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In 2020, the United States was shaken by concurrent crises: the COVID-19 pandemic and protests for racial equality. Both crises present significant challenges for law enforcement. On the one hand, the protests for racial equality drew the public’s attention to the criminal justice system’s disparate treatment of Blacks and other people of colour. On the other hand, the pandemic required the expansion of police duties to enforce public health mandates. To ensure compliance, law enforcement may arrest, detain, and even use force to prevent the transmission of communicable diseases that may have an irreversible impact on human health, such as COVID-19. Policing, however, is at a critical point in America. The government is expanding police powers for the sake of public health; all the while, public indignation about police (ab)uses of power has fuelled calls for its defunding. It is therefore important to explore Americans’ views of policing pandemics during periods of social unrest, focusing on the recognition that socio-economic and racial inequities shape perceptions. The data from this project derives from surveys with Americans on the specific topics of race, policing, racial protests, and COVID-19. The study finds that Americans perceive the police as legitimate overall; however, there are divergences based on race, gender, and marital status. These differences may contribute meaningful insights to the current discourse on police legitimacy in America.

A range of individual, social, and neighborhood factors influence the smoking-related health inequities of urban minorities. Yet little is known about how these factors interact to influence smoking behaviors, including cessation. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to estimate the variance in cessation service utilization among a sample of primarily African American adults accounted for by individual, social, and neighborhood factors. Findings showed individual and social factors were important predictors of cessation service utilization. Social contexts have significant effects on smoking cessation service use, and social influences were more significant predictors of cessation service use than neighborhood factors.

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