I am an associate professor of sociology at Portland State University. My interests in drug policy and race eventually led me to graduate school at the University of Wyoming (where the sociology program sadly has been merged) and then on to the University of California, Irvine where I studied both quantitative and qualitative methods. I spent several years at Washington State University before arriving at PSU. My research and teaching interests continually evolve but involve drugs/addiction, racial capitalism, state violence, law and society, police, radical organizing, and critical analyses of science and method.

Together with Luis Daniel Gascón (associate professor at the UMass Boston), I wrote a book entitled "The Limits of Community Policing: Civilian Power and Police Accountability in Black and Brown Los Angeles" based on 5 years of ethnographic work. The book, from NYU Press (reviewed here, here, here, and here), is a critical analysis of the "community policing era" using South LA as a case study. We place the rise of community policing alongside its twin, police militarism, and examine its claims to accountability and management of interracial/ethnic conflict under the white supremacist/capitalist political order of the region. 

A group of colleagues (profs and grad students) and I conceptualized and measured the contribution of state violence to the overall crime rate. It may come as a surprise that harm committed by the state (such as police homicide or prisoner rape) is not found in the official crime rate. We conceptualize that omission and assess it empirically here. 

A group I led surveyed Oregon's impoverished population regarding their most pressing legal needs. An preprint of an article from that work regarding Spanish-speaking farmworkers specifically is here, while the general survey results are here. Another group and I are working to understand the excuses made by police for their homicides, an extension of criminology's famous "techniques of neutralization." I am working on a number of additional projects as well. 

Full CV here.

My thoughts on the construction of the Refaat Alareer Memorial Library and pro-Palestine protest here. 

r o u s s e l l (at) pdx (dot) edu