Featured research: Investigating racial disparities in drug arrests

Some argue the racial disparity in drug arrests is due to disproportionate drug use – what does the data say?

As an MDI Scholar, working in partnership with Justice Innovation Lab, Phil Cork helped investigate racial disparities in drug arrests. The research focused on producing estimates of drug use by race. The process required geocoding arrest locations from high-quality administrative data as well as implementing cutting-edge machine learning methods to predict drug use. In general, the findings suggest that patterns in drug arrests do not match the estimated patterns in predicted drug use.

To view the full article by MDI Scholar Phil Cork, click here.