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 authority. 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 legitimate their capacity to use authority by insisting that they are mistakenly reduced into “warriors” when they are much more than that. This finding implies that contrasting police roles in terms of the associated levels of coercion are not necessarily in a competitive relationship but reinforce each other through how officers see themselves as officers in a holistic way. A standalone output from this project was published in Ethnic and Racial Studies.

US Citizenship and 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 solo-authored a paper, which defines legal texts 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 (particularly Hispanic) 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 illuminate the black box of whether and how immigration enforcement shapes plea-bargaining actions, which provides a valuable case of inter-organizational dynamics between the criminal justice system and other institutions.

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, once police officers bring citizens to the emergency department as candidates for involuntary commitment, they actively engage with the treatment process by ordering patients to comply with the treatment procedures, assisting hospital staff with applying physical restraint, and discussing care plans and appropriate dispositions with clinicians. We suggest that police are more closely involved with the treatment of mental illness than the findings of prior studies based on the street and the waiting room.