Wikimedia Commons, Paul Becker

Current Projects

1. Breaking the Cycle? Marijuana Policies and Racially Biased Policing, with Toni Rodon

Marijuana policies have been oftentimes pushed by activists and legislators to curb racially biased policing. However, their effects have proven elusive due to structural and institutional factors that hinder deep change in patrol tactics. Using information on ~21 million traffic and pedestrian stops, and applying multiple tests to measure disparity and bias, we show that police response to marijuana policies is heterogeneous and appears resistant to change. Difference-in-differences models show that in Illinois, compared to similar jurisdictions, excess stops against minorities clearly grew after decriminalization and legalization of marijuana. Gaps in search thresholds grew after decriminalization for both minorities, and for Black motorists after legalization. Legalization had some positive effects on decreasing bias in searches and arrests, but improvements disappear when focusing on Chicago. Our findings underscore the hardships that reforms aimed at decreasing police bias face, the discretionary power that police still retains in the U.S. when confronted with reform, and how this is hindering police accountability.

2. Policing Queer and Racialized Identities: an Intersectional Approach to Study Police Bias

Queer people in the U.S. have been historically over policed, in a long-standing history of criminalization and oppression of sexual and gender minorities by law enforcement. Despite scholars having extensively used administrative records of police stops to uncover racial disparities and bias in law enforcement practices, virtually no studies exist doing the same to examine the discriminatory policing of queerness – by itself, and in the intersection with race. In this article, I fill this gap by analyzing administrative records of ~3,100,000 stops in the U.S. between 2018 and 2025, looking at whether civilians who are perceived as LGBTQ+ are disproportionately targeted by the police in post-stop decisions. Through multiple tests, I find consistent evidence that queerness is associated with a higher probability of being searched, arrested, and be victims of police use of force, compared to cisgender and heterosexual civilians. Then, using an intersectional approach, I test whether the interaction of race with queerness worsens police discrimination. Results show that bias gets worse for racial minorities who are also LGBTQ+, suggesting that a dynamic of intersectional, double disadvantage can be found in police discrimination. The findings underscore the importance of applying an intersectional framework to police studies, and the ongoing role of policing in reproducing the marginalization of historically oppressed communities.

3. De-Policing Or Reform? Police Tactics After Black Lives Matter’s 2020 Protests

Can mass protests for racial justice influence police patrol tactics? Which racial and spatial mechanisms underlie these changes? Previous literature suggests that high-profile events can lead departments to alter their enforcement activities by ‘de-policing’. However, literature is scarce (and conflicting) about the relationship of de-policing with crime, and effects across racial groups are underexplored. In this article, I argue that this apparent de-policing is, in reality, a (positive) reform of police patrol tactics induced by public pressure, which forced law enforcement to reconsider its approach to police-civilians interactions and focus on adopting a conservative stopping strategy, more targeted against higher-risk individuals, and more sensitive regarding the unequal treatment of minorities. To do so, I analyze this issue combining pedestrian stops and crime data from Chicago, asking whether the 2020 BLM protests led the CPD to change its patrol strategy. When protests erupted, crime and policing got progressively decoupled: when criminality rose, stops did not. While crime simply returned to its pre-BLM (and pre-COVID-19) trends and levels, policing changed radically: stops, searches and arrests dropped and became stationary, while hit rates rose sharply. Stops also decreased differently across racial groups: almost exclusively for Black civilians, and mostly in minority districts.

4. Anti-Feminist Resistance and Cisheteronormative Sexism: Evidence from a List Experiment, with Marina Munoz Puig and Toni Rodon

Measuring sexist attitudes today requires addressing how these encompass resistance against LGB, trans, and other gender nonconforming identities, while also accounting for social desirability bias in responses. In this research, drawing from an intersectional framework, we use a list experiment with novel items to explore attitudes towards identities and family structures that challenge more entrenched patriarchal, heteronormated values. We do so in Catalonia, introducing the novel concept of ‘cisheteronormative sexism’, describing prejudice against non-conforming identities and structures that challenge a patriarchal, cisheteronormative order. Results show that our framing yields much higher estimates of the prevalence of sexist attitudes compared to traditional items, especially among young men and right-wing respondents. Findings are important, as they hint at the emerging importance of new forms of sexism, mainly aimed against LGBTI+ individuals and their demands for equality, even when societal progress has led to predominantly approving opinions regarding equality towards men and women.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

1. Choices, Flows, Segregation. Lower Secondary Education in Bologna, Reggio Emilia and Prato, with Giancarlo Gasperoni, Debora Mantovani, and Federica Santangelo

The article explores the allocation of pupils in secondary schools in Bologna, Reggio Emilia and Prato – cities featuring a high incidence of foreign students – to assess how the distribution is associated with ascribed characteristics of pupils and their families (namely, citizenship and parents’ education level), catchment areas’ social characterization and school profiles. Nearly half of the pupils do not attend their area of residence’s reference school. Such mobility is more widespread among Italian families and those with more educated parents, especially when it comes to leaving the public school system in favour of privately managed institutions. An ad hoc, detailed typology of area-to-school movements also unveils unexpected forms of reference school ‘avoidance’, such as ‘downward’ mobility towards schools that appear to be more disadvantaged than reference schools. Interschool segregation tends to be greater than residential segregation, and the allocation of pupils between classes further contributes to segregation. Equitable access to educational opportunities varies according to pupils’ migratory status, families’ cultural resources and the social profile of catchment areas, but with significant variations presumably reflecting municipal and neighbourhood contexts.

This article has been published in Scuola Democratica