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Research Summary: Place‐based conditions are well‐established predictors of police behavior, but the literature lacks nuanced examinations of how place‐based factors influence officer decision making, especially by citizen race/ethnicity and from officers' perspectives. We investigate officers' accounts regarding how they weigh place‐based factors into their arrest decisions of Black, Hispanic, and White drug suspects in Newark, New Jersey from 2011 to 2016. Our analysis of 438 filed drug arrest reports revealed that most arrestees, especially Black Americans, became susceptible to heightened police scrutiny because of their presence in stigmatized, criminalized areas. Although place‐based stigma and individualized prohibited behavior coalesced to guide police contacts with Hispanic and White residents, officers made contacts with Black Americans based on a lower legal basis, often irrespective of their individualized behavior in stigmatized places. Policy Implications: Officers' differential, racialized reliance on place‐based conditions supports the need for effective, evidence‐based, community‐centered social services that reduce crime, overreliance on police, and opportunities for discriminatory policing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The goal of this research was to investigate the ways in which families respond to the collateral consequences of incarceration and reentry. Background: Although scholars have extensively documented the collateral consequences of mass incarceration for individuals, far less attention has been paid to families, particularly the adult relatives of incarcerated or formerly incarcerated persons who are the primary social support agents. Method: The current study draws from 24 in‐depth, semistructured interviews with the parents, siblings, romantic partners, and other relatives of formerly incarcerated persons in an urban, mid‐sized Midwestern city. We employed a multistage qualitative analysis. Results: The analysis revealed 10 stress‐induced responses among families. These responses largely involved individuals' self‐reliance on their personal efficacy, some reflecting maladaptive responses, while having limited external or formal supports on which to rely when facing strains from familial incarceration. Implication: Findings suggest that the significant socioeconomic and psychological tax families pay when supporting a justice system–involved relative compromises their well‐being. This study has the potential to inform treatment, research, practices, and policies involving families that are affected by incarceration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Summary: In response to highly publicized, controversial police killings of Black Americans, policymakers and advocates have proposed several police reforms, including a recurrent, decades‐long demand for police departments to diversify their forces to better match the racial composition of the communities they serve. We draw on a unique police agency‐level dataset comprising 1,988 local police agencies and regress measures of police killings of Black, Hispanic, and White Americans from 2013 to 2018 onto racial congruence ratios and other theoretically relevant predictors. The results provide support for the hypothesis, revealing a negative association between racial congruence and police killings among Black and Hispanic victims. Policy Implications: Our results suggest that for at least some local police departments, increasing the racial/ethnic representation of officers might lower police killings of people of color. This implication offers some optimism amid impassioned demands to decrease police killings of Black Americans, specifically, and reform policing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate macrolevel sources of police use of fatal force at the intersection of race, ethnicity, and gender. Focusing on 580 U.S. counties from 2013 to 2018, we build a unique dataset and analyze whether violent crime, social disorganization, and racial conflict indicators predict police killings among six victim subgroups of Black, Hispanic, and White men and women. Regression results show that violent crime—and social disorganization, albeit less consistently—is positively associated with police killings of men, irrespective of race/ethnicity, and Hispanic women while having no significant impact on Black or White women. We find nuanced evidence that racial conflict shapes police use of fatal force across all six racial-ethnic-gender subgroups. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study contributes to homicide research by parsing out the Hispanic Effect and applying an intersectional approach to examining U.S. homicide victimization trends by race, ethnicity, and gender, jointly. Drawing on mortality data, we document and describe total, firearm, and non-firearm homicide victimization rates from 1990 to 2016 for six subgroups: Black women, Black men, Hispanic women, Hispanic men, White women, and White men. The analysis of within- and between-group homicide trends reveals important subgroup-specific patterns that prior studies using aggregate or confounded data have masked. The findings have important research, theory, and policy implications and advocate for an intersectional approach to studying homicide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial conflict theories suggest that racialized policing should wane in areas where people of colour are the majority and Whites, the minority. This article examines community-level predictors of racial/ethnic differences in drug arrests from 2011 to 2016 across 86 census tracts in Newark, NJ, a city where most officers and residents are persons of colour. We examine whether racial conflict indicators predict Black, White and Hispanic drug arrests, accounting for other factors. Findings indicate that racialized policing