In this episode, Clay speaks with Dr. Michael Sierra-Arevalo. Michael is a sociologist, criminologist, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is an expert on police, gangs, guns, and violence prevention and serves on the City of Austin’s Public Safety Commission.
His research shows how danger and violence influence police culture, officer practice, and social inequality. His first book, The Danger Imperative: Violence, Death, and the Soul of Policing, is under advance contract at Columbia University Press. Michael’s writing and research have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Times Higher Education, NPR, Vox, GQ, and The New Republic.
Michael and Clay explore “The Danger Imperative”- a term Michael uses to describe how police are informally and formally socialized into a cultural frame that emphasizes violence and the need for officer safety—and its effect on officer behavior. They discuss culture and its importance, the complexity and difficulty of policing, where the Danger Imperative and cognitive distortions in all humans overlap, base rates and probabilities, translating data into OpEd’s and talking points, the citizen’s role in police interaction, and solutions to bridge the divide.
