Research interests: effects of technology on police legitimacy, networks of police misconduct, and military gear usage by local law enforcement.

My research interests lie in policing. First, I am interested in the effects of technology on police legitimacy. Specifically, body-worn cameras ("BWCs") have been shown to contribute to police legitimacy (Ariel et al., 2020) and modulate complaints against police (Mitchell et al., 2018). I am eager to investigate how technologies like BWCs affect police legitimacy in areas of significant police distrust. Second, I hope to apply social network analysis to police misconduct.
Specifically, US cities like Chicago, Illinois, and Bloomington, Indiana have publicly released their police complaint records. Because police complaints can be used as rough proxies for misconduct (Hassell & Archbold, 2010), I am eager
to apply social network analysis to these datasets to better understand networks of misconduct. Third, I hope to investigate the effects of military gear usage by local law enforcement agencies ("LEAs"). Specifically, local LEAs in countries like the USA, China, and Israel are increasingly using military gear like armored personnel carriers on their local populace (Brewer et al., 2016; Balko, 2013; Kraska, 2020). The effects of this military gear usage are not well understood: all studies to date are correlation-based and suffer from self-selection (e.g. Bove & Gavrilov, 2017; Gunderson et al., 2020). I would therefore be eager to design a randomized control trial to contribute substantially to this inquiry.