Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques

Since Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in 2014,1 the problem of police violence against African Americans has been a relatively salient feature of nationwide discussions about race. Across the ideological spectrum, people have had to engage the question of whether, especially in the context of policing, it’s fair to say that black lives are undervalued. While there is both a racial and a political divide with respect to how Americans have thus far answered that question, the emergence of Black Lives Matter movements2 has made it virtually impossible to be a bystander in the debate. Separate from whether racialized policing against African Americans is, in fact, a social phenomenon, is the contestable question about solutions: Assuming that African Americans are indeed the victims of overpolicing, meaning that by some metric they end up having more interactions with the police and more violent encounters than is normatively warranted, what can we do about it? And here, the answers range from abolishing police officers altogether, to training them, to diversifying police departments. It is on the last of these proposed solutions — the diversification of police departments — that we focus in this essay. The central question we ask is: What are the dynamics that might shape how African American police officers police other African Americans? Asked another way, what do existing theories about race and race relations,

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Locking up our own: crime and punishment in black america

Reporting crime to the police, 1973-2005: a multivariate analysis of long-term trends in the National Crime Survey (NCS) and National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS)

Review: Media, Crime, and Criminal Justice: Images, Realities and Policies

The spread of misinformation on social media has become a major societal issue during recent years. In this work, we used the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic as a case study to systematically investigate factors associated with the spread of multi-topic misinformation related to one event on social media based on the heuristic-systematic model. Among factors related to systematic processing of information, we discovered that the topics of a misinformation story matter, with conspiracy theories being the most likely to be retweeted. As for factors related to heuristic processing of information, such as when citizens look up to their leaders during such a crisis, our results demonstrated that behaviors of a political leader, former US President Donald J. Trump, may have nudged people's sharing of COVID-19 misinformation. Outcomes of this study help social media platform and users better understand and prevent the spread of misinformation on social media.

Understanding the spread of COVID-19 misinformation on social media: The effects of topics and a political leader's nudge

Currently, about 96% of U.S. police departments have adopted social media, nearly 94% of which have implemented Facebook. Unfortunately, researchers have not paid much attention to police use of social media. The study serving as the basis for this article entails a careful analysis of 14 of the most popular police Facebook pages and analyzes posts during a 1-year period. The study documents 5 major themes and 24 noteworthy subthemes, and then applies a two-step cluster analysis to identify four principal types of police Facebook social images: crime fighter, traditional cop, public relations facilitator, and mixer. The well-established diffusion of innovations literature is employed to provide justification for the timeliness of the study, and the work of Rogers and subsequent scholars building upon it serves as the principal theoretical framework for this study. Public policy implications for policing are discussed, along with appropriate directions for further research.

“We Are More Than Crime Fighters”: Social Media Images of Police Departments:

Building upon prior research, the purpose of this paper is to improve the understanding of public satisfaction with the police by examining the effects of one’s military background and the interactions between one’s education and perceptions about prior contact with the police.,This study statistically analyzes the 2012 citizen survey data collected in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, USA, and the theoretical framework includes the major models of citizen satisfaction with the police (i.e. demographic, prior contact with the police and neighborhood conditions).,Findings show that being a military family member is significantly positively related to satisfaction with the police. In addition, there are significant interactions between higher education and prior contact with the police, suggesting that people with different educational backgrounds tend to consider their prior experiences (either positive or negative) differently in their general evaluations of the police.,The study expands the literature by empirically assessing two often omitted factors that could have significant impacts on how the public evaluate the police.

Understanding public satisfaction with the police: Military background and interactions between higher education and prior contact with the police

Most police agencies in the USA make the claim that they use social media, and such use is drawing a great academic attention. Most studies on police use of social media focus on the content of police social media websites. Little research, however, has been conducted regarding what types of police agencies are in fact making use of social media. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap in the knowledge.,The study reported here analyzes the 2013 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) data set to identify the principal organizational characteristics of police agencies associated with the use of social media. Binary logistic regression is used to identify significant independent predictors of police use of social media, viewed here as a form of innovation.,The findings indicate that the workforce size (commissioned and civilian personnel) of a police agency, the level of participation in multi-jurisdictional task forces and the early use of an official agency website to communicate with the public are the predictors of police use of social media.,Three theories pertaining to organizational behavior (i.e. contingency theory, institutional theory, and resource dependency theory), as well as Maguire’s (2003) study, are used to establish the theoretical framework for the research reported here.,Viewed as a pioneering study testing organizational theories related to police use of social media, the current study sets forth findings that help deepen the collective understanding of contingency theory, institutional theory and resource dependency theory as frameworks for explaining organizational behavior in policing.

Social media and the police: A study of organizational characteristics associated with the use of social media

Police agencies have adopted social media quite widely, but researchers have paid relatively little attention to the phenomenon.  To date few studies have explored public reaction to police use of ...

Public preferences regarding police facebook posts: a macro-level analysis

Baer, J., & Chambliss, W. J. (1997). Generating fear: The politics of crime reporting. Crime, Law & Social Change, 27(2), 87–107. Cain, C. M. (2017). Child savers. In C. J. Schreck, M. J. Leiber, H. V. Miller, & K. Welch (Eds.), The encyclopedia of juvenile delinquency and justice. https://doi.org/10.1002/ 9781118524275.ejdj0183 Forman, J. Jr. (2017). Locking up our own: Crime and punishment in Black America. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Michalowski, R. J. (2016). What is crime? Critical Criminology, 24(2), 181–199. Muhammad, K. G. (2011). Where did all the white criminals go? Reconfiguring race and crime on the road to mass incarceration. Souls, 13(1), 72–90. Pickett, R. S. (1969). The society for the prevention of pauperism (1815–23). In House of refuge, origins of juvenile reform in New York state, 1815-1857 (pp. 21–49). Syracuse University Press. Torres, L. (2018). Latinx? Latino Studies, 16(3), 283–285. Ward, G. (2014). The slow violence of state organized race crime. Theoretical Criminology, 19(3), 299–314.

Xiaochen Hu

Papers

“We Are More Than Crime Fighters”: Social Media Images of Police Departments:

Understanding public satisfaction with the police: Military background and interactions between higher education and prior contact with the police

Social media and the police: A study of organizational characteristics associated with the use of social media

Public preferences regarding police facebook posts: a macro-level analysis

Book Review: No surrender: The land remains indigenous: