Welcome!

I study the complex ways geography structures race and other individual-level descriptive attributes (i.e., race, class gender, etc.), inside the criminal legal system. My research agenda focuses on two distinct areas. 

The first involves my substantive work related to policing, identity, and the criminal legal system. Here, I investigate how demand for policing presence, as proxied by 911 call locations, shapes the location of officer-initiated surveillance and enforcement acts. By examining how residents can affect law enforcement behavior from the bottom-up, I aim to become a leading scholar on demand preferences for policing and its impact on civil society. 

The second area involves my technical innovations related to geolocated event data (i.e., cell phone geo-coordinates, computer IP addresses, etc.). In this category, I develop novel measurement strategies that estimate spillover effects between discrete call locations. This also includes expanding the potential outcome framework of causal inference so that it can accommodate space-time event data and spatial point process models. Framed as a question, how can researchers use geographically informed variables to better describe the world and isolate causal effects?

Email Contact: davidson [dot] marty [at] protonmail [dot] com