Northwestern: “As communities across America have gathered in recent months to protest police abuses, researchers are taking a close look at how, where, and why racial disparities in policing occur. IPR sociologist Beth Redbird is one of them, and with graduate research assistant Kat Albrecht she’s compiled the data for a powerful new visual tool that shows how those disparities have grown over time. With their new police bias map, Redbird and Albrecht show county by county the extent to which Black Americans are arrested at a higher rate than White Americans — a trend that has only accelerated in recent decades. They also include data on the arrests of Asian Americans and American Indians, the latter of whom saw an increase in disparity that matches that among Blacks. The tool draws from a recent working paper in which Redbird analyzed data from more than 13,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide. She and Albrecht discovered that even while crime rates fell in recent decades, the racial disparity in arrest rates nearly doubled. As Redbird and Albrecht write, such vast disparities can “delegitimize law enforcement, increase tension between police and citizens, and even increase crime.”…