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Purpose – Police violence involving minority citizens is a significant problem in the United States. Efforts to explain the disparate treatment of minorities have often relied on structural-level racial threat hypotheses. However, research framed by this macro-level approach fails to consider meso-level characteristics of spatially specified places within cities. The place hypothesis maintains that police see disadvantaged minority neighborhoods as especially threatening and, therefore, use more violence in them. Reconceptualizing the racial threat model to include meso-level characteristics of place is essential to better explain police violence.

Design/methodology/approach – The argument is investigated using literature drawn from quantitative analyses of structural predictors of police violence and qualitative/quantitative studies of the police subculture and police behavior within disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Findings – Research on the effects of city-level racial segregation on police violence supports the place hypothesis that the incidence of police violence is higher in segregated minority neighborhoods. City-level segregation is, however, only a proxy for the degree of concentrated minority disadvantage existing at the meso-level. Community-level studies suggest that the police do see disadvantaged places as especially threatening and use more violence in them. Plausibly, meso-level neighborhood characteristics of cities may prove to be better predictors of the incidence of police violence than are structural-level characteristics in cross-city comparisons.

Originality/value – This analysis builds on structural-level racial threat theories by demonstrating that meso-level characteristics of cities are central to explaining disparities in the use of police violence. A multilevel approach to studying police violence using this analytic framework is proposed.

The purpose of this paper is to integrate conflict theory's class and race perspectives to explain police force size in large cities in the USA.

Data on US cities with populations of 250,000 or greater (n=64) are used to test whether class and/or racial factors impact police force size. The data are analyzed using OLS regression.

This study finds that class and race factors combine to impact police force size concurrently. By adjusting the model specifications of a recent article, which concludes police force size in large US cities is determined by racial factors and not class, this study shows that two class‐related factors – racial economic inequality and poverty – significantly influence police force size. Additionally, this analysis calls into question the importance of racial factors; specifically, the threat caused by minority presence and a city's history of racially coded violence.

Few conflict theorists have attempted to integrate class and race in order to explain police force size. The results of this study show that racial economic inequality interacts with poverty (class threat) and that they jointly affect police force size. This adds further nuance to the argument of the complex causal interaction of intersectionality and supports theoretical, methodological, and public policy shifts that blend class inequality and racial threat to explain police force size.

Drawing on the relational demography literature and a social identity perspective, several research propositions in which the authors postulate that demographic characteristics (e.g. gender and race) of senior leaders will influence the implementation and effectiveness of diversity management practices were presented. Specifically, the authors focus on the Chief Executive Officer/Chief Diversity Officer (CEO/CDO) dyad and explore independent and joint effects of CEO and CDO majority–minority group status on workplace diversity outcomes, outlining key identity-based and relational moderators (e.g. value threat, relational identity and leader–member exchange) of these relationships.

The literature on relational demography and leader–member exchange to develop propositions for future research was integrated.

This is a conceptual paper. There is no empirical data reported testing the propositions.

The authors extended theory and research on relational demography by focusing on senior leaders in the organization and proposing that the influence of CEO and CDO demographic characteristics on the enactment of diversity practices may be contingent on key identity-based and relational processes.

The authors are not aware of any studies investigating how personal characteristics and relational processes relating to the CEO and CDO may influence the implementation and effectiveness of workplace diversity management practices. In a similar vein, the authors contribute to the research literatures on relational demography and social identity by extending the application of these theories to senior leaders in organizations and in relation to the work of CEOs and CDOs.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a conflict analysis framework that better captures the complexity of conflicts in divided societies by including the differing perceptions of identity boundaries between ethnic majorities and minorities in divided societies.

The analysis draws on the social boundaries and societal security literatures to develop a typology representing four dyads of perceived identity boundaries that illustrate the different dynamics of ethnic relations in divided societies.

The exploratory cases illustrate how the perceptions of identity boundaries have implications for conflict dynamics that call for different conflict management strategies.

The empirical cases serve to illustrate the application of the theoretical framework. Policy makers devising conflict management strategies in these deeply divided societies are likely to err if differing perceptions of social boundaries are not taken into consideration. Thus, the authors provide explicit policy recommendations for conflict management in each of the dyads presented in the typology.

Using the framework that incorporates differing perceptions of identity allows analysts to account for the impact of external actors in shaping and maintaining identity boundaries and allows for a consideration of the possible differing interpretations of the boundary held by different groups as well as the implications this has for conflict analysis and management.

