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Unwittingly Complicit: The Police & Racial Segregation
A few months ago, I was asked to speak about the origins of my research on the intersection of policing, race, and crime. I soon realized that to do this I would have to discuss the one thing nobody ever really wants to hear about — the details of your doctoral dissertation. Most people would just as soon listen to twenty minutes of a colicky baby wailing set to a beginner bagpipe lesson. So, you’ll have to forgive the academical tone and profusion of attributions, but perhaps there’s a story in here that will surprise you as much as it did me.
In the spring of 2009, I started writing my dissertation. I knew I wanted to do something about policing and race. If there is well-trod ground in criminal justice circles that is certainly it. The biggest challenge was finding a new way to study some very old questions.
A year earlier I had begun to work with computer simulation models. Around the same time, I started reading the work of the Nobel Prize winning economist, Thomas Schelling. As I thought about things, it became obvious to me that all these areas had a common intersection.
What resulted was a body of research where I built (programmed) simulated digital communities of around ten thousand “residents.” Visually, they were just thousands of red or green dots on a computer screen with a smaller…
