Daniel Herda

• Doctor of Philosophy, University of California Davis, 2013
• Professor (Associate) at Merrimack College

Politicians and pundits commonly tout campaigning on crime and policing as an effective strategy for winning elections. Yet, scholars have only recently started examining the contributions of both variables to voting. The available research shows that scholars disagree, however, about whether crime and policing, independently or jointly, increase o...

The first Donald Trump Presidency created a hostile government context of reception for immigrants with its restrictionist approach to migration policy. Segmented assimilation theory argues that such regimes contribute to reactive ethnicity, which can involve increased identification with the origin culture and adversarial stances towards the recei...

Between 2017 and 2020, the Donald Trump Presidency made for a particularly hostile context of reception for immigrants in the United States, but did it have any measurable influence on their adaptation? Hostility in the form of interpersonal discrimination is known to increase transnational practices—a pattern dubbed reactive transnationalism. But...

The character of an interaction between a citizen and an immigrant can shape outgroup attitudes. Any variety — whether positive or negative — matters, but what if someone accumulates experiences with both? Using data from the 2016 German ALLBUS, this study develops a roster of contact experiences through cross-tabulation, permitting a detailed cons...

How does interpersonal exposure to immigrants influence citizens’ opinions about immigrants? The Intergroup Contact Theory (ICT) famously predicts improved attitudes under certain circumstances. However, research on the population innumeracy phenomenon predicts that this same exposure may worsen demographic misperceptions about immigrants. The curr...

Several studies find links between immigrant population innumeracy and anti-immigrant attitudes. It seems that when people over-estimate the size of foreign-born populations in their country, they also tend to be more hostile toward them. But can these inflated perceptions also result in anti-immigrant actions and behaviors, even acts of violence?...

Whether it be about population size, origin, or legal status, what ordinary citizens imagine about immigrants is often incorrect. Furthermore, these misperceptions predict greater dislike of foreigners. But, if one considers all the facts that people could get wrong, researchers have likely only scratched the surface. To advance toward a more compl...

Quantitative analyses show that police stop and frisks are highly concentrated by neighborhood. Interview and ethnographic studies show that police routinely share information about neighborhood attributes including crime rates and demographic characteristics such as racial and ethnic composition and economic conditions. Investigations suggest that...

Relatively few theoretical criminologists are recognized for their lasting impact on public policy, and it is therefore instructive to reconsider a scholar whose influence endures. Donald Cressey wrote a theoretically driven Presidential Commission essay that inspired the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). He also advanced a...

RM Daley mobilized Chicago police, the Cook County courts, and state prisons in a massively punitive assault on crime. This deflected attention from teardowns of housing projects RM’s father built and from the absence of replacement housing in hyper-segregated neighborhoods. RM shifted attention to “gangs, guns, and drugs,” tightening a criminal ju...

In 2010, Jon Burge was finally convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. Yet the case also involved a 30-year cover-up, supervised torture, and the code of silence. An important sidebar ruling by the judge prevented presentation of evidence that Burge had enforced this code of silence to hide his torture crimes. Burge served three years in j...

The late 19th and 20th century Great Migration of southern Black Americans permanently changed Chicago, with Mayors RJ and RM Daley overseeing its segregated neighborhoods. The dual Daley dynasty spanned more than four decades, including ML King’s 1960s housing marches and activist Fred Hampton’s assassination. With RM Daley’s apparent knowledge, a...

Twenty years after Andrew Wilson’s 1982 torture, Jon Burge remained a free man. From 2002–2006 a “special state’s attorney” with Daley machine connections led a multimillion-dollar investigation that scapegoated Police Superintendent Richard Brzeczek for “dereliction of duty” in neglecting a letter he sent Daley about Burge’s suspected torture. The...

