Over the last two decades, public scrutiny of racial bias in policing has increased significantly. Several high-profile cases in recent years have detailed the use of excessive force and racial profiling by police, including the fatal choking of Eric Garner by NYPD this year and the controversial “stop and frisk” policies that have disproportionately targeted young black and Latino men and. These incidents have made national headlines and prompted community leaders to call for greater accountability and transparency from law enforcement. In 2013, for example, New York mayor Bill de Blasio ran on a platform that included a promise to end the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” policy. Yet, recently a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri fatally shot unarmed teenager Michael Brown, triggering a wave of community protests and clashes with the police that continued for over a week.

The Russell Sage Foundation’s working group on Racial Bias in Policing was formed in 2009 to research the effects of U.S. police departments’ disparate use of force in dealing with minorities, especially young black men. Blacks, and to a certain extent Latinos, are overrepresented on the receiving end of the criminal justice system, especially in jails and prisons, with significantly negative consequences for the life chances of these groups, and for the future of their communities. The law enforcement system has enormous discretionary power in determining who is stopped, searched, arrested, prosecuted, and how punishment is dispensed.

Several reports in the initiative examine police encounters with civilians. In “Across the Thin Blue Line,” Bernadette Park and Charles Judd compare police officers with community members in terms of the speed and accuracy with which they made simulated decisions to shoot (or not shoot) either black or white targets. Andraé L. Brown and colleagues examine the psychological and physical distress faced by street life oriented black men in the U.S., and offer a new model for mental health treatment. Other scholars assess the extent to which the current legal system promotes police accountability, including research by Joanna Schwarz on whether government officials receive adequate information about lawsuits alleging misconduct by police officers, and how they in turn use this information to reform law enforcement.

Click here to see the full archive of the reports and working papers in the Foundation’s Racial Bias in Policing initiative.