Author: Christopher Marier

Christopher J. Marier is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Appalachian State University. His research primarily focuses on policing and race & justice.
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A tough-on-crime approach is back in US state capitols

Within minutes of his inauguration, new Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe is expected to issue a variety of orders targeting crime. The tone-setting move reflects a national trend.

After a period of relaxed sentencing laws, a tough-on-crime approach is back in political favor in the U.S.

Republicans and Democrats alike are promoting anti-crime initiatives as a new year of lawmaking gets underway in state capitols. That comes after voters in several states approved ballot
measures in the fall imposing stricter penalties for crimes ranging from shoplifting to deadly drug dealing.

Full story: A tough-on-crime approach is back in US state capitols

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‘Pizzagate’ gunman killed by police during traffic stop in North Carolina

The “Pizzagate” gunman who fired his rifle in a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant in 2016 after acting on a debunked conspiracy theory has died following a fatal traffic stop. Edgar
Maddison Welch was shot by police over the weekend and died from his injuries on Monday, authorities in North Carolina said Thursday.

Almost 10 years ago, Welch made national headlines when he traveled to the nation’s capital from North Carolina and fired shots in the Comet Ping Pong restaurant, spurred by a conspiracy
theory that had spread online.

Prosecutors said at the time that Welch was trying to investigate an internet conspiracy theory about the pizza restaurant being home to a child sex-trafficking ring connected to prominent
Democratic politicians, a false claim that became known as “Pizzagate.”

Full story: ‘Pizzagate’ gunman killed by police during traffic stop in North Carolina

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‘It’s beyond human scale’: AFP defends use of artificial intelligence to search seized phones and emails

AFP headquarters in Canberra

The Australian federal police says it had “no choice” but to lean into using artificial intelligence and is increasingly using the technology to search seized phones and other devices, given the vast amount of data examined in investigations.

The AFP’s manager for technology strategy and data, Benjamin Lamont, said investigations conducted by the agency involve an average of 40 terabytes’ worth of data. This includes material from the 58,000 referrals a year it receives at its child exploitation centre, while a cyber incident is being reported every six minutes.

Full story: ‘It’s beyond human scale’: AFP defends use of artificial intelligence to search seized phones and emails

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The Color of Confinement: Racial Bias and Jail Populations Across America

This study builds on the body of research examining whether racial disparities in criminal justice can be attributed to bias. The purpose of the current study was to examine whether there is a relationship between aggregate levels of bias and race-specific incarceration rates in U.S. counties. With data from the Vera Institute of Justice, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the Harvard Project Implicit, this study uses county-level estimates of implicit and explicit biases via Multilevel Regression with Poststratification to assess the relationship between those two types of biases and Black and White prisoners in 2,825 county jails across the U.S. using negative binomial regression. Results indicate that pro-White/anti-Black explicit and implicit bias are associated with a higher population-adjusted number of Black prisoners, and fewer White prisoners, even after controlling for socioeconomic covariates and arrest rates. This research provides compelling evidence that racial bias may contribute directly to racial inequity in jail populations and that bias can be understood as a collective phenomenon impacting social systems.

Published in the American Journal of Criminal Justice

Read Author Accepted Manuscript
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To Battle the Bullet, Baltimore Goes After the Bottle

Decades of research has shown that alcohol contributes to violence in a couple of ways. Where alcohol businesses cluster, violence follows. And although most people who consume alcohol do so safely, people who have been drinking are also more prone to conflict. Perpetrators of homicide are rarely apprehended in time to measure their toxicology, but a global meta-analysis found that about half of killers were under the influence of alcohol at the time of their crimes. Data is more reliably collected from the dead, and in Baltimore between 2017 and 2021, nearly a quarter of homicide victims had alcohol in their blood, according to the Maryland Violent Death Reporting System, similar to patterns nationwide.

Excessive drinking is no more common in Baltimore than elsewhere in the state, according to the data. But because the city has long endured an extraordinarily high rate of gun violence, public health scientists there have dug into the role that alcohol sales play in fueling it. And residents and a few policymakers have pushed reforms that are more creative and ambitious than in any other American city. In several neighborhoods that require alcohol outlets to close earlier than the regular call-time of 2 a.m., a recent study suggests, the change may be playing an unheralded role in the city’s decline in homicides.

Full story: To Battle the Bullet, Baltimore Goes After the Bottle