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Project Descriptions
Spring 2025

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Origins of High Rates of Police Homicides and Civilian Homicides in US Cities

Gabriel Lenz, Professor  
Political Science  

Closed. This professor is continuing with Fall 2024 apprentices on this project; no new apprentices needed for Spring 2025.

US cities continue to experience a criminal justice nightmare with high rates of interpersonal violence, police violence, and incarceration. When did this nightmare start? Why did it start? In preliminary work, I've found that this nightmare appears to have begun in Jim Crow southern cities around 1900. This finding suggests that Jim Crow policies may lie behind the criminal justice nightmare we continue to experience. In this URAP project, we are collecting data on police homicides, interpersonal homicides, and arrests in an attempt to confirm (or reject) this initial result. Students will search through newspapers from Jim Crow cities in the years 1870-1940 to look for reports of homicides, police homicides, and total arrests. The project can be tedious but reading through old newspapers can be informative and fun.

Role: Find and code police and civilian homicides in newspapers as well as the total
number of arrests police report.

Qualifications: Willingness to work hard and carefully search/read historical newspapers online. We will use Google sheets to collect the data on each homicide.

Hours: 3-5 hrs

Off-Campus Research Site: We will try to work together in person, but we will play it by ear and may work over zoom.

 Social Sciences

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