Author ORCID Identifier
Semester
Summer
Date of Graduation
2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Type
PhD
College
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
Department
Sociology and Anthropology
Committee Chair
James J. Nolan
Committee Member
Paul Hirschfield
Committee Member
Jennifer Steele
Committee Member
Jesse S.G. Wozniak
Abstract
The dissertation contends that, despite many diligent efforts—from mass protests to a presidential task force—America is not yet on path to remedying its outsized patterns of police abuse. The abuse problem is broadly characterized herein through a “triad” of over-enforcement, excessive force, and racial discrimination. The Washington Post’s “Fatal Force” database, covering the years 2015 through 2024, is offered as a bellwether of American progress in addressing its police abuse; and, it is observed, the nation’s yearly count of fatal police shootings of civilians has been increasing, rather than decreasing.
To help make sense of our lack of national progress, the frameworks that guide the extant remedial efforts are critically assessed. The four frameworks are police abolitionism, which regards the police as unreformable; and three others that are reform-based: evidence-based policing, democratic policing, and constitutional policing. The assessments are pursued through an adapted use of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970), wherein each framework is regarded as a “scientific community.” For each framework, the study examines its “paradigms” (core beliefs) and “anomalies” (problems or unsolved puzzles), and asks whether the scientific community in question exhibits a capacity to grapple with and resolve anomalies—as reflected in the pertinent literature and in practice. One of these frameworks—constitutional policing—is partly assessed through a case study of the landmark stop-and-frisk federal lawsuit, Floyd v. City of New York (2013a) and its subsequent impact on police abuse in New York City.
The conclusion, though not advancing a new police abuse remedy as such, does imagine one potential new trajectory toward promoting progressive police reform nationally.
Recommended Citation
Ryan, Howard, "Police Abuse in America and the Search for Remedy" (2025). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 13044.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/13044