Maybe the most powerful figure I’ve seen this year: the racial gap in tickets from speed cameras vs. officer stops.
pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…
Justin T. Pickett
1,776 posts
Justin T. Pickett
@JustinTPickett
Professor @UAlbany, social scientist (public opinion, survey methodology, decision-making), outdoor enthusiast, Hufflepuff
- (1/9) Our new article on police-related fear (with @agrahamphd) shows that Black and White Americans live in different emotional worlds. This thread summarizes our findings. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/17… Data, code, and preprint available @socarxiv and at: osf.io/tgq9b/
- (1/2) We need more attention to selection bias in qualitative research. A new study in a top sociology journal examines "how young people experience policing," but it draws only on interviews of youth in an organization devoted to abolishing the police, one that bombards...
- (1/6) Because we didn't find racial discrimination, Reviewers thought our findings were wrong and our preregistered hiring experiments were flawed, leading to repeat rejections. Some lessons we learned, as outlined in our Discussion. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/17…
- MTurk vs. college students: here are several years of attention check responses, from about 6,000 respondents. Figure on the left shows the percentage failing attention checks in each sample and year. On the right is one of the attention checks I used.
- Replying to @JustinTPickett(2/2) ...its members with abolitionist messages. If you repeatedly expose youth to these messages (a few of the Coalition's social media posts are below), and then ask them how they feel about police, you are going in circles. They're going to tell you what you told them.
- At some point there is going to have to be some kind of organized, interdisciplinary pushback against IRBs. Just had one IRB say not to ask racial resentment questions in a survey, because they might offend someone. Guess we can’t study racism anymore.
- Replying to @JustinTPickett(6/6) I say this as a scholar who cares deeply about social justice and who wants to eliminate racial discrimination. Unfortunately, I also have an email from a famous scholar admitting that they left multiple null-result experiments on racial discrimination in the file drawer.
- That’s definitely not what I’m suggesting. My research area is also Black Americans’ fear of the police (see below). My suggestion is that the study needed to be described clearly as an examination of youth in one specific police-abolition coalition. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/17….
- Replying to @JustinTPickett(7/9) A Rawlsian cost–benefit experiment reveals that 45% of Black respondents prefer to be robbed or burglarized than to be questioned by the police “without good reason,” and 52% prefer it over being searched. Confrontational police stops, then, may be as traumatizing as crime.
- Replying to @JustinTPickettGiven the responses, I need to add two posts. Although I'm not a qualitative researcher, the concerns I'm raising are discussed regularly by qualitative methodologists. I'll put one source here and one in the next post. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…
- Replying to @JustinTPickett(8/9) We explain why it is a serious mistake to dismiss Black Americans’ fears by pointing to statistics about police killings of unarmed Black civilians.
- Replying to @JustinTPickett(5/6) Our experiments didn't focus on racial discrimination. Applicant race was a control variable. Yet, we faced strong pushback because of our findings. This needs to stop. Studies should be judged based on their designs not findings. And audit studies aren't the gold standard:
- Replying to @sTeamTraen and @PeterMoskosI believe the data shows a small racial gap in camera tickets (blue vs. red line) at all levels of driver racial composition (x-axis, “share on road”), but a HUGE racial gap (green vs. pink lines) in officer stops at basically all levels of driver racial composition.
