Alumni Rashawn Ray (M.A. '05, Ph.D. '10) and Alyasah Sewell (M.A. '08, Ph.D. '13) recently spoke at the university's Public Sociology Forum, which offers an inclusive environment in which group members discuss ideas about best practices, challenges, and rewards of making sociology more immediately relevant, applicable, and visible to non-sociological audiences.
Read more about their presentations below.
George Floyd's death significantly shifted public opinion as 76% of Americans (including 71% of Whites) agreed that incidents such as the killing of Floyd are signs of racism with law enforcement. This racial awakening and acknowledgement of racism is further confirmed by police brutality inflicted onto protestors and highlighted in the killings of Breonna Taylor and Duante Wright.
While the public outcry often includes the views of the general public, missing, especially in the academic literature, are police officers themselves as well as a proper evaluation of use of force and proposed reforms (such as defund the police). Over the past several years, Ray, along with colleagues in The Lab for Applied Social Science Research, collected interview, survey, social media, and virtual reality data with police officers, activists, and civilians. His findings show how "structural implicit bias" contributes to racial disparities in policing vis-a-vis the organizational embeddedness of racism within the origins and functions of law enforcement. Ray's research indicates that police reforms focused on implicit bias trainings and body-worn cameras fall short because they do not address how the structural, cultural, and organizational components of policing obstruct accountability and contribute to over-policing, racial profiling, and racial disparities in policing killings. Ray concludes by discussing how a series of evidence-based policy prescriptions that focus on reallocating and shifting funding within police department budgets and innovative trainings using virtual reality technology can help transform policing in America.
Public health approaches to injury prevention have shifted over the past half century from situating policing as a system of care to recognizing policing as a system of hurt. This transformation is buttressed by an ever-growing body of work on the detrimental effects of contact with the criminal legal system - most widely considered, mass incarceration.
Less is known, however, about the illness ramifications of everyday contact with law enforcement officers, who are the initial gatekeepers of formal processes of criminalization. Using novel multilevel databases that connect municipal administrative data to community health surveys, I focus on the epidemiological ramifications of living in neighborhoods that are proactively, aggressively, and lethally policed. To conclude, I discuss the broader sociopolitical tensions created by public policy efforts to control violence.
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