Feedback from Proposal: STRICTLY LOOK AT THIS

The topic of racially discriminatory policing is an important topic and a good one for your final paper.

For your paper, you should think carefully about how you’re going to define “racial discrimination” and what type of discrimination you’re interested in. You also alternate between discrimination and “racial profiling” at various points in the proposal–these two things are related but have particular connotations in policing scholarship. You should be clear about what you’re talking about and define your terms accordingly.

My read is that you are interested in racially biased police shootings–a perfectly good and very important topic to focus on. As it stands, however, you don’t actually ever say that this is the specific phenomenon you want to focus on.

If this it the topic at hand, these readings might be helpful for you as you think about the causes and consequences of racial discrimination in policing.

Bor, J., Venkataramani, A. S., Williams, D. R., & Tsai, A. C. (2018). Police killings and their spillover effects on the mental health of black Americans: A population-based, quasi-experimental study.  The Lancet.  https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31130-9

Edwards, F., Lee, H., & Esposito, M. (2019). Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, raceethnicity, and sex.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,  116(34), 1679316798.  https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821204116

Siegel, M., Sherman, R., Li, C., & Knopov, A. (2019). The Relationship between Racial Residential Segregation and Black-White Disparities in Fatal Police Shootings at the City Level, 20132017.  Journal of the National Medical Association.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnma.2019.06.003

Worrall, J. L., Bishopp, S. A., Zinser, S. C., Wheeler, A. P., & Phillips, S. W. (2018). Exploring Bias in Police Shooting Decisions With Real Shoot/Dont Shoot Cases.  Crime & Delinquency, 0011128718756038.  https://doi.org/10.1177/0011128718756038

Sherman, L. W. (2018). Reducing Fatal Police Shootings as System Crashes: Research, Theory, and Practice.  Annual Review of Criminology,  1(1), 421449.  https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-criminol-032317-092409

Correll, J., Hudson, S. M., Guillermo, S., & Ma, D. S. (2014). The Police Officers Dilemma: A Decade of Research on Racial Bias in the Decision to Shoot.  Social and Personality Psychology Compass,  8(5), 201213.  https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12099

Nix, J., & Lozada, M. J. (2019). Do police killings of unarmed persons really have spillover effects? Reanalyzing Bor et al. (2018).  SocArxiv, 115.  https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/ajz2q