prevails within this majority–minority context. Officers tend to arrest Blacks in communities with greater White and Hispanic residents and Whites in predominantly Black areas. In contrast, Hispanic arrests are not attributable to racialized policing. We conclude with recommendations for future theoretical redevelopment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study extends Brunson and Weitzer's 2009 endeavor to elucidate the influence of race and place in policing by reexamining enforcement practices across disadvantaged urban neighborhoods but from the purview of police. We investigate the impact of race and neighborhood context on officer decision making and routine enforcement practices by analyzing 144 official reports of drug arrests made between 2009 and 2013 in a similarly disadvantaged majority White, majority Black, and racially mixed neighborhood in St. Louis. Our analysis reveals the importance of place and race for helping to shape officers' decision making and investigation practices. In particular, proactive traffic and pedestrian stops, motivated by officers' views of criminogenic neighborhood conditions, drove most drug arrests in the three study settings. Enforcement practices differed, however, in the racially mixed neighborhood where proactive encounters were more frequent, capricious, and seemingly driven by race. Our findings have important implications for research and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2015 and 2016, U.S. homicide rates rose dramatically amid two historic social phenomena: a police legitimacy crisis related to an alleged "Ferguson effect" and the opioid epidemic. To empirically explain this increase, we compile county-level data on race/ethnic-specific homicides from 2014 to 2016 along with contemporaneous county-level data on police killings of civilians, citizen protests, fatal drug overdoses, structural disadvantage, and other factors. Regression analysis suggests that both police illegitimacy and the drug epidemic contributed to Black and White homicide rises, particularly in structurally disadvantaged counties. However, we find no such association for Hispanic homicide increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In studies of race disparities in policing, scholars generally employ quantitative methodologies with the goal of determining whether race disparities exist or, in fewer instances, of ruling out correlates. Yet, lacking from theoretical and empirical efforts is an elucidation of how and why on‐the‐ground policing produces race disparities that are justified in legal, race‐neutral terms. To address this knowledge gap, I analyze officers' self‐reported accounts of their enforcement activities, justifications, and decision‐making in a representative sample of 300 official reports of drug arrests made in St. Louis from 2009 to 2013. These accounts are analyzed across neighborhood racial contexts and arrestee race, revealing important differences that help illuminate the race disparity problem. Unlike drug arrests in White neighborhoods or of White citizens that primarily stem from reactive policing, drug arrests in Black and racially mixed neighborhoods and of Black citizens result from officers' greater use of discretionary stops based on neighborhood conditions, suspicion of ambiguous demeanor, or minor infractions. During such stops, officers' discovery of drug possession often results from discretionary Terry frisks or searches incident to arrests for outstanding bench warrants. These findings fill important theoretical and empirical gaps and have implications for reforms toward racially just policing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigates the source of Black–White differences in drug arrests by conducting a neighborhood-level test of the differential police scrutiny and racially discriminatory policing hypotheses. The study examines drug arrests made across 78 neighborhoods in St. Louis between 2009 and 2013. Results from the negative binomial regression analyses lend the greatest support to the racially discriminatory policing perspective. Neighborhood racial composition significantly shapes drug law enforcement practices, net of neighborhood-level violent and property crime rates, drug-related calls for service by citizens, and socioeconomic disadvantage. Specifically, findings suggest that officers engage in "out-of-place" racial profiling in drug law enforcement, as they tend to target suspects whose race is incongruent with the neighborhood racial context. Implications of the study findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The criminal justice system routinely imposes financial sanctions on probation clients. These fines, fees, and restitution debts often amount to more than what many clients can reasonably afford to pay. Until recently, Massachusetts courts have incarcerated clients solely for their inability to pay these debts in a practice known as "fine time". In 2018, the state passed a landmark criminal justice reform bill that restricted the types of cases in which fine time can be ordered. Clients that can establish that payment would lead to financial hardship can now petition the court for a financial waiver accompanied by community service. The current study seeks to explore the implications of the recent reform efforts on probation services by analyzing surveys gathered from a sample of 121 Massachusetts probation officers in 2020. Descriptive findings of officers' attitudes toward fines and fees, responses to nonpayment by clients, and the use of financial waivers are presented. Officers' perceptions and practices align with the recent reform efforts, suggesting support among probation personnel for policies that limit punitive responses to nonpayment of legal debts by their supervisees. Possible directions for future research and policy development are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]