Jeannine Bell, hate crime scholar, to speak at Ivy Tech in February

BLOOMINGTON – Jeannine Bell, author and nationally-recognized scholar in the area of policing and hate crime, will give a talk on police violence and its effect on citizens’ trust at Ivy Tech Community College on Thursday, Feb. 8. Bell will speak at Ivy Tech Bloomington’s campus at 200 Daniels Way, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. in Shreve Hall. The event is free and open to the community.

Bell’s talk is titled, “Mining the Trust Gap: Police Violence and Its Effect on Citizens’ Trust” in which she will attest that nowhere is the separation between black and white citizens clearer than in criminal justice matters. Bell will address the events that transpired in Ferguson, Mo. after a white police officer, Darren Wilson, shot to death an unarmed man, Michael Brown, on Aug. 9, 2014. She will speak on the “trust gap,” referring to the drastic difference in public opinion regarding the police, and share statistics regarding incarceration and public opinion regarding police behavior. Using a range of sources including interviews, news accounts and public opinion data, Bell’s talk will explore views of police behavior by Americans of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Bell has written extensively on hate crime and criminal justice issues. Her newest book is Hate Thy Neighbor: Move-in Violence and the Persistence of Racial Segregation in American Housing (NYU Press, 2013). Her book titled Police and Policing Law (Ashgate 2006) is an edited collection that explores law and society scholarship on the police. Her first book, Policing Hatred: Law Enforcement, Civil Rights, and Hate Crime (New York University Press 2002) is an ethnography of a police hate crime unit.

Bell’s research is broadly interdisciplinary, touching on both political science and law. In that regard, she has written in the area of qualitative methodology and she is co-author of Gaining Access: A Practical and Theoretical Guide for Qualitative Researchers (AltaMira Press 2003). Her scholarship has appeared in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, Rutgers Race & the Law Review, Punishment and Society, and the Michigan Journal of Race and Law. An associate editor of the Law and Society Review, Bell has served a trustee of the Law and Society Association and as a member of the American Political Association’s Presidential Taskforce on Political Violence and Terrorism. She was appointed Richard S. Melvin Professor of Law in 2015.