Details:
Please join us for our fourth installment of the 2014-2015 Brown Bag Speaker Series, featuring a presentation by Prof. L. Song Richardson, titled “Suspicion Cascades and Police Violence.”
This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served. No RSVP necessary.
Parking is available for a small fee in the Social Sciences Parking Structure. For maps and directions to the UCI campus, please click here.
**Approved for 1 MCLE Credit
Date:
Tuesday, February 10th, 2015
Time:
12-:00 – 1:00pm
Location:
University of California, Irvine campus
Social & Behavioral Sciences Gateway Building, room 1517
Abstract:
The high profile killings of unarmed Black men by the police have brought national attention to the persistent problem of policing and racial violence. Many accounts have been given to explain these instances of racial violence at the hands of the police, ranging from arguments that the police acted justifiably to arguments likening these killings to Jim Crow lynchings. It is tempting to blame racial violence on either the racial animus of officers or the purportedly threatening behaviors of victims. However, drawing from well-established research in the field of social psychology, I will introduce the theory of suspicion cascades to explain how waves of decision-making errors can result in instances of racial violence even in the absence of conscious bias. Suspicion cascades reveal that racial violence is a foreseeable consequence of current policing practices and culture. As a result, unless corrective structural and institutional interventions are made, racial violence is inevitable regardless of whether officers have malicious racial motives or citizens engage in objectively threatening behaviors.
Speaker Bio:
Professor Richardson’s interdisciplinary research uses lessons from cognitive and social psychology to study criminal procedure, criminal law and policing. Currently, she is working on a book that examines the legal and moral implications of mind sciences research on policing and criminal procedure. Professor Richardson’s scholarship has been published by law journals at Yale, Cornell, Northwestern, Southern California, and Minnesota, among others. Her article, “Police Efficiency and the Fourth Amendment” was selected as a “Must Read” by the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys. Her co-edited book, The Future of Criminal Justice in America, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2014.
Professor Richardson’s legal career has included partnership at a boutique criminal law firm and work as a state and federal public defender in Seattle, Washington. She was also an Assistant Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. Immediately upon graduation from law school, Professor Richardson was a Skadden Arps Public Interest Fellow with the National Immigration Law Center in Los Angeles and the Legal Aid Society’s Immigration Unit in Brooklyn, NY. Professor Richardson has been featured in numerous local and national news programs, including “48 Hours.”
Professor Richardson is the 2011 Recipient of the American Association of Law School’s Derrick Bell Award, which recognizes a junior faculty member’s extraordinary contribution to legal education through mentoring, teaching, and scholarship. Richardson frequently presents her work at academic symposia as well as at non-academic legal conferences. She is a member of the American Law Institute.
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