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

这个项目探讨了从1964年民权法案通过到现在，警察人事决策中种族意识形态的演变。在大都会警务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官员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而改变。第二个是当代的：研究人员考察了在警察人事决定中适当使用种族的概念。在这两个阶段，主要重点是警察局长、警察局长和更高级别的警官和官员在作出人事决定（例如征聘、雇用、晋升和分配任务）时将种族因素考虑在内所使用的官方理由。这些理由可以从针对城市警察部门的平等就业机会诉讼和同意法令以及其他档案数据（包括报纸采访和政府机构的证词）中辨别出来。本研究补充了来自一个城市警察部门的案例研究的访谈和观察数据，以探索当代执法管理部门愿意认可的适当使用种族意识政策与街头警察认为可接受的执法资源之间是否存在差距。这项研究对关于种族和刑事司法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具有重要意义。本研究探讨了很少受到学术关注的种族和警务问题，并对法律和社会科学奖学金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.