Professor Beth Redbird
Beth Redbird, Institute for Policy Research (IPR) sociologist and Professor of the Department of Sociology, took data from 1999-2015 measuring racial disparity in policing. Along with her graduate research assistant, Kat Albrecht, Redbird has created a county-by-county police bias map, which shows the extent of how much more black Americans are arrested than white Americans in that area.
Redbird worked with information from a working paper where she examined over 13,000 agencies of law enforcement across the country. She found that in 1999, the typical agency of law enforcement arrested 5.48 black Americans to 1 white American, but in 2015 the ratio became 9.25:1. Additionally, the ratio increased for Natives to whites in terms of arrest from 3.7:1 in 1999 to 6.2:1 in 2015. Redbird and Albrecht have taken this data to assign an “arrest risk ratio” to each county.