Researcher: Elizabeth Wrigley-Field (College of Liberal Arts, Department of Sociology, Minnesota Population Center, Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation)

2020 marked a major upheaval in how racial stratification and neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation (e.g., neighborhood poverty rates) intersect in structuring mortality risk in Minnesota. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, racial stratification in mortality aligned strongly with neighborhood deprivation. The early pandemic changed that. But what has happened since and what is happening now? Has Minnesota returned to its pre-pandemic patterns of inequity, has it maintained the new patterns it…

In recent years, policing has become an increasingly controversial and salient government service in the US. After several heavily publicized deaths of Black boys and men (and, later, Black women) during police encounters, some have rallied around the #BlackLivesMatter movement, while others have grown stauncher in their support for law enforcement. Yet scholars currently know little about this shift in the politics of policing. This study takes a mixed-methods approach, combining survey data, ethnographic observations, textual analysis, and qualitative interviews to understand police reform in Minneapolis, a city on the forefront of national progressive reforms, yet with a deeply…