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Racial Bias in Policing

The Russell Sage Foundation's Working Group on Racial Bias in Policing integrates experimental and survey research with unprecedented access to police personnel data to shed light on how, why, and when race influences police decisions, and how law enforcement agencies might change their officer recruitment, hiring, and training decisions to reduce racial bias. In partnership with police departments across the country, the group now studies three topics: the causes and consequences of racial profiling, the implications of requiring local police to enforce immigration laws, and the effects of organizational equity measures on police behavior and effectiveness. Read More

Featured Projects

The Consortium for Police Leadership in Equity (CPLE)

Research Consortium
Co-founded by Phillip Atiba Goff of UCLA, the CPLE pairs police departments with world-class social scientists to provide rigorous, independent, and well-informed research on the most fundamental questions about equity in law enforcement.

The Contract for Policing Justice: A Research Agenda

Project Report
The Contract for Policing Justice is an agenda for research on legitimacy and effective policing, the goal of which is to provide a roadmap to ensure effective and unbiased law enforcement.

Reports

Safety or Liberty?: The Bogus Trade-Off of Cross-Deputization Policy

The discussion of cross-deputization (mandating that police officers enforce immigration policies) is often framed as a referendum on civil rights and racial politics. Those who oppose cross-deputization often maintain that asking police to target individuals based on their immigration status endangers civil rights. Those who support cross-deputization, on the other hand, argue that enforcing immigration laws is necessary to maintain a culture of lawfulness and to preserve public safety.

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Working Group Leaders


 

Phillip A. Goff
Phillip A. Goff is an assistant professor of social psychology at University of California, Los Angeles. He helped create the Consortium for Police Leadership in Equity (CPLE). His research investigates the possibility that contextual explanations play an under-explored role in producing racial inequality.


 

John Dovidio
John Dovidio is a professor of psychology at Yale University. His work centers around issues of social power and social relations, both between groups and between individuals.


 

Delores Jones-Brown
Dr. Delores Jones-Brown is a former assistant Monmouth County prosecutor and a Professor in the Department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. She also directs the John Jay College Center on Race, Crime and Justice.


 

James Sidanius
Jim Sidanius is a Professor in the departments of Psychology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He has authored and published more than 100 scientific papers, and his most important theoretical contribution to date is the development of social dominance theory, a general model of the development and maintenance of group-based social hierarchy and social oppression.


 

Samuel Sommers
Samuel Sommers is an associate professor of psychology at Tufts University. He is interested in issues related to stereotyping, prejudice, and group diversity. His research focuses on two general (and often overlapping) topics: 1) race and social perception, judgment, and interaction; 2) the intersection of psychology and law.


 

Thomas Tyler
Thomas Tyler is a professor of psychology at New York University. His research is concerned with a variety of issues broadly related to the dynamics of authority within groups, organizations, and societies.