The authors develop a model that accounts for the perceptions of both the majority and the minority of the identity boundaries that separate divided societies. They account for the implications for conflict dynamics and thus for conflict management strategies of differing perceptions of identity boundaries, which provides a perspective that is both theoretically significant and policy relevant, as most policy makers assume that ethnic minorities and majorities see the social boundary between them in similar terms.

Specialized police gang units are a rapidly emerging form of concentrated social control. Prior research, however, into the creation of specialized gang units suffers from a number of theoretical and methodological shortcomings. These shortcomings make it difficult to understand which of several potential explanations can best account for the establishment of specialized police gang units. Three perspectives are examined that have been hypothesized by policymakers and academics to explain the creation of gang units: contingency theory, social threat theory, and resource dependency theory. Using data obtained from police departments and communities around the country, the explanatory power of measures derived from these three theories is explored, while controlling for several environmental and organizational influences.

Prior studies of criminal sentencing have largely focused on individual-level predictors of sentencing outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of a variety of theoretically derived community measurements of social threat and disadvantage on the criminal sentencing of convicted felons. This analysis permits an evaluation of whether legal ideals such as equality before the law and policy goals of equal treatment for like offenders are achieved.

The study examines data of individuals sentenced in the state of Florida and community level measurements of racial and ethnic threat and community disadvantage. Hierarchical generalized linear model is used to analyze the effect of these measures on the dichotomous in/out imprisonment variable, and standard hierarchical linear regression analysis is used to model the continuous dependent variable of sentence length.

The results provide support for the racial threat perspective though not for ethnic threat nor community disadvantage. The findings and their implications are discussed in terms of theory, research and policy.

Racial disparity in criminal justice practices is receiving increasing public and policy attention, as evidenced by the growing Black Lives Matter movement. Regarding sentencing, racial disparity remains a major research and policy question. While the current research and theoretical literature on sentencing is not conclusive, it is clear that race matters. As a result, racial disparity in sentencing needs to be a priority in subsequent “transitional criminology” efforts between researchers and policy makers to identify, explain and ultimately predict exactly how race impacts sentencing, and how to reduce it as a consideration from sentencing.

This study contributes to a growing body of literature that examines the social context of punishments by using several community level measurements of threat and disadvantage, while modeling the two-step sentencing outcome of imprisonment and sentence length.

The purpose of this paper is to validate the unobtrusive knowledge test (UKT) in a minority population, and examine its potential for limiting stereotype threat.

Study One: (convergent validity): UKT and Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT) scores were correlated for 131 students. Study Two: (stereotype threat) 202 minority students were placed into one of four groups based on whether or not they were given instructions to elicit stereotype threat, and whether they took the Excellence scale of the UKT or the WPT.

Correlations provided evidence of convergent validity between the Excellence subscale of the UKT and the WPT. The stereotype threat study was inconclusive, with no differences being seen in the threat/non‐threat conditions for the WPT, and higher scores in the threat condition than the non‐threat condition for the UKT.

Unreliability of some scales and low correlations of others with the WPT, lessened the overall UKT's convergent validity.

The need to develop measures of intelligence not subject to adverse impact is clear, and the results of the current research provide justification for further research establishing the properties of the UKT as a selection tool.

This paper offers new evidence of the usefulness of the UKT as a measure of cognitive ability for minority populations, and raises questions about the impact of stereotype threat on the UKT test.

The purpose of this research is to compare the fatality rate of Black and White subjects shot by police. This comparison is meant to explore whether officer-involved shootings (OIS) are impacted more by perceived threat or by demographic characteristics. Beyond race, contextual and officer-level variables are examined for their influence on lethal vs non-lethal police shootings.

The study utilizes data from the Tampa Bay Times database on police shootings in Florida from 2009 through 2014. Our analysis focuses on the substantive importance of this issue, using the population of OIS in one specific state over a specified time period. The authors also including multinomial logistic regression models analyzing the impact of race, contextual and officer-level variables on the lethal outcome of OIS is clear that the police are shooting at two very different populations.

Although Black subjects are disproportionately represented as the subjects of OIS, there was no significant difference in the lethality of such incidents based simply on race. However, when we compare Black subjects to White subjects, it is clear that the police are shooting at two very different populations. Black subjects were younger, less likely to be armed, less likely to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and less likely to have suspected or known mental health considerations than their White counterparts.

Thus, it is possible that any racialized difference in the lethality of police shootings is being suppressed because we are comparing very different groups of subjects to one another.

This paper is the first to examine the racial threat that officers experience past the decision to engage in violence. The authors are looking at how they shoot at minorities vs the decision to shoot at minorities.