Beyond Profiling: The Institutional Sources of Racial Disparities in Policing

American policing faces a crisis of legitimacy. A key source of this crisis is a widespread police practice commonly endorsed by police leaders to fight crime. This is the investigatory stop, used to check out people who seem suspicious and to seize illegal drugs and guns and make arrests. Using data from an original scientific survey of drivers in the Kansas City metropolitan area, the authors show that racial disparities in police stops are concentrated in investigatory vehicle stops. In these stops, but not others, officers disproportionately stop African Americans and question and search them. The overwhelming majority of people stopped in this way are innocent, and the experience causes psychological harm and erodes trust in and cooperation with the police. Many of the most controversial police shootings during the past two years occurred in these stops. Reforming this practice is an essential step toward restoring trust in the police.     

Men in Skirts

There are signs that the wearing of skirts by men appears to be on the increase in the West. Connor's essay provides a series of historical reflections on the signification and cultural phenomenology of male and female apparel. The first appearance of bifurcated dress in the late mediaeval period is considered, along with the struggle between men and women for command of lateral space during the seventeenth century in Europe, as attested to by commentators like John Bulwer and John Evelyn. Explications are offered of the thematics of the fringe and the pocket, as they are dramatized in trousers and skirts, as well as of the logic of lightness and of the pendant. Trousers, Connors concludes, have never lost their fanciful associations with utility, practicality and rationality; they are the signs of occupation, of being taken up in what you do, rather than consumed in what you are. The political victory of the trousered over the untrousered races (Romans, Scots, Indians etc.) is confirmed by its inversion in male masochist fantasies of 'petticoat government', from the late nineteenth century onwards.     

Civic Education,Political Discussion,and the Social Transmission of Democratic Knowledge and Values in a New Democracy: Kenya 2002

How does civic education affect the development of democratic political culture in new democracies? Using a unique three‐wave panel data set from Kenya spanning the transitional democratic election of 2002, we posit a two‐step process of the social transmission of democratic knowledge, norms, and values. Civic education first affected the knowledge, values, and participatory inclinations of individuals directly exposed to the Kenyan National Civic Education Programme (NCEP). These individuals became opinion leaders, communicating these new orientations to others within their social networks. Individuals who discussed others’ civic education experiences then showed significant growth in democratic knowledge and values, in many instances more than individuals with direct exposure to the program. We find further evidence of a “compensation effect,” such that the impact of civic education and post‐civic education discussion was greater among Kenyans with less education and with lower levels of social integration.