Jed Knode Receives ASC Division of Policing Award
September 12, 2024
Jedidiah Knode, Doctoral Student in the School of Criminal Justice, has received the 2024 Outstanding Student Article Award from the American Society of Criminology (ASC) Division of Policing.
Knode received the award for his article “Pulling back the veil of darkness: A proposed roadmap to disentangle racial disparities in traffic stops,” written with co-authors Dr. Scott Wolfe and Dr. Travis Carter.
The article aims to clarify the methodology behind the “veil of darkness,” a test used to explore pre-stop racial bias in police traffic stops. Knode says that part of the reason he and his co-authors write the article was due to the confusion and inconsistency surrounding these analyses.
Discussing the method, Knode says “the veil-of-darkness takes advantage of the fact that it’s harder to see during darkness than during daylight. Not impossible – just more difficult. If we hold a bunch of things related to when it’s light or dark outside constant (e.g., time of day, time of year), as well as things related to police activity (e.g., assignment, discretion involved in the stop), so that the only theoretical difference between the groups of stops you’re comparing is whether they occur during daylight or darkness (ie: whether driver race is more visible), it can serve as a test of whether racial bias is present when police conduct traffic stops.”
The end result was an article that demonstrates how to properly model these analyses and provides practitioners with a reproducible code to make similar assessments more accessible.
Congratulations Jed, this is well earned!
___
Jed is a 4th-year doctoral student in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. His research focuses on the evaluation and reduction of institutional inequalities and reducing the barriers between practitioners and research to improve evidence-driven policy. His work appears in the journals Criminology, Justice Quarterly, and Criminology & Public Policy. He currently serves as a graduate research fellow at the Michigan Statistical Analysis Center. Jed graduated from Colorado State University in 2020 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. He is currently managing growing over 40 varieties of peppers (too much by any stretch of the imagination), running a D&D game set in the Victorian era, and spending any remaining time with his far cooler spouse and daughter.