A robust body of research suggests that Black individuals are disproportionate victims of lethal police violence. One potential explanation for this disparity is racial threat, which posits that the dominant group in society will impose coercive control tactics, such as police violence, particularly in contexts where large minority populations are perceived as threatening. However, others have argued that once a certain threshold of empowerment is met, minority groups will counter these attempts at social control. The current study examines the relationships between Black political empowerment, departmental use of force policies, and Black civilians killed by police. Findings suggest that greater political empowerment is associated with fewer killings of Black civilians, specifically when the agency has a Black chief and the proportion of Black officers reflects the city's Black resident population. We also find that agencies with a greater number of use of force policies experience fewer Black civilian fatalities by police, although this finding is slightly sensitive to model specification.
Criminology and criminal justice undergraduate programs funnel future employees into the criminal legal system, yet we rarely examine how the (de)racialization of white faculty shapes what gets taught about race and justice. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of the habitus, deeply ingrained systems of habits, this article explores how 17 white faculty who use a critical approach to teaching about race developed their understanding of race. Through thematic analysis of interviews conducted over a semester, we trace how early deracialized experiences form a primary habitus. Focusing on graduate education, we find that graduate school inculcated an academic habitus that largely confirmed rather than disrupted the primary habitus, leaving faculty with structural awareness of race and racism but experiential distance from it. As a result, in the classroom, this habitus positions whiteness as an asset and a liability. It eases race discussions, facilitates retreat into race-neutral language, and enables faculty to contain student pushback, strategies that feel responsible but leave white students' racialized knowledge intact. We conclude by discussing that good intentions and critical frameworks are insufficient without self-awareness of how deracialized early experiences shape what faculty see as normal, neutral, or risky.
This study examines how perceived police discrimination and acculturation are associated with police avoidance through perceived police illegitimacy. Prior research shows that unfair treatment by police can undermine legitimacy, while work on immigrant incorporation suggests that nativity and acculturation may shape how people interpret legal authority. Yet these literatures are rarely examined together in ways that explain behavioral withdrawal from police contact across racial and nativity groups. Using nationally representative data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Postelection Survey ( N = 15,552), weighted mediation models are estimated in which acculturation and perceived police discrimination predict perceived police illegitimacy, which in turn predicts police avoidance. Additional analyses examine whether these relationships vary across nativity groups, racial groups, and race × nativity subgroups. Across models, perceived police discrimination is the strongest predictor of perceived police illegitimacy, and perceived police illegitimacy consistently predicts greater police avoidance. Illegitimacy significantly mediates the relationship between discrimination and avoidance across most groups. By contrast, acculturation exhibits comparatively small and inconsistent direct and indirect effects. These findings suggest that police avoidance is shaped less by acculturation alone than by perceived unfair treatment and diminished legitimacy. The study contributes to policing research by highlighting avoidance as a meaningful behavioral outcome and by clarifying how discrimination, legitimacy, and acculturation intersect across racial and nativity contexts.
Contemporary immigration enforcement has, in practice, inverted Fourth Amendment protections for Latino Americans, shifting the burden from the government's obligation to justify seizures to citizens perceived need to carry documentation to avoid detention. Drawing on a 2025 U.S. Senate investigation documenting 22 cases of citizen detention, this article argues that selectively imposed documentary demands function analogously to Jim Crow literacy tests: ostensibly neutral proof requirements administered discriminatorily to produce two-tiered citizenship. The historical parallel lies in requiring targeted citizens to establish an entitlement that others enjoy presumptively. In contemporary immigration enforcement, demands for proof of citizenship can serve as the mechanism through which ethnic targeting operates, requiring Latino citizens to repeatedly establish a status ordinarily presumed for others. The article argues that the Supreme Court's September 2025 stay in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo threatens to entrench this disparity by allowing combinations of race-correlated factors to support reasonable suspicion. It proposes reforms including strict enforcement of prohibitions on race-based stops, clear limits on documentation demands, prohibitions on repeat stops absent new grounds, and private rights of action for wrongfully detained citizens.
