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Social Science Speaks – Suspect Citizens: Driving While Black in North Carolina and the US with Frank Baumgartner

April 22, 2019 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

 

Suspect Citizens: Driving While Black in North Carolina and the US with Frank Baumgartner

Odum Institute 95th Anniversary Speaker Series: Social Science Speaks
 
 
Headshot of Professor Frank BaumgartnerIn honor of our 95th anniversary, the Odum Institute is organizing a speaker series to highlight the interdisciplinary impacts of social science research. As part of this series, Professor Frank Baumgartner will hold a talk about his recent book, written with Derek A. Epp and Kelsey Shoub, “Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race,” followed by a Q&A session. Refreshments will be provided.

From the Amazon description:

“Suspect Citizens offers the most comprehensive look to date at the most common form of police-citizen interactions, the routine traffic stop. Throughout the war on crime, police agencies have used traffic stops to search drivers suspected of carrying contraband. From the beginning, police agencies made it clear that very large numbers of police stops would have to occur before an officer might interdict a significant drug shipment.
 
Unstated in that calculation was that many Americans would be subjected to police investigations so that a small number of high-level offenders might be found. The key element in this strategy, which kept it hidden from widespread public scrutiny, was that middle-class white Americans were largely exempt from its consequences. Tracking these police practices down to the officer level, Suspect Citizens documents the extreme rarity of drug busts and reveals sustained and troubling disparities in how racial groups are treated.”

 

Bio:

Frank R. Baumgartner, the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UNC-Chapel Hill, received his undergraduate and graduate training at The University of Michigan (PhD, 1986), and held full-time academic appointments at The University of Iowa, Texas A&M, and Penn State before coming to Carolina in 2009.
 
Author of 10 books and editor of four others, he created (with Bryan D. Jones of the University of Texas) the Comparative Agendas Project and is known for his work on lobbying, policymaking, agenda-setting, and racial dynamics in the criminal justice system. He has published scores of articles in the major political science journals, serves on numerous editorial boards, has held various offices in the Midwest Political Science Association, the American Political Science Association (including Vice President (2015-16) and, and has been active with the National Science Foundation.
 
He regularly teaches classes at all levels ranging from large lectures to small graduate and undergraduate seminars and contributes to UNC in various service capacities, with a particular focus on faculty diversity. His most recent books include Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty (Oxford, 2018, co-authored with four UNC undergraduate students), Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us about Policing and Race (Cambridge, 2018, co-authored with two UNC graduate students), and Comparative Policy Agendas: Theory, Data, Tools (Oxford, forthcoming 2019, co-edited with Christian Breunig and Emiliano Grossman, representing the current state of the Comparative Policy Agendas project). He has won numerous awards and in 2017 was inducted in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

 
 
 

Details

Date:
April 22, 2019
Time:
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Event Category:

Venue

Dey Hall – Toy Lounge
200 South Road
Chapel Hill, NC 27514 United States
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