In 1992, 15-year-old Joseph White shot and killed DeLondyn Lawson about a gambling debt at Tilden High School on Chicago’s South Side. RM Daley’s Automatic Transfer Act fast-tracked White for a homicide trial in adult court. The media portrayed White as a violent gang member, although neither White’s nor Lawson’s mothers saw their sons as involved...

Chicago is confronting a racial reckoning that we explain with an exclusion-containment theory of legal cynicism. Mayors RJ and RM Daley used public and private funds to exclude and contain South and West Side predominantly Black neighborhoods where Police Detective Jon Burge supervised torture of over 100 Black men. A 1982 case involved Andrew Wil...

RJ and then RM Daley used public and private funds to build structures that separated Chicago’s downtown business districts from the city’s South and West Side neighborhoods. This shut out and contained Black and Brown residents within hyper-segregated neighborhoods, excluding them from the city’s growing resources. RM Daley’s “iron fisted” law enf...

Princeton historian Eddie Glaude observes that James Baldwin was revolutionary when he insisted that to understand White Americans required turning their thoughts upside down. Thus White people want to believe that police “serve and protect” everyone equally; yet we show that complaints about police misconduct are concentrated in racially segregate...

Chicago is confronting a racial reckoning that we explain with an exclusion-containment theory of legal cynicism. Mayors RJ and RM Daley used public and private funds to exclude and contain South and West Side predominantly Black neighborhoods where Police Detective Jon Burge supervised torture of over 100 Black men. A 1982 case involved Andrew Wil...

Chicago is confronting a racial reckoning that we explain with an exclusion-containment theory of legal cynicism. Mayors RJ and RM Daley used public and private funds to exclude and contain South and West Side predominantly Black neighborhoods where Police Detective Jon Burge supervised torture of over 100 Black men. A 1982 case involved Andrew Wil...

Largely due to immigration, European societies have grown increasingly diverse. The current study seeks to determine how citizens characterize their experiences with this diversity and whether various types of intergroup exposure can influence immigration attitudes. This analysis takes a unique approach by comparing positive, negative, and neutral...

We join Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s structural theory of the racialized U.S. social system with a situational methodology developed by Arthur L. Stinchcombe and Irving Goffman to analyze how law works as a mechanism that connects formal legal equality with legal cynicism. The data for this analysis come from the trial of a Chicago police detective, Jon...

Racial discrimination presents challenges for children of color, particularly with regard to their schooling. Experiences of rejection and unfairness because of one’s race can prompt students to disengage from academics. The expansive discrimination literature finds that such experiences are commonplace. So much so that researchers have begun askin...

The phenomenon of immigrant population innumeracy has drawn considerable attention from social researchers over the past 15 years. This tendency to overestimate the size of foreign born populations has understandably generated concern about the consequences of faultily perceiving demographic realities. Indeed this ignorance is often associated with...

We call for a further appreciation of the versatility of concepts and methods that increase the breadth and diversity of work on law and social science. We make our point with a review of legal cynicism. Legal cynicism's value, like other important concepts, lies in its versatility as well as its capacity for replication. Several classic works intr...

Research findings show that legal cynicism—a cultural frame in which skepticism about laws, the legal system, and police is expressed—is important in understanding neighborhood variation in engagement with the police, particularly in racially isolated African American communities. We argue that legal cynicism is also useful for understanding neighb...

Misperceptions about immigrants are pervasive and have piqued the interest of social researchers given their links to greater intergroup hostility. However, this phenomenon is rarely considered in Canada, with its reputation as a particularly welcoming context. The current study simultaneously considers two such misperceptions: over-estimation of t...

Existing research from the social sciences indicates that misperceptions about immigrants are pervasive in American society and present consequences for intergroup relations. The classroom may be an arena in which to reduce this incorrectness. The current note provides a replication and extension of previous research on the effectiveness of the Cor...

Citizens’ tendency to overestimate the size of immigrant populations has been the subject of several studies over the past three decades. While we have learned a great deal about the extent, causes, and potential consequences of this population innumeracy, our understanding remains static. The current letter offers the first longitudinal considerat...

