How to Reform Policing in America

Policing is an extremely challenging profession: Officers engage in crisis after crisis and are often forced to be frontline mental health workers. They devote their lives to public safety and must do it without error; one wrong move, and a person can die. But too often, the evidence has demonstrated that much in our system of policing is broken, and communities of color have borne the brunt of these systemic failures. 
 

Go Deep: Laura Arnold, AV co-chair and host of “Deep Dive With Laura Arnold,” sits down with two leading voices in the policing reform conversation: Monica Bell, a sociologist and professor at Yale Law School whose theories on legal estrangement have served as a breakthrough in developing policies related to policing; and Carmen Best, the first Black woman to serve as Chief of Police in Seattle.

In this episode, Arnold, Bell, and Best examine the root causes of the accountability crisis in policing and the impacts on communities of color, outline the various policies that have been proposed and the evidence on their effectiveness, and explore what’s next in this movement to effect change in policing. 

When police shot Carlos Hunter 16 times as he sat behind the wheel of his Kia Optima, still in his seatbelt, they took more than his life. They took a dad away from his unborn child; a sense of safety from his middle children, ages 7 and 9, who are now terrified of police officers; and the innocence of his older children, who have been given The Talk — told that because they are Black, they don’t get to make poor choices, because one wrong move could get them killed. 

What’s Happening: Hunter’s sister, Nickeia Hunter, is among those working around the clock to get policing reform passed in her state legislature. Since the murder of George Floyd and subsequent calls for policing reform, there have been a number of bills introduced across the country; however, many are stalling. AV is supporting partners to advance state legislation that reduces or eliminates structural barriers to policing reform. Researchers, advocates, and lawmakers are working to ensure bills are passed that ban dangerous practices like chokeholds, neck restraints, and no-knock warrants — and hold law enforcement accountable.  

Bottom Line: “It seems so ridiculous that you have to continue saying these things," says Nickeia Hunter. "You know, ‘Close your eyes and pretend you’re me.’ No. I want you just to open your eyes and see you don’t have to be Black to know injustice, you don’t have to step in my skin to see that they’re killing us, they are killing our children.”

A number-cruncher by nature, Coleen Gabhart began her college search by looking for data that could provide insights into student outcomes for a program’s graduates: typical career paths, salaries, and hiring rates. She was shocked at how hard they were to come by. Gabhart started at a two-year program in agricultural business, but it did not suit her career goals and the detour cost her a full year and added $5,000 to her student loan debt. “Not having the data readily accessible, and not having enough of it, set me back,” she said.

What’s Happening: For most students in Gabhart’s position, it’s a struggle to find clear information about their college options. In March, a bipartisan coalition in the House and Senate reintroduced the College Transparency Act, legislation that aims to remedy this problem by ensuring that students and their families have access to better data on higher education outcomes, especially on equity.

Bottom Line: The legislation would lift the ban on student-level data collection set forth in the Higher Education Act and create a user-friendly, privacy-protected data network where students can see reporting on enrollment, completion, and post-college earnings. It would also disaggregate the data by race, ethnicity, and income status, which will highlight opportunities for improvement in quality and equity of the country’s higher education system, made all the more important by the impact of the pandemic. This bill has stalled twice before, but advocates see a promising opportunity for passage this time.

We’re wrapping up our National Women’s History Month series in which we're recognizing the women who are making history today by working to impact policy change for the future. 

Topeka Sam: Working to Support Formerly Incarcerated Women

While serving a sentence in federal prison, Sam witnessed the disparate impact of incarceration on women, particularly women of color. So after her release in 2015, she founded The Ladies of Hope Ministries to support women making the transition from prison to society. Sam’s tireless advocacy work helped bring attention to the plight of Alice Marie Johnson, who was serving a life sentence for a nonviolent drug offense, leading to Johnson’s pardon by President Donald Trump.

Read the story >

Anu Manchikanti Gómez: Ensuring Equity in Women's Health

Gómez is an associate professor at the University of California Berkeley School of Social Welfare and director of the Sexual Health and Reproductive Equity (SHARE) Program. For more than 15 years, her research has focused on a diverse range of issues related to women’s health equity from contraceptive use, to gender equity, and violence against women and children. “In so many ways, the work I am doing now is the product of my family's history.”

Read the story >

By Stuart Buck, Vice President of Research
 

Way back in 2004, some pediatric researchers published a major journal article that grabbed the attention of parents. It was titled, “Early Television Exposure and Subsequent Attentional Problems in Children.” Drawing from a major national survey, they found that when young children in 1990 were reported by their mothers as having spent more hours watching TV every day, by 1996-2000, the same children had more attention problems. 

In other words: Let your toddler watch TV, and they’ll be a nightmare by grade school!

But just last week, a group of researchers published a new paper that discredits the 2004 finding. They reinvestigated the 2004 paper using a fairly new technique called multiverse analysis. This basically means that if there is more than one reasonable way to analyze data (e.g., different statistical techniques or different controls), rather than picking one to highlight in a paper, just run all of them and see if a result holds up.

Thus, the authors of the new paper returned to the same national survey and ran fully 848 statistical models! If the original study was valid, then you might expect many or most of the 848 models to return similar results. Not the case here. The researchers found that “only 166 models (19.6%) yielded a statistically significant relationship [between TV and attention problems], and most of these employed questionable analytic choices.”

In other words, the original paper from 2004 – intentionally or not – seems to have cherry-picked its results from the small number of often questionable statistical models that just happened to show the most alarming and headline-grabbing result.

Once again, this is a cautionary tale about believing scientific papers from famous researchers in top journals. And it’s worth going back and reinvestigating those papers from time to time. 

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