The Reality of Racial Disparity in Criminal Justice: The Significance of Data Collection

Criminologists have long debated the presence of racial disparity at various places in the criminal justice system, from initial on-the-street encounters between citizens and police officers to the sentencing behavior of judges. What is new is the use of statistics designed to persuade the public, and not just other academics and researchers, that grave racial disparities exist in the system, and that these disparities necessitate significant policy changes

How Accountability-Based Policing Can Reinforce -- Or Replace -- The Fourth Amendment Exclusionary Rule

In Hudson v. Michigan, a knock-and-announce case, Justice Scalia\u27s majority opinion came close to jettisoning the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule. The immense costs of the rule, Scalia said, outweigh whatever benefits might come from it. Moreover, police officers and police departments now generally follow the dictates of the Fourth Amendment, so the exclusionary rule has outlived the reasons that the Court adopted it in the first place. This viewpoint did not become the law because Justice Kennedy, one member of the five-vote majority, withheld his support from this section of the opinion. But the closeness of the vote on the rule\u27s survival, and the Court\u27s 2009 opinion in Herring v. U.S., should motivate renewed discussion of what should replace it. But recently published empirical findings cast doubt on the Court\u27s premise in Hudson that the bad old days of search and seizure violations lay behind us. On the contrary, viewing the data conservatively, roughly a third of all search and seizure activity violates the Fourth Amendment. Thus what the situation calls for is a set of proposals that can serve as a substitute for the exclusionary rule if it disappears, but which can also work equally well to brace up the rule if it stays in place. Fortunately, the law, criminology, and technology can combine to provide a viable set of answers for both possibilities. First, a system for tracking police search and seizure activity, based on successful work on early intervention systems now used to head off police misconduct, holds great promise for advancing the ability of supervising officers to assure that those under their commands obey the law. Second, strengthening the ability of members of the public allegedly subjected to police misconduct to bring suit for redress in federal court would create real incentives for better police behavior. This would do much to address the issue of Fourth Amendment violations that uncover no evidence, making the exclusionary rule an inapplicable remedy. Third, new technologies can enable police departments to make video and audio recordings of nearly all police activity. Coupled with appropriate evidentiary presumptions, these devices can change police behavior, including search and seizure activity. The article will examine these three possibilities, explain their superiority to other substitutes for the exclusionary rule, and will also examine their drawbacks

Terry Stops and Frisks: The Troubling Use of Common Sense in a World of Empirical Data

The investigative detention doctrine first announced in Terry v. Ohio and amplified over the past fifty years has been much analyzed, praised, and criticized from a number of perspectives. Significantly, however, over this time period commentators have only occasionally questioned the Supreme Court’s “common sense” judgments regarding the factors sufficient to establish reasonable suspicion for stops and frisks. For years, the Court has provided no empirical basis for its judgments, due in large part to the lack of reliable data. Now, with the emergence of comprehensive data on these police practices, much can be learned about the predictive power of suspect conduct and other predicates for law enforcement interventions. And what has been learned calls into question a number of factors that have been credited over many years. No observer of the legal system can fail to notice the growing role of data and empirical analysis in the courts. A disparate set of cases have turned in large part on rigorously analyzed data. Yet this trend has not taken root in an important set of cases involving the widely used practice of stop-and-frisk. When stop-and-frisk practices become the subject of litigation, courts generally either have no data to review or have failed to engage in empirical analysis of the data that are available and which could be used to test the claims of reasonable suspicion. Rather, the courts invoke the conventional wisdom that as a matter of common sense certain conduct, for example, furtive movement, flight, bulges in clothing, and suspect location, indicates criminal conduct. We have no argument with common sense propositions; we have no aversion to clear, straightforward thinking. But what this phrase often reflects is a set of unexamined (even if widely held) assumptions. The proliferation of data on these basic questions provides the means for empirical analysis, and it is our argument that courts should do so in assessing reasonable suspicion factors in the same manner that they have engaged in empirical judgments, using both big and targeted data, in other areas

Testing for a unit root in the presence of a possible break in trend

In this paper we consider the issue of testing a time series for a unit root in the possible presence of a break in a linear deterministic trend at some unknown point in the series. We propose a break fraction estimator which, in the presence of a break in trend, is consistent for the true break fraction at rate Op(T^-1) when there is either a unit root or near-unit root in the stochastic component of the series. In contrast to other estimators available in the literature, when there is no break in trend, our proposed break fraction estimator converges to zero at rate Op(T^-1/2). Used in conjunction with a quasi difference (QD) detrended unit root test that incorporates a trend break regressor in the deterministic component, we show that these rates of convergence ensure that known break fraction null critical values are applicable asymptotically. Unlike available procedures in the literature this holds even if there is no break in trend (the true break fraction is zero), in which case the trend break regressor is dropped from the deterministic component and standard QD detrended unit root test critical values then apply. We also propose a second testing procedure which makes use of a formal pre-test for a trend break in the series, including a trend break regressor only where the pre-test rejects the null of no break. Both procedures ensure that the correctly sized (near-) efficient unit root test that allows (does not allow) for a break in trend is applied in the limit when a trend break does (does not) occur.Unit root test; quasi difference de-trending; trend break; pre-test; asymptotic power

