Jungmyung Kim

Occupational Identity Maintenance of US Police

My dissertation is about occupational identities of US police. Specifically, I examine how police officers perceive themselves in the fact of activist criticism and attempts to restrict their capacity to use force. To do so, I utilize qualitative methods, especially observations and in-depth interviews with police officers. I conducted more than 500 hours of observation and 115 interviews with various police departments. I find that police officers justify their existence and power by insisting that they are mistakenly reduced into “warriors” when they are much more than that. This finding implies the variety of police work can be a source of excuse from efforts to create institutional changes in public safety. A standalone output from this project was published at Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Textual Opportunities and Outcomes of Criminal Case Processing

With Dr. Michael Light and Dr. Jason Robey, I published studies on the disparities in criminal case outcomes by US citizenship in state courts in the American Journal of Sociology and Criminology. Extending these studies, I am solo-authoring a paper, which defines legal texts as cultural objects that enable a certain plea bargaining strategy more viable than others with consequences on citizenship disparities. By analyzing case records of California, I find that non-US citizens were more likely to be convicted than US citizens. Interestingly, this pattern was stronger when non-US citizens can be convicted of more ambiguous offenses that help them avoid criminal deportation. Based on this finding, I illustrate how legal texts can contribute to the inequality of criminal justice.

Relationships between Police and Hospitals

As an expansion from the dissertation project, I examine the processes of mental healthcare that routinely lead to police involvement at the emergency room. In-depth interviews with staff of a midwestern hospital suggest that hospital staff called the police as a reinforcement of security. This police involvement was often a result of the medical staff’s attempts to perform involuntary treatment on patients and manage the resistant behavior of the patients. As such police involvement may erode patient trust in the medical system, we suggest that hospital staff minimize involving police for the assistance of their treatment processes and call for more community-based mental health resources to reduce the possibility of relying on involuntary treatment.

The Spectacle of Subway Automation and Status Aspirations of Cities

With Dr. Youbin Kang, I analyzed an original dataset consisting of 1,276 cities for the adoption of automated subways, characterized by the absence of drivers in the train. Our event history analysis suggests that automated systems were more likely to be adopted by high-status cities. However, this trend diminished when cities were preparing to host a mega-event such as the FIFA World Cup. Using this finding, we argue that cities visually remove drivers to achieve higher status in the competition for global capital. This project was published at Socio-Economic Review.