Related papers: On Racial Disparities in Recent Fatal Police Shoot…
We believe that "all men are created equal". With the rise of the police shootings reported by media, more people in the U.S. think that police use excessive force during law enforcement, especially to a specific group of people. We want to…
While extensive, research on policing in America has focused on documented actions such as stops and arrests -- less is known about patrolling and presence. We map the movements of over ten thousand police officers across twenty-one of…
This study examines racial disparities in violent arrest outcomes, challenging conventional methods through a nuanced analysis of Cincinnati Police Department data. Acknowledging the intricate nature of racial disparity, the study…
Racial homophily refers to the tendency of individuals to associate with others of the same racial or ethnic background. A recent study found no evidence of racial homophily in responses to mass shooting data visualizations. To increase the…
Among industrialized countries, U.S. holds two somehow inglorious records: the highest rate of fatal police shootings and the highest rate of deaths related to firearms. The latter has been associated with strong diffusion of firearms…
Inferring racial discrimination in police use of force -- the average causal effect of civilian race on use of force -- requires two assumptions about policing prior to potential use of force: that officers do not discriminate in whom they…
The use of video surveillance in public spaces -- both by government agencies and by private citizens -- has attracted considerable attention in recent years, particularly in light of rapid advances in face-recognition technology. But it…
Studying racial bias in policing is a critically important problem, but one that comes with a number of inherent difficulties due to the nature of the available data. In this manuscript we tackle multiple key issues in the causal analysis…
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…
We discuss some causal estimands used to study racial discrimination in policing. A central challenge is that not all police-civilian encounters are recorded in administrative datasets and available to researchers. One possible solution is…
The murder of George Floyd centered Minneapolis, Minnesota, in conversations on racial injustice in the US. We leverage open data from the Minneapolis Police Department to analyze individual, geographic, and temporal patterns in more than…
In New York City, neighborhood policing was adopted at the police precinct level over the years 2015-2018, and it is of interest to both (1) evaluate the impact of the policy, and (2) understand what types of communities are most impacted…
The United States leads the world in the number of mass shootings that occur each year, even as policy making on firearms remains polarized along party lines. In the face of increasing violence and public demand for policy action, we ask…
Following recent shootings in the USA, a debate has erupted, one side favoring stricter gun control, the other promoting protection through more weapons. We provide a scientific foundation to inform this debate, based on mathematical,…
To assess racial disparities in police interactions with the public, we compiled and analyzed a dataset detailing over 60 million state patrol stops conducted in 20 U.S. states between 2011 and 2015. We find that black drivers are stopped…
Addressing public safety effectively requires incorporating diverse stakeholder perspectives, particularly those of the community, which are often underrepresented compared to other stakeholders. This study presents a comprehensive analysis…
Homophily refers to the tendency of individuals to associate with others who are similar to them in characteristics, such as, race, ethnicity, age, gender, or interests. In this paper, we investigate if individuals exhibit racial homophily…
The general population systematically overestimates the size of minority groups, yet how these misperceptions vary across racial groups and geographical scales remains poorly understood. Using a purpose-built survey of the U.S. population,…
Acts of political violence in the continental United States have increased dramatically in the last decade. For this rise in political violence, we are interested in where and when such incidents occur: how are the locations and times of…
Several key actors -- police, prosecutors, judges -- can alter the course of individuals passing through the multi-staged criminal justice system. I use linked arrest-sentencing data for federal courts from 1994-2010 to examine the role…