IBSS: Measuring Justice, Managing Equity: An Interdisciplinary, Multi-Level Approach to Understanding Bias and Equity in Police Stops and Use of Force

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This project focuses on what causes racial disparities in policing and how one can measure these disparities using tools taken from sociology, demography, public policy, criminology, psychology, and behavioral economics. Understanding what causes contemporary racial inequality is particularly vexing for researchers across disciplines because the US's steady decline in racial prejudice has not been accompanied by an analogous decline in racial inequality across social institutions (e.g., education, healthcare, employment, criminal justice). This has meant that traditional theories of how racial inequality is produced are insufficient to explain contemporary racial dynamics, requiring new research models to produce new understandings of social inequality. This project capitalizes on existing research collaborations between the Consortium for Police Leadership in Equity and law enforcement departments across the US to produce a mixed-methods approach to understanding what produces racial inequality in complex systems (i.e., policing). In cooperation with approximately 25 law enforcement partners, the investigators will first standardize data collection regarding police stops of pedestrians and motorists as well as police use of force. Second, researchers will collect psychological surveys from officers, aggregating responses by districts within departments. Finally, using social-spatial data, department policy data, aggregate officer attitude data, and data about the relative contributions of "bad apples" to department-wide disparity rates, the researchers will address some of the fundamental questions about race in law enforcement as well as the role that local demographics and department-wide culture have in producing racial inequality. The interdisciplinary research team and large number of participating police departments facilitate inquiry across multiple levels of analysis and comparisons across different types of departments, producing a symptomology of unequal outcomes. While previous research has looked at police-citizen encounters (stops, searches, arrests, force, etc.) or measured biases, it has rarely done both together. Consequently, this project will contribute both to scientific understandings of what causes racial inequality in policing and identifying ways practitioners can measure and manage that inequality.Taken together, the investigators intend this project to promote the development and validation of a nationally standardized approach to police stops and use of force data collection, analysis, and interpretation. The findings will be widely disseminated to police departments, directly informing policy and setting the scientific foundations for national best practices to reduce racial inequality in police outcomes. This project will also provide postdoctoral fellows and graduate students a unique opportunity to examine racial bias in an applied and multidisciplinary context, while exposing them to more complex and diverse data analytic strategies. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.