Category: UW Experts in the News

Quoted: That lines up with experts that say a diverse police force is only part of the answer when the discussion centers on racism, representation, and bias in communities. Police forces are often a reflection of the communities where they serve, UW-Madison Professor Emerita of Sociology Pamela Oliver noted in an email exchange with 7 Investigates. “It isn’t clear that changing the composition of the police force when the community hasn’t changed would make much of a difference.”

A 2003 study found that higher diversity in law enforcement did not necessarily mean a lower number of deaths caused by police, and Prof. Oliver said that the overall body of research “is mixed at best” in relation to the idea that diversity alone in law enforcement will result in less implicit bias.

While Muir spoke disparagingly of Indians, the greater problem is that he largely ignored them, said Paul Robbins, dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW-Madison. Robbins said Muir was “using the same playbook as everyone else was working from” at the time, but that the Sierra Club was founded on the premise of preserving “sacred spaces” devoid of the people who previously inhabited them.

The night sky is giving us many good reasons to look up this summer.

From Neowise, the recently-discovered comet that’s only viewable every few thousand years, to the annual Perseid meteor showers, there’s a lot to watch for in the evening and early morning skies, said Jim Lattis, director of the University of Wisconsin Space Place.

Lattis walks through the summer sky’s brightest objects, and gives tips for where and how to see them.

Quoted: “His stupid, careless talk is not really fascist but conceivably subfascist,” said Stanley Payne, a well-known historian of European fascism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Both Hitler and Mussolini spoke more toward theoretically coherent goals.”

Confusion this week over whether Milwaukee’s private schools could start in-person education in the fall led several parents to ask FOX6: Who has the power to veto school plans during a pandemic?

“If you had asked that question a couple months ago, it would have been pretty clear,” University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Emeritus Dennis Dresang said.

Dresang’s research focuses on state, local, and federal government.

Quoted: “If we look at crises throughout history, they can be a kickstart for progressive social and urban change,” says Kurt Paulsen, a professor of urban planning at UW-Madison. “But they can also be an opportunity for backlash and anti-progressive forces.”

Quoted: Such practices have been justified by the third key component of the vote suppression narrative: the claim of widespread voter fraud. This claim, too, is fallacious, as many voting experts will attest. As Kenneth R. Mayer, a voting expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison declared, “The continued insistence that there are material levels of intentional voter fraud is itself a form of fraud.”

Noted: Swap meets and flea markets are an old practice in the United States, and until the 1960s, they were mostly populated by white vendors who sold mostly secondhand goods outdoors, said Edna Ledesma, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has researched swap meets.

Quoted: Michele LaVigne, a recently retired University of Wisconsin-Madison clinical law professor and director of the Public Defender Project, said implementing the new rules — which require prosecutors to include crime victims in more steps of a prosecution — could slow an already sluggish process.

“All court systems have shut down basically and there is a backlog from hell building up,” LaVigne said, referring to the four months courts have been largely closed because of the coronavirus pandemic.