In an unexpected twist, Colquitt et al.
dis- SOCIAL SCIENCE
cover another key difference between the
DVR and neocortex. By examining g-ami-
nobutyric acid (GABA)–ergic interneurons
(inhibitory neurons that project locally),
they find that the entire songbird pallium
is populated by a type of interneuron that
is largely absent in the neocortex. These in-
terneurons, born in the lateral ganglionic
eminence (LGE), migrate to ventral pallium
areas in mammals, such as the amygdala
and olfactory bulb. This implies that the
cortex-like microcircuits described in the
avian DVR may engage an entire class of
interneurons that has no counterpart in the
mammalian neocortex.
The study by Colquitt et al. is a teaser for
what is to come. Single-cell genomics, one of
the most powerful tools to understand neu-
ronal diversity, is revolutionizing the study of
brain evolution. But in single-cell compara-
tive studies, the power and accuracy of bio-
informatic analyses depend on the breadth
and depth of the data. Colquitt et al. sampled
a small portion of the DVR in two closely
related species of finches. On the mamma-
lian side, ventral pallium single-cell data are
scarce. More data—ideally whole-pallium
cell-type transcriptomes from multiple spe-
cies, including amphibians and fish—are
needed to clarify in detail the relationships of
ventral pallium cell types in vertebrates.
An evolutionary view of the DVR that ac-
knowledges its ventral pallium nature forces
reexamination of the functional analogies
with the neocortex. The independent expan-
sions of the DVR and neocortex endowed
birds and mammals with the capacity to pro-
cess and integrate sensory inputs in complex
ways, but perhaps for different uses. Unlike
the neocortex in mammals, the DVR in birds
is poorly connected with entorhinal-hippo-
campal circuits; instead, one of its main pro-
jection targets is the hypothalamus, resem-
bling parts of the mammalian amygdala in
the ventral pallium (9). Did early mammals
benefit from an enhanced representation of
space to tackle complex navigation tasks? Did
the bird brain specialize in computing stimu-
lus valence? A closer look at the differences
between the DVR and neocortex is needed to
understand the cognitive specializations of
birds and mammals. j
REFERENCES AND NOTES
1. B. M. Colquitt et al., Science 371, eabd9704 (2021).
2. A. Calabrese, S. M. N. Woolley, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.
112, 3517 (2015).
3. H. J. Karten, Curr. Biol. 23, R12 (2013).
4. S. D. Briscoe, C. W. Ragsdale, Science 362, 190 (2018).
5. L. Puelles et al., in Evolution of Nervous Systems, J. H.
Kaas, Ed. (Elsevier, ed. 2, 2017), pp. 519–555.
6. M. A. Tosches et al., Science 360, 881 (2018).
7. A. Zeisel et al., Cell 174, 999 (2018).
8. D. Arendt et al., Nat. Rev. Genet. 17, 744 (2016).
9. L. L. Bruce, T. J. Neary, Brain Behav. Evol. 46, 224 (1995).
10.1126/science.abf9551
SCIENCE sciencemag.org
Asking the right questions
about race and policing
When is policing the right tool, and when is it the problem?
By Phillip Atiba Goff1,2
U
pon asking, “How can we fix this
problem?” enough times, one won-
ders whether the problem can ever be
fixed. This frustration characterizes
an increasingly vocal segment of the
United States on the topic of racism
in policing, with most residents—including
a majority of white respondents—believing
that policing needs major change (1) and
calls to defund the police meriting serious
public engagement (2). On page 696 of this
issue, Ba et al. (3) analyze officer demograph-
ics and police behavior in Chicago and show
that Black officers use force less often than
white officers. Such advances in quantita-
tive social science on racism in policing (4)
should be applauded. But the
field needs to tackle ques-
tions of police abolition to “…the number of
remain relevant to policy dis-
cussions. Gaps remain in the
officers who identify
field’s reasoning about race with vulnerable
that are difficult to address
without considering when groups can matter
policing is the right tool—
and when it is the problem.
quite a bit in
Questions about when and
how policing can reduce re-
predicting police
ported crime now make up behavior.”
one of the largest quantita-
tive literatures on policing (4). This research
challenged previous scientific consensus
that policing could never prevent crime (5).
Now, the question of policing as crime pre-
vention has been the subject of two National
Academies of Sciences reports and volumes
of scholarship (4, 6). Yet, although the litera-
ture produced methodological innovations in
establishing causality, it left critical gaps in
understanding how policing affected vulner-
able communities, particularly historically
marginalized Black communities (4).
