Amy Farrell

A Resource Guide on Racial Profiling Data Collection Systems: Promising Practices and Lessons Learned

This guide is a blueprint that police and communities can use to develop data collection systems. It offers practical information about implementing these systems and analyzing the data. The guide is not intended to serve as a comprehensive and thorough inventory of all existing data collection systems. It focuses on providing detailed descriptions of data collection efforts in a few selected sites: San Jose, California, which has designed a simple letter-code system allowing information to be collected verbally (via radio) or by computer; San Diego, California, which utilizes an online data collection system; North Carolina, the first state to collect data on traffic stops pursuant to state legislation; Great Britain, which uses a paper- based system to collect information on both traffic and pedestrian stops and searches; and New Jersey, which is collecting information on traffic- stops pursuant to a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). These sites were first identified by DOJ in preparation for the conference and represent various population sizes and geographic locations.

Social Control, Serious Delinquency, and Risky Behavior: A Gendered Analysis

Social control theory asserts that strong social bonds inhibit delinquency, whereas weak bonds offer little resistance to offending. In the development of this theoretical perspective, new research suggests that the type and magnitude of social bonds have differing effects on male and female delinquency. This study adds to our understanding of how social control factors of parental attachment, involvement in diverse prosocial activities, belief in traditional norms, and school climate affect both young mens and young womens reports of serious delinquency and risky behavior in a sample of high school youth. Whereas previous research has generally either controlled for the effect of gender statistically or studied all-male samples, this article uses separate models to examine the independent effects of social bonds on male and female delinquency. The findings support the development of gender-specific analyses to understand how social control affects male and female pathways into delinquency.

Policing Human Trafficking

Since 2000, the federal government and all fifty states have passed laws that criminalize the trafficking of persons for labor and commercial sex. To date, relatively few human trafficking cases have been identified, investigated, and prosecuted by local criminal justice authorities. Using data from case records and qualitative interviews with police, prosecutors, and victim service providers in twelve counties, we discuss the challenges local police face in identifying cases of human trafficking. We find that the culture of local police agencies and the perceptions of police officials about human trafficking do not support the identification of a broad range of human trafficking cases. Since local definitions of human trafficking are still evolving, police focus on sex trafficking of minors, which they perceive to be the most serious problem facing their communities. Reluctance to differentiate between vice and sex trafficking minimizes the problem of human trafficking and makes labor trafficking seem largely nonexistent.

The Evidence of Racial Profiling: Interpreting Documented and Unofficial Sources

This article summarizes the major cases that established the existence of racial profiling in the American public debate. The authors distinguish the widening split between the narrow, case-bound definition acknowledged by the police and the broader definition asserted by minority communities, which see the practice as widespread, affecting all areas of police-community contacts. The fact patterns of incidents substantiated on the public record set the stage for a discussion of the expected efficacy of the palliative measures nowbeing undertaken in the political domain.

Bias-Crime Reporting Organizational Responses to Ambiguity, Uncertainty, and Infrequency in Eight Police Departments

Over the past two decades, significant efforts have established categories of crimes motivated by bias and so enhanced the quality of information about the prevalence of such crimes in the United States. As part of a national reporting system established by the Hate Crime Statistics Act, local police agencies collect information about the prevalence and characteristics of bias-crime incidents. Although the quality of this program has improved since its inception, local police face several challenges to identifying and accurately classifying bias crimes, including the ambiguity of applying legal definitions to cases, uncertainty regarding bias motivation, and infrequency of reported events to law enforcement. Drawing on information from eight case studies, the article examines how local police identify and record bias crimes through various kinds of reporting procedures and organizational structures. The article concludes with best practice recommendations for bias-crime tracking and reporting of incidents of bias crime within local police agencies.

Measuring Judicial and Prosecutorial Discretion: Sex and Race Disparities in Departures from the Federal Sentencing Guidelines

The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 sought to abolish disparities in criminal sentences by mandating the development of sentencing guidelines that based criminal sentences on the severity of a defendants criminal conduct and past criminal record. Though the Federal Sentencing Guidelines were designed to reduce disparities in sentencing, research on the application of the Guidelines has consistently shown that women receive more lenient sentences than men. This paper presents data on downward departure decisions for federal sentences in 1996–1997 and suggests that the decisions by both judges and prosecutors to grant departures from the Guidelines result in continued gender disparities in the application of federal sentences. While gender disparities in granting departures are the primary emphasis of the analysis, the paper identifies important interactive effects of race and gender in departure decisions. These findings are discussed in light of recent legislative and judicial efforts to reduce discretion in granting departures from the Guidelines.

Environmental and Institutional Influences on Police Agency Responses to Human Trafficking

In response to domestic and international concern about individuals being exploited for labor or commercial sex, the U.S. Government passed legislation in 2000, creating a new crime of human trafficking and devoting resources to the identification of victims and prosecution of perpetrators. Since that time, all 50 states have passed legislation criminalizing trafficking of persons, yet law enforcement responses to these new legal mandates have been uneven. Recent research suggests police agencies are generally unprepared to identify and respond to human trafficking incidents in local communities and, as a result, relatively few cases have been identified. Using data from medium-to-large municipal police agencies in the United States, this research examines competing explanations for the adoption of responses in the wake of new human trafficking laws. The findings suggest the importance of institutional explanations including organizational experience with change.

Moving Police and Community Dialogues Forward Through Data Collection Task Forces

Although collection of information about traffic or pedestrian stops is an important part of a departments strategy to address perceptions of bias, taken by itself this data may be insufficient to resolve the controversy about racial profiling. Unfortunately, most jurisdictions have implemented data collection systems with little thought about how information will be disseminated to the public or, more important, used to create an effective policecommunity dialogue about police operations. A model of community-police task forces may be used to facilitate discussions of racial profiling data and enhance a police-community conversation about appropriate police operations. This article discusses the challenges of role definition, representation, leadership, and goals setting that face task forces devoted to understanding the problem of racial profiling.

Police perceptions of human trafficking

Although the US federal government and all 50 states have passed legislation that defines human trafficking as a crime and specifies stiff penalties for such offenses, little is known about how police perceptions of human trafficking influence investigation and response strategies. Previous research confirms that human trafficking definitions are ambiguous and police commonly lack the training and experience necessary to identify the crime. Using schema theory as a guide to our inquiry, we explore how existing crime schema influence police perceptions of and responses to human trafficking. In addition, we examine how new human trafficking laws change police perception of previously existing crimes, particularly prostitution. Data from in-depth interviews from a targeted sample of 90 law enforcement officials in 12 US counties inform how the police frame the problem of human trafficking and how those frames guide their actions.

Explaining Leniency: Organizational Predictors of the Differential Treatment of Men and Women in Traffic Stops

Scholars have devoted significant attention to measuring the degree to which a driver’s personal characteristics affect police decisions to stop and sanction motorists. Following the pattern of research on gender and enforcement practices more broadly, traffic stop studies show that female drivers are less likely to receive formal sanctions such as a citation following routine traffic stops. Despite the consistency of these findings across places and times, we know little about the conditions under which female traffic violators are granted leniency. This article extends research on the effect of driver and stop characteristics on gender disparities in traffic enforcement decisions by examining 149,888 stops from across 37 communities in Rhode Island with different local needs and variation in police organizational culture and structure. The findings confirm that although women are less likely to be cited than men, community-level variation in police agency culture and structure, particularly the proportion of female officers in an agency, moderates the effect of driver sex on stop outcomes.