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42 J. Crime & Just. 1 (2019)

handle is hein.journals/jlcmadjc42 and id is 1 raw text is: JOURNAL OF CRIME AND JUSTICE Routledae 2019, VOL. 42, NO. 1, 1-2 https://doi.org/10.1080/0735648X.2018.1559029 Taylor&Francis Group Introduction to the special issue on contemporary issues in American policing Richard K. Moule Jr. and Bryanna Fox Department of Criminology, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA In August of 2014, Michael Brown, an African-American male, was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri by a White police officer, Darren Wilson. In the months and years that have followed, new names of African- Americans who were been killed by police - including Eric Garner in New York City, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Walter Scott in North Charleston, SC, and Philandro Castile in Falcon Heights, MN - entered the national lexicon. New social movements such as Black Lives Matter, pubic protests, and in some cases, riots, followed these lethal police-citizen interactions. In response to this unrest, former President Obama assembled the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, the first blue-ribbon commission on law enforcement since the 1970s. Tasked with examining an array of policing-related issues, the Task Force received testimony from a number of community stakeholders, police administrators, and academics. These events, and the testimony of various stakeholders, highlighted a number of topics - police uses of force, responses to peaceful protests and civil unrest, data collection and account- ability, and effectiveness, among others - as contemporary issues in American policing (President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing 2015). These topics, and the narratives surrounding them, serve as the backdrop to this issue of the Journal of Crime and Justice. We have worked to assemble research by a number of well-known and emerging policing scholars regarding these and other important topics in this special issue. Two articles focus on issues associated with disparities in uses of force and efforts to document these uses. John Shjarback details state-led initiatives to systematically collect deadly police use of force data in 'State-mandated transparency: A discussion and examination of deadly force data among law enforcement agencies in Texas.' Research on officer-involved shootings rely primarily on data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. However, as former FBI Director James Comey noted, 'reporting (to UCR) is voluntary, our data is incomplete and therefore, in the aggregate, unreliable.' In his article, Shjarback reviews police use of force data collection efforts from the UCR, the Center for Disease Control, Bureau of Justice Assistance, news media outlets (e.g., The Washington Post), and a new dataset available from the state of Texas, outlining the benefits, weaknesses, and opportunities for researchers studying use of force using these varied datasets. In 'Disparity does not mean bias: making sense of observed racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings with multiple benchmarks,' Brandon Tregle, Justin Nix, and Geoff Alpert address a critical question: whether racial disparities in officer-involved shootings vary across different bench- marks (e.g., total population, total arrest, offense-specific arrests). After analyzing shootings using multiple datasets, Tregle, Nix, and Alpert find that Black citizens are more likely than White citizens to be fatally shot by police officers when compared to population-based benchmarks. Alternatively, when using arrest and crime-specific benchmarks, Black citizens actually appear less likely to be fatally shot by police officers. Together, these articles speak to increasingly sophisticated, and necessary, approaches to understanding and evaluating police use of force in the United States. CONTACT Richard K. Moule Jr. rmoule@usf.edu © 2018 Midwestern Criminal Justice Association

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