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. 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.
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.
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.
Jungmyung Kim 