Project Description
The faculty project examines the impact of police use of lethal force on crime clearance (solving crime) in that jurisdiction. Studies have found that well-publicized police violence damages the police-community relationship and decreases citizen cooperation with crime investigation, a key factor for police in gathering information and successfully solving crime. The project uses national data sources, including the National Incident-Based Reporting System, the American Community Survey, and Mapping Police Violence data.
The project plans to produce two academic papers for academic journal submission:
Paper #1 examines the relationship between police violence and crime clearance by modeling the effect (hypothesized to be decaying as time passes) of police use of lethal force incidents on that jurisdiction’s crime clearance.
Paper #2 considers the possible re-generating effect on crime clearance of protests over police violence. To incorporate this aspect of protests in the analysis, local/national media information on protests associated with each police lethal force incident is needed.
Tasks and Responsibilites
The student will be assisting the faculty mentor with getting Paper #1 ready for academic journal submission during this coming fall. The student's tasks will include gathering related literature, making tables, and formatting the paper according to the journal’s requirements.
To improve the student's statistical skills, he/she will also be conducting a simpler version of paper #1’s analysis on a Milwaukee or Midwestern sub-sample of cases. Instead of modeling a time-decaying effect of police violence on crime clearance, he/she will simply consider the effect of the presence of police violence. For this portion, the student will learn logistic regression and how to use SAS statistical software to prepare the data for analysis.
Desired Qualifications
None listed