Citizens' tendency to overestimate the size of immigrant populations has been the subject of several studies over the past three decades. While we have learned a great deal about the extent, causes, and potential consequences of this population innumeracy, our understanding remains static. The current letter offers the first longitudinal considerat...

There exists a well-documented tendency among citizens to perceive immigrant populations as much larger than indicated by official statistics. This misperception has been linked to desires to halt the flow of immigration or restrict immigrants’ rights, raising concern about the consequences of pervasive faulty information. However, ignorance extend...

Researchers are beginning to understand the extent and consequences of interpersonal discrimination experiences for the identities and attitudes of Muslim Americans. However, is first-hand discrimination required to bring about these consequences? The current study builds on previous research by examining how both experienced and anticipated interp...

Using a wide array of official and unofficial data spanning two decades in the neighborhoods of Chicago, we explore connections between legal cynicism, the electoral regime of Mayor Richard M. Daley, and citizen calls for police assistance and police reports of drug crime. We find that the disproportionate concentration of legal cynicism about law...

Significance Cynicism about lawlessness and police crime prevention and protection efforts is often high in predominately African-American neighborhoods, but residents persist in calling 911 and requesting police assistance. These calls continue to rise in neighborhoods that have recently experienced further increases in racial isolation, incarcera...

There is a growing body of evidence linking racial discrimination and juvenile crime, and a number of theories explain this relationship. In this study, we draw on one popular approach, Agnew's general strain theory, and extend prior research by moving from a focus on experienced discrimination to consider two other forms, anticipated and vicarious...

Can experiencing interracial hostility perpetuate interracial hostility? This article considers this possibility by examining the link between interpersonal discrimination and racial attitudes. Further, I situate discrimination into one’s totality of interracial exposure by analyzing whether other forms of interracial contact (friends, neighbors, o...

The current analysis examines the degree to which a classroom activity using student response systems (SRS) can improve the accuracy of commonly held demographic misperceptions. Overestimation of religious, racial, and immigrant minority population sizes is pervasive in the United States and Western Europe, and such inaccuracies predict more negati...

This analysis examines fear of interpersonal racial discrimination among Black, Hispanic, and White adolescents. The extent and correlates of these concerns are examined using survey data from the Project for Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. Borrowing from the fear-of-crime literature, the contact hypothesis, and group threat theory, sev...

With Turkey’s recent transition from a nation of net emigration to one of net immigration, it becomes important to understand how the country is adapting to an increasing presence of foreigners. The current study contributes to this end with a focus on the knowledge level of ordinary Turkish respondents regarding their immigrant population. Quantit...

Population innumeracy (the tendency to overestimate immigrant or minority population sizes) has sparked scholarly interest. However, erroneous size estimates are not the only consequential misperception. There are also qualitative questions that are prone to error, such as the most common origin of immigrants. Using data from the Finnish National E...

The current study examines the extent and correlates of ignorance regarding the size of the American Jewish population. Using the 2000 General Social Survey, I examine how large the non-Jewish respondents perceive the Jewish population to be in both the country as a whole and in their local community. Individuals of all backgrounds are found to exp...

The tendency to overestimate immigrant population sizes has garnered considerable scholarly attention for its potential link to anti-immigrant policy support. However, this existing innumeracy research has neglected other forms of ignorance, namely underestimation and nonresponse. Using the 2002 European Social Survey, the current study examines th...

:Our research uses two waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to analyze the stability of same- and cross-race friendships. We find the following: First, interracial friendships are less stable than same-race friendships, even after controlling for a variety of contextual and dyadic characteristics, such as school r...

Individuals frequently perceive immigrant and minority population sizes to be much larger than they are in reality. To date, little is understood about the extent or causes of this phenomenon, known as innumeracy, which may have consequences for inter-group relations. However, before the literature can assess these consequences, a better understand...