Racial profiling and searches: Did the politics of racial profiling change police behavior?*

Research Summary Scholarly research has documented repeatedly that minority citizens are disproportionately stopped, searched, and arrested relative to their baseline populations. In recent years, policymakers have brought increased attention to this issue as law‐enforcement agencies across the United States have faced allegations of racial profiling. In the 1990s, the politics generated by accounts of racially biased policing placed heightened pressure on law‐enforcement agencies. However, to date, few studies have explored whether the increased social and political scrutiny placed on police organizations influenced or changed their general pattern of enforcement among black and white citizens. Using data in the search and citation file from the North Carolina Highway Traffic Study, this research specifically examined whether the politics generated by the media coverage of racial profiling and racial profiling legislation in North Carolina influenced the search practices of officers of the North Carolina State Highway Patrol's drug interdiction team. The findings suggest that media accounts and the passage of new legislation were particularly powerful influences, which thereby reduced racial disparity in searches. Declines in the use of consent searches and an increased probability of finding contraband also were influenced by the politics of racial profiling. Policy Implications The results of this study suggest several important policy recommendations. First, law‐enforcement agencies must monitor the policing practices of their officers because such supervision can influence officer compliance with fair and unbiased policing policies. Next, supervisors need to familiarize themselves with enforcement data to identify potential problem officers and organizational practices. By doing so, police organizations will not only increase officer accountability but also will potentially improve communication with their local communities. Such communication can empower community members to file charges against officers who violate their civil rights. Next, the media and political effects documented in this study suggest that external oversight can be particularly influential on police practices. Therefore, police agencies should consider developing a citizen complaint board, which is an external oversight board that would be responsible for investigating allegations against officers who engage in racial profiling or other racially biased enforcement practices. Such a board could assist police administrators in identifying problem officers as well as in making recommendations for corrective action. Finally, external social and political pressure must continually be placed on police forces to improve equity in police behavior. These external forces can assist in creating opportunities for police to increase the overall quality and efficacy of policing.     

Justice,Emotion, and Belonging: Legal Consciousness in a Taiwanese Family Conflict

This case study of a family conflict in Taiwan explores how legal consciousness is emotionally driven, intersubjective, and dependent on relational factors that are deeply connected to an individual's perception of the self–other relationship and affinity therein. As the members of the Lee family negotiated emotionally on issues involving elder care and inheritance, their adoption of law was at times absent, at others influential, but always shaped by certain Chinese concepts such as zìjǐrén (自己人), which constitute the emotional complex of belonging in Taiwan. This cultural patterning identifies a person as included, accepted, and respected by the group and when in conflict, is the driving force behind a disputants' pursuit of an identity that places them on moral high ground as a form of justice. Rather than depending on rational decision making or legal norms, their legal consciousness was determined by the sense of self, rectitude, emotion, and subjectivity.     

Challenges and Changes in Dutch Family Law

Since the “Divorce Challenge” in the Netherlands, a lot of initiatives have been taken on a political level, from the judiciary and in practice, to improve the situation for children of separation. Experimental legislation is on its way to enable the development of new court procedures. One of its ideas is to introduce a so‐called family's representative. This new professional, a lawyer or mediator, can represent both parents in court or coordinate the entire divorce process, both before and after the court procedure.     

Understanding (Mis)classification Trends of Latin Americans in Fordisc 3.1: Incorporating Cranial Morphology,Microgeographic Origin,and Admixture Proportions for Interpretation

Assigning correct population affinity to a skeleton can contribute important information to an investigation—yet recent work highlights high error rates when classifying Latinos with a traditional tool, Fordisc 3.1 (FD3). Our study examines whether misclassification trends exist, and whether these can be used to infer population affinity. We examine the relationships among ancestry, geography, and FD3 misclassifications of Latinos using canonical variate analysis and unsupervised model‐based clustering of craniometrics. Northern Mexicans appear more strongly associated with FD3 references samples with elevated amounts of European ancestry (e.g., American Blacks and Whites), while Southern Mexicans are more strongly associated with FD3 reference samples with reduced amounts of European ancestry (e.g., Guatemalans and Native Americans). FD3 classifications revealed that Latinos exhibited lower posterior probabilities when compared to other common case demographics (Whites and African Americas), even when the classification was “correct.” We make recommendations for practitioner interpretation of FD3 reports for casework.     

Competency for Chinese Handwriting and Signature Examination

Chinese characters had their root some 4000 years ago and, with the growth in population, are used by over 1.3 billion people worldwide today; it is inevitable that document examiners would encounter cases involving the examination of Chinese handwriting regardless of their location. Although there are extensive studies on the examination of English handwriting in the literature, similar studies on Chinese handwriting are relatively limited. We are seeking to explore the obstacles and challenges for a document examiner who is unfamiliar with Chinese characters to apply the principles of identification and elimination of authorship described in the literature to examine Chinese handwriting, and how can these document examiners demonstrate their competency for conducting Chinese handwriting examination. This study provides a review of the literature, compares the methodology and key features in English and Chinese handwriting examination, and describes various workshops and proficiency testing programs organized to assist document examiners seeking development in Chinese handwriting and signature examination.     

