Michelle S. Phelps

The scale of ASA is always dizzying. Looking forward to seeing dozens (maybe not hundreds) of you sociologists soon in Chicago.

If we want a truly public media, we need to publicly fund it. This is a setback, but we cannot normalize it. The US has always vastly underfunded the system, but we have to keep fighting for an actually public system that won't rely on donors and underwriting for survival.

ABSTRACT With low but rising levels of violent political threats and violent acts by civilians in the U.S., researchers increasingly want to measure violent public views – fearing the erosion of collective norms inhibiting violence while also regarding individual attitudes as a risk for rare violent action and more common forms of aggressive political behavior. But how should violent views be measured and interpreted? Drawing on our decade-plus researching these views with several dozen questions and a catalog of related work by others, we provide a practical measurement guide for assessing violent political views with extensive new observational and experimental illustrations that also make important methodological and substantive contributions to the field. We provide considerations for choosing good measure(s): empirically-informed measurement principles, general and specific question evaluations, a deep dive into question design, reliability and validity, and more. The Online Appendix also catalogues a century of violence questions and more published works.

My paper w/ @lilymasonphd.bsky.social is accepted at Public Opinion Quarterly! 🥳

"How to Measure Public Support for Political Violence"

It has nuanced guidance for items & interpretation, & catalogs survey Qs since 1930s. I'll thread another day.

Thanks to editor & reviewers for great feedback!

Inside ICE’s Supercharged Facial Recognition App of 200 Million Images 404 Media has seen user manuals for Mobile Fortify, ICE’s new facial recognition app which allows officers to instantly look up DHS, State Department, and state law enforcement databases by just point...

Not good.

www.404media.co/inside-ices-...

The police militarization debate is over Quaint disputes about the proper role of police and military have been superseded by a more urgent threat: Donald Trump is creating his own, personal paramilitary force

New at The Watch:

radleybalko.substack.com/p/the-police...

They're literally burning food because they didn't want to give it to starving black and brown people.

Pie chart showing that in the U.S. 2 million people are in correctional facilities, 2.9 million people are on probation, 670,700 are on parole.

On any given day, the criminal legal system controls more than 5.5 million people across the U.S.

Here we go again: Over an acerbic dissenting opinion by Justice Sotomayor (joined in full by Justices Kagan and Jackson), #SCOTUS, with no explanation, grants a stay in the Department of Education RIFs case—effectively clearing the way for the Trump administration to dismantle much of the agency:

In the AI era, all summer academic email traffic will just be our office auto-responders emailing each other back and forth until oblivion.

John Fabricius, executive director of the Praxis Initiative, spent 15 years incarcerated in the ADCRR, and since his release in 2018, he's worked with other criminal justice advocacy groups to get a law passed in Arizona to bring some sort of transparency to state prisons. He says he realized while behind bars that the ADCRR had "total narrative control" over information, and what was really happening wasn't getting out to anyone—reporters, lawmakers, and even prison administrators. "I watched people die," Fabricius says. "I watched a guy lose a leg. I watched my friend go blind. It was crazy. It was insane in there." In the case of his friend, Fabricius says the man went permanently blind in one eye after waiting three months for an outside appointment and then nine months for surgery to treat a detached retina. Fabricius says that, while his friend was putting in requests to see a doctor, prison medical staff offered him Visine for his occluded eye.

Of all the things I write about, medical neglect in prisons and jails is the one that just drives me nuts.

"I watched people die. I watched a guy lose a leg. I watched my friend go blind. It was crazy. It was insane in there." reason.com/2025/07/11/a...

overheard at the (kids') lunch table: "Bluey is a bit sus." 😂

I'm aware of the wars on various constituencies we've been talking about. But a campaign addressing the Trumpian endeavors to starve children at home and abroad, to snatch their parents away in front of them, to deny them basic healthcare, deny their citizenship could have some impact.

Medicaid cuts will ‘devastate’ millions, advocates say An estimated 16 million would lose insurance, including via Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, in the next decade if budget bill passes

I wrote about the impact of the Medicaid cuts for @prismreports.org, which had then passed the House. Now, they've passed the Senate in even worse form. The only hope left is improvements back in the House, but not holding my breath.
thehill.com/policy/healt...
prismreports.org/2025/06/18/m...

He's implying that 35 million people are getting healthcare support they don't deserve, but it's just as likely that 35 million people need more support than they are able to access because of how the poverty line is established.

His tone shows his revulsion toward those who access govt resources.

Remembering Melissa Hortman: Republicans and Democrats say her power came from her selflessness • Minnesota Reformer “She wasn’t about the bullshit,” Rep. Aisha Gomez said. “The TV cameras or the next higher public office. Or about being glorified or having everyone like you. She was about doing the best she could d...

And read J. Patrick Coolican and Michelle Griffith's story about Hortman's legacy, based on interviews with dozens of her friends and colleagues, here: minnesotareformer.com/2025/06/26/r...

