Record numbers of women, and in particular women of color, are gaining elective office across the country. This article explores how their presence in legislative bodies might make a difference in policy agendas and legislative advocacy, especially at the intersections of race and gender. Leveraging original datasets of Democratic lawmakers and the bills they sponsor in fifteen U.S. state houses in 1997 and 2005, we examine multiple forms of race–gender policy leadership and how it is tied to legislators’ race–gender identity. Testing theories of intersectional representation, we find that women of color often are the most likely race–gender policy leaders. Indeed, our measures of race–gender policy leadership reveal the distinctive representational work of women of color, which traditional, single-axis measures of legislative activity on behalf of women or racial/ethnic minorities cannot.
Arrests are the paradigmatic police activity. Though the practice of arrests in the United States, especially arrests involving minority suspects, is under attack, even critics widely assume the power to arrest is essential to policing. As a result, neither commentators nor scholars have asked why police need to make arrests. This Article takes up that question, and it argues that the power to arrest and the use of that power should be curtailed. The twelve million arrests police conduct each year are harmful not only to the individual arrested but also to their families and communities and to society as a whole. Given their costs, arrests should be used only when they serve an important state interest; yet, they often happen even when no such interest exists. Governments have allowed constitutional law to become the primary constraint on arrest practices, and it has proved a poor proxy for good policy analysis. The Fourth Amendment permits arrests whenever an officer has probable cause: it has no mechanism for ensuring that the state has any interest in making an arrest—as opposed to starting the criminal process in another way. More broadly, traditional arguments for arrests cannot justify existing arrest practice. Arrests are usually unnecessary to start the criminal process effectively, to maintain order, to collect evidence, or to deter crime. In most cases, reasonable, less intrusive, alternative means exist or could exist for achieving these ends. Even arrests for some serious crimes might be curbed significantly without risking substantial harm to public safety or order. If the state can achieve its law enforcement objectives without arrests, then police departments should conduct far fewer arrests than they currently do, and states should restrict the statutory authority to arrest accordingly. Though there are risks to reducing arrests, those risks are far less problematic than continuing what is presently a massive, and largely unnecessary, enterprise of state coercion.
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