Atypical Suicide by Submachine Gun

In case of suicide, the presence of multiple entrance wounds is always suspicious. We report the case of a man who committed suicide by shooting himself three times in the chest and the skull with a submachine gun. The weapon seems to have been initially pointed in the precordium area with a lethal lesion of the proximal aorta. Two other projectiles were fired by the weapon and hit the neck and the skull of the deceased. The presence of three entrance wounds despite a first fatal wound could finally be explained by the characteristics of the weapon and wounds. Most suicides related to multiple gunshot wounds are explained by a first nonlethal shot but the use of an automatic weapon can also be found. In these last cases, medicolegal and criminalistics aspects become important in differentiating suicide and homicide.     

Attitudes,Perceptions, and Preferences of Individuals from Temuco (Chile) About Denture Marking

Denture marking (DM) helps identify edentulous people with different methods. Analyzing perceptions and attitudes of denture wearers would enable understanding of the practical aspects, an analysis still absent in South America. Fifty‐three individual candidates for removable dentures were instructed on disaster victim identification (DVI) and the usefulness of DM for this purpose. They were physically shown eight DM systems and a questionnaire to which they responded by highlighting preferences in those systems. Although 98.11% did not know that dentures could be marked, only 9.43% denied interest in some type of DM. The 90.57% would mark their dentures with some system, preferring the inclusion of QR codes or a micro SIM card. The proven weaknesses of DVI and propensity for disaster mean this community in Chile is an opportunity to implement DM systems. Obstacles may come not from patients but from their dentists, educational institutions, or a lack of public policies.     

A Retrospective Study of Intentional Body Dismemberment in New York City: 1996–2017

A review of New York City dismemberment cases occurring between 1996 and 2017 was conducted, which resulted in a total of 55 dismembered decedents in a 22‐year period. Annual trends indicate an average of 2.5 dismembered decedents. Additional results show that 53% of cases involved transection only, 35% involved disarticulation only, and 13% involved a combination of both. When the entire body could be accounted for, the average number of body portions per case was 5.5. Frequent locations for dismemberment were the neck, shoulders, hips, and knees. Dismemberment locations showed a general trend of anatomical symmetry. Seventy‐eight percent of the dismemberments involve disposal of body parts in an outside location. Eighty‐four percent were concealed from view with some type of covering. The findings from New York City are compared with other studies.     

The commemoration of death,organizational memory,and police culture

Police scholars document that although there is fragmentation of the so‐called “monolithic” police culture, historically consistent features of the occupational culture of police exist. By drawing on ethnographic observations in three U.S. police departments, I describe how one consistent feature of police culture—the preoccupation with danger and potential death—is maintained by the commemoration of officers killed in the line of duty. Through the use of commemorative cultural artifacts, officers and departments construct an organizational memory that locally reflects and reifies the salience of danger and potential death in policing. Furthermore, commemoration of fallen officers is not restricted to a department's own; the dead of other departments are commemorated by distant police organizations and their officers, maintaining broad, occupational assumptions of dangerous and deadly police work that transcend a single department and its localized organizational memory. Implications for the study of police culture, inequalities in policing, and police reform are considered.     

The Making and Unmaking of Feminicidio/Femicidio Laws in Mexico and Nicaragua

This article examines the contested process of law‐making related to the killing of women which resulted in the criminalization of feminicide (feminicidio) and femicide (femicidio) in Mexico and Nicaragua, two countries in which feminists engaged in legal activism to increase state accountability for gendered violence. Through comparative analysis, we demonstrate the importance of (1) the interaction between shifting local political conditions and supranational opportunities and (2) the position of feminist actors vis‐à‐vis the state and its gender regime in shaping regional variation in the making of laws concerning gendered violence. In Mexico, the criminalization of feminicidio resulted from a successful naming and shaming campaign by local feminist actors linked to litigation in various supranational arenas, and the intervention of feminist federal legislators. In Nicaragua, the codification of femicidio resulted from the state's selective responsiveness to feminist demands in a moment of narrow political opportunity within an otherwise highly consolidated regime. We also examine the unmaking of these laws through their perversion in practice (Mexico) and their intentional undermining (Nicaragua) at the hands of the state. Our analysis demonstrates how states' decisions to enact legislation against gendered violence does not occur solely because they are invested in international legitimacy, but also in response to states' shifting acceptance of the legitimacy of supranational authority itself.