A more recent surge of interest in racial
justice has motivated quantitative scholar-
ship around the question of how policing can
be made less racially disparate. Though this
1
Department of African American Studies and Department
of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA. 2Center
for Policing Equity, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Email: phillip.goff@yale.edu
Published by AAAS
question does not directly contradict any lit-
erature (i.e., there is not a raft of scholarship
arguing for policing’s inherent egalitarian-
ism), it does highlight major gaps in the pre-
vious orthodoxy. Specifically, it highlights the
dearth of quantitative social science on ra-
cial equity in policing and the tacit assump-
tion in much of the literature that reported
crime (rather than, say, public concerns
Downloaded from http://science.sciencemag.org/ on February 16, 2021
about state violence) is the primary metric
by which public safety should be evaluated
(4). Yet, even as emerging work such as that
of Ba et al. begins to identify ways to combat
seemingly obvious racism in policing, their
findings suggest the need to engage a ques-
tion that poses an even more fundamental
challenge to established thinking in the field:
whether and when police can be the right so-
lution to social problems.
The assertion that police
can cause more harm than
good is not new (7, 8). But
quantitative social scientists
have not produced a sizable
body of scholarship on the
topic, and thus have fallen
further behind in their ability
to speak to one of the most
urgent issues of public safety
in the United States. For ex-
ample, there is no consensus
on the influence of training
on officer behavior (9, 10). There is no con-
sensus on what portion of racially disparate
policing outcomes are driven by factors out-
side of police control (11). There is no con-
sensus on what officer characteristics predict
biased or burdensome outcomes. And, as Ba
et al. discuss, there has been no consensus on
what the influence of officer demographics is
on officer behavior.
Scholars often assert that these questions
remain unanswered because of the paucity
of data necessary for making precise causal
inference (12). It can take researchers years
to gain access to police data of sufficient
granularity to answer basic questions. The
consequence is the relative silence of quanti-
tative scientists regarding the most pressing
public policy issue in policing. Indeed, a re-
cent National Academies of Sciences report
tasked with summarizing the scholarship on
racial bias stemming from proactive policing
12 FEBRUARY 2021 • VOL 37 1 ISSUE 6530 677
INS IGHTS | P E R S P E C T I V E S
concluded, essentially, that the quantitative
question of racial bias was unresolved despite
strong evidence from historical sources and
suggestive analogs from quantitative litera-
tures on bias in other field settings (4).
As a result, when scholars identify data
that allow for strong inference around race
and policing, they are rightly lauded by the
field. And, to be sure, Ba et al. should be
celebrated. Most of the data used to answer
questions about how the race and gender of
officers influence their behaviors compare
officers within or between departments but
cannot account for where, when, or whom
officers are policing. The result is that the re-
search tended to say “more Black officers is/is
not associated with higher rates of force,” but
the number of potential confounding vari-
ables was humbling. The ability to leverage
the newly public Chicago Police Department
data to match officers with peers on the same
shift and in the same neighborhoods is a
quantum advance for making strong infer-
ences. Here, Ba et al. remove alternative hy-
potheses (at least in this dataset) that Black
officers are simply assigned to higher-crime
neighborhoods or that women are sent to less
dangerous assignments.
These data reveal that Black officers use
force 35% less often than white officers, and
that women use force 31% less often than
men. The magnitude of the differences pro-
vides strong evidence that—at least in some
cities—the number of officers who identify
with vulnerable groups can matter quite a bit
in predicting police behavior. Although this
does not settle the matter, the work stands
alone in its ability to make apples-to-apples
comparisons across officers—regardless of
how many may be bad apples.
Although the study by Ba et al. advances
the field’s understanding of the relationship
between police demographics and behaviors,
some of the most notable findings suggest ad-
ditional questions that align less with “how
can we fix this” and more with “why are we
doing this at all.”
The study reveals that 38% of the dis-
parities in police stops of pedestrians and
motorists between Black and white officers
are predicted by white officers’ greater use
of discretionary stops such as for “vaguely
defined ‘suspicious behavior,’” which means
someone was detained for whatever an of-
ficer deemed suspicious. Ba et al. frame
this as an explanation of how officer de-
mographics predict officer behaviors. But,
given that Ba et al. find negligible demo-
graphic differences in officers’ responses to
community violence, such a large difference
in discretionary stops compels a reader to
ask: Are any of those excess stops by white
officers necessary? Should a department
even be making them, given the demon-
678 12 FEBRUARY 2021 • VOL 37 1 ISSUE 6530
strated risk for abuse so evident in vulner-
able communities?
Similarly, 83% of the excess use of force
by white officers, compared to Black offi-
cers, is due to differences in targeting Black
residents for force. Likewise, 82% of women’s
lower rate of using force compared to men is
attributable to differences in applying force
to Black residents—across racial groups of of-
ficers. The magnitude of the finding raises the
question: Are any of those excess use of force
incidents by white officers necessary? And if
the excess force is not necessary for public
safety, why does the department target Black
communities for so much physical coercion?