XASH genes promote neurogenesis in Xenopus embryos

Neural development in Drosophila is promoted by a family of basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) transcription factors encoded within the Achaete Scute-Complex (AS-C). XASH- 3, a Xenopus homolog of the Drosophila AS-C genes, is expressed during neural induction within a portion of the dorsal ectoderm that gives rise to the neural plate and tube. Here, we show that XASH-3, when expressed with the promiscuous binding partner XE12, specifically activates the expression of neural genes in naive ectoderm, suggesting that XASH-3 promotes neural development. Moreover, XASH-3/XE12 RNA injections into embryos lead to hypertrophy of the neural tube. Interestingly, XASH-3 misexpression does not lead to the formation of ectopic neural tissue in ventral regions, suggesting that the domain of XASH proneural function is restricted in the embryo. In contrast to the neural inducer noggin, which permanently activates the NCAM gene, the activation of neural genes by XASH-3/XE12 is not stable in naive ectoderm, yet XASH-3/XE12 powerfully and stably activates NCAM, Neurofilament and type III β-tubulin gene expression in noggintreated ectoderm. These results show that the XASH-3 promotes neural development, and suggest that its activity depends on additional factors which are induced in ectoderm by factors such as noggin

The War on Terror, Local Police, and Immigration Enforcement: A Curious Tale of Police Power in Post-9/11 America

In post-9/11 America, no goal ranks higher for law enforcement than preventing the next terrorist attack. This is as true for local police departments as it is for the FBI, and police in cities. At the same time, many advocates of tightening U.S. immigration enforcement have recast their efforts as national security and anti-terrorism campaigns. Thus, these advocates and their many allies in the current administration and in Congress have called for local police to become involved in enforcing immigration law. Officials in both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government have taken a number of actions designed to make this happen, pushing expanded power and authority on law enforcement in order that these agencies take up the fight. In the past, as national crises over crime have been declared – think, for example, of the war on drugs – state and local police have risen as one to enlist in the struggle, and have both fought for and accepted expanded authority to carry out their duties. Thus it will surprise many to hear that, in this instance – with nothing less than the prevention of terrorist attacks at stake – local law enforcement has, for the most part, vehemently refused to accept the increased authority to enforce immigration law that the federal government has proffered. Various explanations have been tendered for this, but the one that rings truest by far is that police do not wish to become involved in immigration enforcement because doing so constitutes bad police work – that is, poor public safety policy. Becoming adjunct soldiers to federal immigration enforcement agencies will actually make the public not safer, but less safe, from criminals and predators. Ironically, it will also make Americans less safe from the dangers posed by terrorists. The reasons for this have much to do with the building success and popularity of community policing among police officers over the last twenty years. As police officers in departments of all sizes in every region of the U.S. know, making communities safe depends on intelligence gathering – which in turn depends on the very types of relationships between the public and the police that community policing produces. Thus the refusal of state and local law enforcement to become involved in immigration enforcement both illuminates a turning point in American policing, and teaches us important lessons in how we must go forward in the war on terror if we are to succeed

The display of multi-dimensional flows in turbomachinery

August 1972Introduction: As part of a general development of computational techniques for multidimensional flows through turbomachine passages and over turbomachine blading at the M.I.T. Gas Turbine Laboratory, display techniques and programs have been developed for the visualization and interpretation of the computed flows. These display programs have been developed for the Adage AGT-30 system implemented at the Electronic Systems Laboratory at M.I.T. In the present report two major programs are described and illustrated. These are programs for the display of the turbomachine blading and flow passage geometry and for the display of contours of any scalar fluid variable in the flow passage. The manner in which the system is used is as follows. The turbomachine blading and flow passage geometrical data exist on an Adage tape. The output of the fluid dynamic calculation which is presently done on the OS/370 system is connected on OS/370 to an Adage compatible tape. This tape which represents the computed flow is then viewed on the Adage system.This research carried out in the Gas Turbine Laboratory, M.I.T., supported by the NASA Lewis Research Center under Grant NGL 22-009-38

Attempted DNA extraction from a Rancho La Brea Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi): prospects for ancient DNA from asphalt deposits.

Fossil-bearing asphalt deposits are an understudied and potentially significant source of ancient DNA. Previous attempts to extract DNA from skeletons preserved at the Rancho La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles, California, have proven unsuccessful, but it is unclear whether this is due to a lack of endogenous DNA, or if the problem is caused by asphalt-mediated inhibition. In an attempt to test these hypotheses, a recently recovered Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) skeleton with an unusual pattern of asphalt impregnation was studied. Ultimately, none of the bone samples tested successfully amplified M. columbi DNA. Our work suggests that reagents typically used to remove asphalt from ancient samples also inhibit DNA extraction. Ultimately, we conclude that the probability of recovering ancient DNA from fossils in asphalt deposits is strongly (perhaps fatally) hindered by the organic compounds that permeate the bones and that at the Rancho La Brea tar pits, environmental conditions might not have been ideal for the general preservation of genetic material

Can teaching ultrasound ergonomics to ultrasound practitioners reduce white knuckles and transducer grip force?

Ergonomic training is necessary to help to reduce work related upper limb disorders (WRULDs) in ultrasound practitioners. This study provided an ergonomic training session for ultrasound practitioners to determine whether a teaching intervention changed the grip force used to hold a transducer. Thirteen practitioners participated and were placed into two groups (intervention group n=7). Participants were asked to scan the same simulated transabdominal early pregnancy case. An ergometer was used, which enabled all participants to hear the effect of holding the transducer tightly. Their matched grip force was measured before and after the intervention using a dynamometer. The intervention group reviewed videos and photographs taken during the scan to see if this affected the matched grip force further. Study findings showed that the short ergonomic training session with the use of an ergometer significantly reduced the matched grip force applied to a transducer (p<0.05) for all participants. The video/photo review did not result in any further significant changes