Together with Luis Daniel Gascón (assistant professor at the UMass Boston), I wrote a book entitled "The Limits of Community Policing: Civilian Power and Police Accountability in Black and Brown Los Angeles" based on 5 years of ethnographic work. The book, from NYU Press (July, 2019), is a critical analysis of the "community policing era" using South LA as a case study. We place the rise of community policing alongside its twin, police militarism, and examine its claims to accountability and management of interracial/ethnic conflict under the white supremacist/capitalist political order of the region.
With a group of colleagues (profs and grad students), I am also involved in a quantitative effort to conceptualize and measure the contribution of state violence to the overall crime rate. It may surprise many that crimes committed by the state--from police homicide to prisoner rape (and conceptually including such events as the genocide at Wounded Knee and the Black Wall Street massacre)--are not found in the traditionally reported crime rate. They are lost, for all intents and purposes, from the official record, which records "crime" rather than "harm." We conceptualize that omission and assess it empirically.
The Oregon Law Foundation retained me and several graduate students to conduct and analyze a survey of the legal needs of those in Oregon making <125% of the poverty rate, including a special section on seasonal farmwork. I am also engaged in several projects with graduate students at their own initiative.
Research interests: Racial capitalism; law and society; community policing; drug policy and addiction; qualitative and quantitative methodologies.