Ongoing Research Projects

• Policing for Profit: Raising Revenue Through the Criminal Justice System
  Recent political events have made evident that municipalities across the country rely on revenue derived from their municipal courts and police forces to balance their budgets. Cities operate municipal courts that enforce traffic laws, parking violations and local ordinances which carry financial penalties for breaking them. In the high profile case of Ferguson Missouri, failure to comply with a police officer warrants a $52 ticket, and failure to pay the ticket on time leads to additional fees and a summons to appear at court. If a resident fails to appear at their scheduled court day, a warrant is issued for their arrest as they are in contempt of court. Ferguson, which has a population of approximately 21,000 residents has over 16,000 arrest warrants outstanding. With over 9,000 of these warrants being for missed court appearances related to unpaid fees, service of these warrant carries a $50 fee for the recipient. All together these fines contribute 34% of the revenue for the city budget. The question before us is why have some cities turned to municipal courts to finance their operations and why others have not? What are the strategic incentives to turn to the criminal justice system as opposed to relying on intergovernmental revenue, service fees, and other miscellaneous unrestricted revenues to finance their operations? In this project I argue that interjurisdictional competition, the economic competition for residents and businesses between municipalities in a metropolitan area, causes cities to tap into this revenue source. The utilization of non-tax revenue sources does not harm the competitiveness of a municipality, as the burden of this revenue stream does not rest on businesses or high income residents.
• Spillover: Policing, Legitimacy, and Local Government
  Policing is one of the central powers of the State, its use and misuse upon members of a liberal democratic polity should be of prime concern to scholars of power and government. Even though, in a Weberian sense, policing is one of the core functions of government it is an understudied area within political science. There is a small, but growing, literature that finds that concentrated policing has a negative impact on political participation and willingness to contact government officials for assistance. This paper extends the research on the negative impacts of concentrated policing to the study of political institutions and local government. Through the use of a large-N representative survey of Chicagoans in 2016, I find that not only does negative contact with the police lower their trust in the police department, residents who also lose trust in the Mayor and other local elites. These findings suggest that aggressive policing strategies such as stop and frisk erode the trust that citizen’s place in the police and local government, making it harder for these officials to perform their core functions.
• Politics, Not Crime: The Unintended Consequences of Criminal Justice Reform Frames
  Recent research in the field of social psychology suggests that informing whites of racial disparities in criminal punishment increases their support for punitive criminal justice policies. Arguing that by exposing people to this information, their fear of crime is heightened, as the stereotype of blacks and criminality makes crime more immediate or dangerous in their minds, and leads them to support more aggressive crime fighting policies. In other words, exposing people to information about extreme racial stratification has the effect of increasing their support for the very policies and institutions that maintain that stratification. These findings are troubling as it runs counter to the expectations of well-meaning educators and advocates, that bombarding the public with explicit facts on the issue at hand would change minds. Instead, attempts to educate the broader public may risk strengthening the race-crime nexus, even when participants feel that the laws are too punitive. This project brings in the latest advantages in social psychology and places them in dialogue with the large body of scholarship in political science about racial attitudes and implicit messaging through a series of survey experiments which vary in information presented and argumentative style to explore how explicit information on inequality justifies inequality, and what messages appeal to white voters.