Doctoral Dissertation Research: Race Matters-- Ideologies of Race in Police Personnel Decisions

该项目探讨了从1964年民权法案通过至今，警察人事决策中不断演变的种族意识形态。在大都市治安面貌变化背后的社会力量的背景下，该项目分析了过去和现在的警察如何看待种族在执法中的重要性。该项目包括两个阶段。第一个是历史性的：研究人员调查了警察中的种族意识形态是否以及如何随着时间的推移发生了变化。第二个是当代的：研究人员考察了在警察人事决策中适当使用种族的概念。在这两个阶段，主要侧重于警察局长、警察局长以及更高级别的警官和官员在作出人事决定时所使用的官方理由，例如在招聘、雇用、晋升和分配时考虑种族因素。这些理由可以从平等就业机会办公室针对城市警察部门的诉讼和同意法令以及其他档案数据中辨别出来，包括报纸采访和政府机构的证词。这项研究还得到了一项涉及一个城市警察部门的案例研究的访谈和观察数据的补充，目的是探索当代执法管理层愿意认可的适当使用种族意识政策的做法与街头警察认为的可接受的执法资源之间是否存在差距。这项研究对种族和刑事司法方面的法律社会学以及关于保护个人权利和实现社会利益之间的平衡的政策考虑都有重要影响。这项研究探讨了种族和治安问题，这些问题在学术上很少受到关注，并对法律和社会科学学术的几个领域做出了重大贡献，包括组织理论和法律意识和意识形态。

This project explores the evolving ideologies of race in police personnel decisions from the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the present. Against the background of the societal forces behind the changing face of metropolitan policing, the project analyzes how police officials, past and present, perceive race to matter in law enforcement. The project involves two phases. The first is historical: the researchers investigate whether and how ideologies of race in policing have changed over time. The second is contemporary: the researchers examine conceptions of the appropriate use of race in police personnel decisions. In both phases, the primary focus is on the official justifications used by police commissioners, police chiefs and higher level officers and officials for taking race into account in making personnel decisions, e.g., recruiting, hiring, promoting and making assignments. These justifications are discernible from EEO lawsuits and consent decrees against urban police departments as well as other archival data, including newspaper interviews and testimony before government bodies. This research is supplemented by interviews and observational data from a case study involving one urban police department in order to explore whether there is a gap between what contemporary law enforcement management is willing to endorse as an appropriate use of race-conscious policies and what street-level officers deem to be an acceptable law enforcement resource. This research has important implications both for the sociology of law with regard to race and criminal justice and for policy considerations regarding the balance between protecting individual rights and achieving societal benefits. This research explores issues of race and policing that have received little scholarly attention and makes significant contributions to several areas of law and social science scholarship, including organizational theory and legal consciousness and ideology.