These questions are difficult to answer out-
side a broader engagement with the purpose
of policing—and its limitations. With violence
trending downward the past three decades
(13), mostly troubling small geographic areas
(4), and possibly occupying a small portion
of police activity (14), what should the role of
police be? Failing to take seriously the pos-
sibility that the answer should be “much less”
may end up frustrating both researchers and
a public that has been asking the question for
far longer than most scientists. And, because
policing has been seen as racial terrorism in
too many communities and for too long, a
failure to name that as a principal problem
may render all efforts to fix policing appear
to be a frustrating waste of time. j
REFERENCES AND NOT ES
1. S. Crabtree, “Most Americans say policing needs ‘major
changes,’“ Gallup, 22 July 2020; https://news.gallup.
com/poll/315962/americans-say-policing-needs-major-
changes.aspx.
2. S. Sullivan, R. Bade, “Criticized by moderates and
pressured by their base, liberals fight for a voice in the
Democratic Party,” The Washington Post, 29 November
2020; www.washingtonpost.com/politics/democratic-
party-future-liberals/2020/11/29/3da05bfe-2ba5-1
1eb-92b7-6ef17b3fe3b4_story.html.
3. B. Ba et al., Science 371, 696 (2021).
4. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and
Medicine, Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and
Communities (National Academies Press, 2018).
5. R. V. G. Clarke, J. M. Hough, Eds., The Effectiveness of
Policing (Gower, 1980), pp. 1–16.
6. National Research Council, Fairness and Effectiveness in
Policing: The Evidence (National Academies Press, 2004).
7. W. E. B. Du Bois, Ed., Black Reconstruction in America:
Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in
the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-
1880 (Routledge, 2017).
8. A. Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons,
and Torture (Seven Stories, 2011).
9. J. J. Sim, J. Correll, M. S. Sadler, Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 39,
291 (2013).
10. G. Wood, T. R. Tyler, A. V. Papachristos, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.
U.S.A. 117, 9815 (2020).
11. P. A. Goff et al., The Science of Justice: Race, Arrests, and
Police Use of Force (Center for Policing Equity, New York,
2016).
12. P. A. Goff, K. B. Kahn, Soc. Issues Policy Rev. 6, 177 (2012).
13. J. Gramlich, “What the data says (and doesn’t say)
about crime in the United States,” Pew Research
Center, 20 November 2020; www.pewresearch.org/
fact-tank/2020/11/20/facts-about-crime-in-the-u-s/
14. J. Asher, B. Horwitz, “How Do the Police Actually Spend
Their Time?” The New York Times, 19 June 2020; www.
nytimes.com/2020/06/19/upshot/unrest-police-time-
violent-crime.html.
10.1126/science.abf4518
Published by AAAS
THERMOELECTRICS
Tidying up
the mess
Cadmium doping
improves the thermoelectric
properties of AgSbTe2
through ordering effects
By Yu Liu and Maria Ibáñez
T
hermoelectric materials are engines
that convert heat into an electrical
current. Intuitively, the efficiency of
Downloaded from http://science.sciencemag.org/ on February 16, 2021
this process depends on how many
electrons (charge carriers) can move
and how easily they do so, how much
energy those moving electrons transport,
and how easily the temperature gradient
is maintained. In terms of material prop-
erties, an excellent thermoelectric material
requires a high electrical conductivity s, a
high Seebeck coefficient S (a measure of the
induced thermoelectric voltage as a function
of temperature gradient), and a low thermal
conductivity k. The challenge is that these
three properties are strongly interrelated in
a conflicting manner (1). On page 722 of this
issue, Roychowdhury et al. (2) have found a
way to partially break these ties in silver an-
timony telluride (AgSbTe2) with the addition
of cadmium (Cd) cations, which increase the
ordering in this inherently disordered ther-
moelectric material.
The thermoelectric effect was discov-
ered more than 200 years ago when Volta
was conducting experiments with metal-
lic junctions, vessels of water at different
temperatures, and dead frogs (3). Since
then, physicists, chemists, engineers, and
material scientists have tried to iden-
tify the nature of the effect; understand
its microscopic origin; and find, design,
and optimize materials with the high-
est thermoelectric conversion efficiency.
The quality of a thermoelectric material
is evaluated by using the dimensionless
thermoelectric figure of merit, ZT, which
includes the relevant properties men-
tioned above: ZT = sS2Tk–1, where T is the
absolute temperature.
Two components contribute to k: the
lattice thermal conductivity klatt, which rep-
resents heat carried by atomic vibrations
(phonons), and electronic thermal conduc-
Institute of Science and Technology Austria, Am Campus 1,
3400 Klosterneuburg, Austria. Email: mibanez@ist.ac.at
sciencemag.org SCIENCE
Asking the right questions about race and policing
Phillip Atiba Goff

Science 371 (6530), 677-678.

DOI: 10.1126/science.abf4518

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