Yeah this is the goal and they’ve been pretty clear about it

the dumbest, worst timeline -- I hope we never lose our capacity to be stunned by the awfulness of it all.

Incredible new dataset on police shootings in the US, courtesy of Tom Clark, Adam Glynn, and Michael Leo Owens for their new book “Deadly Force: Police Shootings in Urban America.” It covers all cities with 100K+ residents and includes both fatal & nonfatal outcomes.
policeshootingsdata.com/data/

Judge: And so given all those factual findings, I'm going to exercise the discretion I have to ORDER THE RELEASE of Mahmoud Khalil

I truly believe we will look back at this attitude as *the* sickness of our political era.

It is an extremely basic fact, and has been for decades, that the vast majority of political violence in the US is committed by the right! You cannot solve a problem if you refuse to identify it.

"We are devastated and heartbroken at the loss of our parents, Melissa and Mark. They were the bright lights at the center of our lives, and we can't believe they are gone. Their love for us was boundless. We miss them so much. "We want everyone to know that we are both safe and with loved ones. We are grateful for the outpouring of love and support we have received, and we appreciate your respect for our family's privacy as we grieve. "Our family would like to thank law enforcement for their swift action that saved others and for the coordination across communities that led to the arrest of the man who murdered our parents. We especially would like to thank the officers who were first on the scene to our parents' home and their heroic attempts to rescue our mom and dad. "Our parents touched so many lives, and they leave behind an incredible legacy of dedication to their community that will live on in us, their friends, their colleagues and co-workers, and every single person who knew and loved them. "If you would like to honor the memory of Mark and Melissa, please consider the following: • Plant a tree. • Visit a local park and make use of their amenities, especially a bike trail. • Pet a dog. A golden retriever is ideal, but any will do. • Tell your loved ones a cheesy dad joke and laugh about it. • Bake something — bread for Mark or a cake for Melissa, and share it with someone. • Try a new hobby and enjoy learning something. • Stand up for what you believe in, especially if that thing is justice and peace. "Hope and resilience are the enemy of fear. Our parents lived their lives with immense dedication to their fellow humans. This tragedy must become a moment for us to come together. Hold your loved ones a little closer. Love your neighbors. Treat each other with kindness and respect. The best way to honor our parents' memory is to do something, whether big or small, to make our community just a little better for someone else."

Please read and share this statement from Sophie and Colin Hortman, children of Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark.

(via WCCO reporter Caroline Cummings on X)

A full timeline of events in the shootings of 2 Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses Authorities have taken a man into custody and charged him in the targeted shootings of Minnesota lawmakers Rep. Melissa Hortman and Sen. John Hoffman.

There's still lots of open Qs (inc sequence of events at Hortmans' home) but this timeline of the MN assassinations is horrific. The missed opportunity to intervene at New Hope is just gutting.
www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/ne...

These programs reduce the risk of police violence, reduce costs, and better meet the needs of people calling for service. Wins all around.

This is a good piece and highlights something I've been saying w/r/t Minneapolis for years -- the Q isn't "how do we recruit enough cops?" but instead "how do we shape public safety *now* to meet needs?" And the answer is by thinking more about civilian + other 1st responder programs.

This is good politics and policy. The act is named well and describes exactly its intent. It addresses a growing problem that underlies both the efforts of ICE and the MN political assassinations (since it should not be that easy to impersonate law enforcement). Democrats, be like this more.

Bernie Moreno & • 1 @berniemoreno Follow ... The degree to which the extreme left has become radical, violent, and intolerant is both stunning and terrifying.

It’s not just Mike Lee — Bernie Moreno is pretending that a registered Republican evangelical anti-abortion Trump voter who assassinated a Democrat and had more on his hit list is a representative of “the extreme left”

"No Kings Day" protests turn out millions Our unofficial estimate is that around 4 million people attended a protest event yesterday. Anti-Trump resistance is outpacing 2017.

Based on crowd-sourced records of No Kings Day event turnout, and extrapolating for the cities where we don't have data yet, it looks like roughly 4-6 million people protested Trump across the U.S. yesterday. That's nearly 2% of the U.S. pop!

Mobilized anti-Trump resistance is exceeding 2017 levels

A Democratic legislator was assassinated; right-wing influencers coughed out disinformation • Minnesota Reformer Right-wing influencers marred Hortman’s death and smeared Walz on a pile of lies.

A Democratic legislator was assassinated; right-wing influencers coughed out disinformation minnesotareformer.com/2025/06/14/a...

Notice how the cops tell him to put his hands behind his back AT THE SAME TIME THEY KEEP HIS ARMS FROM MOVING.

This is not uncommon.

There was a police killing of an unarmed drunk man in Vegas a few yrs back, where the cops yelled contradictory things at the man then shoot him for “not complying.”

When a cabinet member announces "We are using the military to liberate an American city from its elected leaders," where do you go from there. What is left to say. The idea of that being anything short of a near-universal "Wait, what the fuck is going on" moment proves how far we've backslid.