected approximately 160 possible crews, comprised of less than 4% of all Chicago police officers. Officers in these crews were involved in an outsized amount of alleged and actual misconduct, accounting for approximately 25% of all use of force complaints, city payouts for civil and criminal litigations, and police-involved shootings. The detected crews also contributed to racial disparities in arrests and civilian complaints, generating nearly 18% of all complaints filed by Black Chicagoans and 14% of complaints filed by Hispanic Chicagoans. 

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4. Detecting disparities in police deployments using dashcam data

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3593013.3594020  

   Franchi, Matt; Zamfirescu-Pereira, J.D.; Ju, Wendy; Pierson, Emma (July 2023, Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency)

   Large-scale policing data is vital for detecting inequity in police behavior and policing algorithms. However, one important type of policing data remains largely unavailable within the United States: aggregated police deployment data capturing which neighborhoods have the heaviest police presences. Here we show that disparities in police deployment levels can be quantified by detecting police vehicles in dashcam images of public street scenes. Using a dataset of 24,803,854 dashcam images from rideshare drivers in New York City, we find that police vehicles can be detected with high accuracy (average precision 0.82, AUC 0.99) and identify 233,596 images which contain police vehicles. There is substantial inequality across neighborhoods in police vehicle deployment levels. The neighborhood with the highest deployment levels has almost 20 times higher levels than the neighborhood with the lowest. Two strikingly different types of areas experience high police vehicle deployments — 1) dense, higher-income, commercial areas and 2) lower-income neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black and Hispanic residents. We discuss the implications of these disparities for policing equity and for algorithms trained on policing data. 

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5. Supporting social hierarchy is associated with White police officers’ use of force

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2007693118  

   Swencionis, Jillian K.; Pouget, Enrique R.; Goff, Phillip Atiba (April 2021, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   null (Ed.)

   Three studies translate social dominance theory to policing, testing the relationship between individual officers’ endorsement of social hierarchies and their tendency to use force against residents. This article demonstrates a link between officer psychological factors and force. Because police are empowered to use force to maintain social order, and because White officers hold a dominant racial identity, we hypothesized social dominance orientation (SDO) would relate to force positively for White officers. For Black officers, we hypothesized a weak relationship between SDO and force, if any. To test these predictions, we examined the relationships between SDO and force using negative binomial regression models stratified by officer race. In an eastern city, SDO relates to force incidents positively for White officers and negatively for Black officers. In a southern city, SDO relates to force positively for White officers, and not significantly for Black officers. Stratified by race and rank, a second eastern city shows a marginally significant, positive SDO/force relationship for White patrol officers, and no significant SDO/force relationship for Black patrol officers. Finally, testing our hypotheses on a dataset pooled across these cities revealed a positive SDO/force relationship among White officers, and no significant SDO/force relationship among Black officers. These findings are consistent with our hypotheses and suggest a need to examine the role that maintaining social hierarchies plays in police behaviors. Future research must continue to investigate these relationships, especially with larger samples of non-White officers, and information about officers’ patrol environments. 

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