Sola receives honor for paper written with Kubrin
Sixth-year Ph.D candidate in criminology, law & society Justin Sola and CLS Professor Charis Kubrin worked together to address how bias might affect peoples’ decisions to call the police. Their work was just singled out for an award.
“Making the call: how does perceived race affect desire to call the police?” earned Sola the 2023 American Society of Criminology Division of Experimental Criminology’s Student Paper Award, which will be presented Nov. 16 during the ASC Annual Meeting in Philadelphia.
The paper notes there is little scholarship about what affects calls for service, even as they constitute most police interventions in the U.S. “We test how racial perceptions, ambiguous situational contexts, and participant demographics affect desire to call the police,” explain the authors.
How? By conducting a nationwide survey experiment with 2,038 participants. Sola and Kubrin varied the seriousness of events, and also varied whether the people in those events were described as either Black or White. Then, the researchers tested how severity and described race interactively affected participants’ desire to call the police.
Sola and Kubrin found perceived race did not directly affect the desire to call the police or the perceived threat, but political views moderated the effects of race: Those identifying as very liberal expressed less desire — and very conservative folks expressed more desire — to call 9-1-1 in low-severity events involving young Black men.
“The political polarization of desire to call the police raises questions about racially differentiated risk of more serious criminal justice system events, including arrest and incarceration, for racial and ethnic minorities,” concluded the co-authors.
Earlier this year, Sola’s “Theory with Consequents: Theories of Neoliberalism in the Study of Social Problems,” which critically evaluates how scholars use neoliberalism to explain social problems, won the graduate student paper competition from the Society for the Study of Social Problems’ Theory Division.
Kubrin, who was named an ASC Fellow in 2019, recently co-wrote the op/ed “Decarceration and Crime Do Not Go Hand in Hand” with former CLS Ph.D. student Bradley J. Bartos, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Arizona.
In reference to Sola’s latest award, Kubrin recently tweeted, “Congratulations @justin__sola! It's been an absolute pleasure getting to collaborate with you on this and other research projects!”
— Matt Coker