How to research policing? talk to people who have been arrested. 4 insights from 150 arrested individuals on the role and reform of the police.

Over past months, the Black Lives Matter movement’s denunciation of police violence has been spotlighted in the wake of high-profile police killings of Black men in the United States. Over the past five years, the cities of Cleveland and Baltimore entered “consent decrees” to undertake civil rights improvements in their police forces after Federal Government investigations found evidence of overly aggressive policing. One of the conditions of the decrees in Baltimore and Cleveland was to ask arrested individuals whether any of these changes were noticeable in practice. In 2019, Todd Foglesong and Ron Levi, along with research teams, went to the jails in both Baltimore and Cleveland to speak with arrested individuals.