2. Policing Queer and Disabled Identities: An Intersectional Approach to Study Police Bias

Scholars have extensively used administrative records of police stops to uncover racial disparities and bias in law enforcement practices. Despite this, we know very little about how other marginalized identities such as queerness and disability are policed. In this article, I fill this gap by analyzing ~3,100,000 stops in the U.S. between 2018 and 2025, looking at whether civilians who are perceived as either LGBTQ+ or disabled are disproportionately targeted by the police. Through multiple tests, I find consistent evidence that queerness and disability are associated with a higher probability of being searched, arrested, and victims of use of force by the police. Then, using an intersectional approach, I test whether the interaction of race with queerness or disability worsens police discrimination. Results show that bias deepens for racial minorities who are also LGBTQ+ or disabled, suggesting that a dynamic of intersectional, double disadvantage can be found in police discrimination.

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. Thinking Intersectionally to Uncover the Limits of Traditional Sexism Measures, with Marina Munoz Puig and Toni Rodon

Measuring sexist attitudes today requires addressing how these encompass backlash against LGB, trans, and other gender nonconforming identities, while also accounting for social desirability bias in responses. In this research, and drawing from an intersectional framework, we use a list experiment with novel items to explore attitudes towards identities and family structures that challenge deeper and more entrenched patriarchal and heteronormated values. We do so in Catalonia, with the aim of looking at whether reconceptualizing sexism beyond the gender binary, relating it to attitudes towards non-conforming gender norms and family structures, reveals a higher prevalence of sexist attitudes in the population when compared to other scales and items that limit their scope to the male-female binary. Results show that our framing yields much higher estimates of the prevalence of sexist attitudes compared to traditional items. Findings also indicate that while societal progress has led to predominantly approving opinions regarding equality among men and women, new forms of sexism, which question the assumed connection between sex, gender, and sexuality, have taken the spotlight and are mainly aimed towards LGBTI+ individuals and their demands for equality.

5. 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