Tune in to Focus Carolina during morning, noon and evening drive times and on the weekends to hear stories from faculty members at UNC and find out what ignites their passion for their work. Focus Carolina is an exclusive program on 97.9 The Hill WCHL, sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Dr. Frank Baumgartner is the Distinguished Professor of Political Science in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences and challenges his students to better understand the implications of public policy on society. His book Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us about Policing and Race discusses the data collected from every traffic stop in North Carolina and how it can tell us who is likely to get pulled over or arrested.
“It’s a review of every traffic stop in North Carolina since 2002. The focus is the difference in how traffic stops involving black, white and Hispanic drivers, how those traffic stops are handled by the police across the state. North Carolina was the first state in the country to mandate collecting this data.”
Part 1
Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty is Baumgartner’s tenth and latest book and examines the death penalty in every state over the past 40 years.
“I teach a class about the death penalty that has become extremely popular because I bring into the class, in the evenings, speakers who have served time on death row but were innocent of the crime for which they were convicted. It’s unlike anything that most students have ever experienced and I wouldn’t be able to give a talk the way they can give it from their personal experience.”
Comments on Chapelboro are moderated according to our Community Guidelines