In recent years, the public has seen a rise in recorded footage of violent encounters between police and Black American citizens, partially due to technology such as cell phones, dash-cameras, and body-cameras. This linguistic study examines how these encounters get escalated to the point of violence by asking 1) what kind of directives were used, 2) how were they responded to, 3) how the directives contributed to escalation, and 4) how might power and authority have played a role. I use two case studies to analyze directives and their responses. Findings reveal that repetition of directives on the part of the officers, as well as the rejections to those directives on the part of the motorists tend to aggravate the conversation. I conclude that a variety of directives may represent a variety of reasons the officer might have for a motorist to comply with their directives and that police authority might be better understood and agreed to by the motorist if a variety of linguistic resources were used.

Reliable geographic intelligence is essential for urban areas; land-cover classification creates the data for urban spatial decision making. This research tested a methodology to create a land-cover map for the main campus of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. The accuracy of nine separate land-cover classification results were tested; the one with the highest accuracy was chosen for the final map. Object-based image segmentation was applied to fused and LiDAR point cloud (elevation and intensity) data and aerial imagery. These were classified by Random Forest, k-Nearest Neighbor and Support Vector Machines classifiers. Shadow features were reclassified hierarchically in order to create a complete map. The Random Forest classifier used with the fused data set gave the highest overall accuracy at 82.3%, and a Kappa value at 0.77. When combined with the results from the shadow reclassification, the overall accuracy increased to 86.3% and the Kappa value improved to 0.82. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

It is not uncommon for graphic scenes of violence and death to infiltrate our timelinesfrom retweets, reposts, and shares. I often question how much control do we really have over the images that enter our feed? In what ways are we affected and influenced by these images? How do we relate to these images and video clips that are played and replayed before us? In what ways are these images evoking or are related to past scenes of racist violence? In what ways are these racially violent moments captured in photos and videos and shared online speaking to a Black consciousness? This project comparatively researches and examines the relationship between past modes and methods of Black trauma curation in the past, to contemporary modes of dissemination on social media in order to argue that contemporary uses of spaces such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter serve as an extension of previous scrapbooking methods. By comparing The Emmet Till Generation and their curation of trauma via scrapbooks which were used to galvanize social movements, and impact organizing efforts of the youth, The Trayvon Generation today uses social media in a similar fashion; to bear witness, to organize, and to curate digital memorials for the dead. Witnessing is further extended and complicated on digital platforms, providing an abundance of visual evidence that has proven to be vital in leading tp prosecutions and arrests of violent state officials, and perpetrators of extrajudicial violence. These live or recorded moments of witnessing are used not only as evidence, but to inform the public. However, we have always known that it’s always happening somewhere, even if we aren’t around to witness it. With that said, what are the effects of having the duty, and the responsibility to bear witness? Paying particular attention to Black youth, this project examines their presence and usage of social media spaces. By analyzing young Black people’s use of social media platforms in relation to Darnella Frazier’s strategic use Facebook, this project examines how Black youth and witnessing is currently driving a cultural shift in entertainment media that highlights witnessing death as a significant milestone for Black youth that marks the transition between childhood and adulthood. It is also impacting entertainment media that is not marketed towards Black people, further highlighting Black witnessing of racialized violence at the intersection of technology as both a contemporary and future issue through its inclusion in contemporary media.Witnessing for Black people is framed as being both necessary and traumatic. This project concludes with an in depth examination of speculative media to reveal the implications of both the present and the future intersections of race relations, state violence and technology. Through analyses of interviews, image circulation and dissemination, magazine articles, social media platforms, visual and speculative media, this dissertation works to address and attempts to answer the aforementioned questions.

Calls to protect Black women have garnered national attention, drawing attention to the axes of racialized and gendered violence that are central to this dissertation project: the intersecting mis/recognition of Black women’s vulnerability and affect within and outside of their own racial communities constrains their possibilities to seek repair and justice for harm. Baltimore community members used social media platforms to call attention to gendered violence, joining movements like Kimberlé Crenshaw’s #SayHerName and Tarana Burke’s #MeToo Movement to address the erasure of violent experiences of Black women and girls; yet the mis/recognition of their affective experiences persists through the societal focus on Black male vulnerability. Through careful ethnographic study with Baltimorean anti-gendered violence activists, Black gendered violence survivors, and Black community healers, this dissertation analyzes how these women and non-binary people mobilize emotions to construct memorial spaces, community-based movements, and their own lives in the midst of pervasive state and interpersonal violence. I investigate the affective and political processes of Black urban place-making, self-making, and memorialization to answer: How do Black women define their own subjectivity at the intersections of antiblack and gendered violence? How does their political mobilization of emotions such as fear and grief transform gendered and racialized understandings of affect? To answer these questions, I use a Black feminist care practice to examine the themes of haunting, violence, home, and care and to conceptualize new analytic tools for writing about violence against Black women. The first chapter of my dissertation undertakes a Black feminist reading of ethnographic interview data, Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975), examining themes of reproduction, violence, and slavery’s afterlife that ripple from the novels’ pages to my and my interlocutors’ lives. I locate the haunting inside and outside of the Black female body, and I discuss the particular way that Black trans life illuminates that haunting. In my second chapter, I explore the (im)possibility of gendered Black affect through a Black feminist mapping of the myriad practices Black people use to create home as a transitory, affective, symbolic, and metamorphic place. This chapter employs autoethnography and interlocutor photographs of emotional sites as analytical and methodological tools to answer its driving questions. The third chapter discusses Black gendered memorialization practices for victims of state-sanctioned and interpersonal violence. I develop my conceptualization of imagined (after)life and self power using ethnographic and archival data, using the aftermath of Korryn Gaines’s and Breonna Taylor’s state-sanctioned murders as primary texts. The fourth and final chapter of my dissertation focuses on Black anti-gendered violence activism and its challenges and failures in Baltimore. By examining the lived experiences of Black activist-organizers, I highlight the complexities inherent in the pursuit of Black liberation. Using a Black feminist abolitionist framework, I analyze photographs, art, and poetry from local artist-activists to illustrate how (after)lives of interpersonal violence survivors can be made radical. My analysis of the affective experiences of Black women and nonbinary people in Baltimore and the gendered politics of grievability in Black anti-violence movements ultimately demonstrates how these movements re-entrench white supremacist patriarchal norms that undermine the pursuit of Black liberation. Thus, we must turn to Black feminist abolitionist praxis to achieve liberation for all Black people.

This thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter examines the impact of judicial discretion and left-digit bias on criminal sentencing outcomes. Judicial discretion allows judges to make nuanced decisions, taking into account details of legal cases that are not directly covered by law. However, judicial discretion can also expose behavioral biases and lead to irrational decision-making. I test for the existence of a particular behavioral bias: age-based left-digit bias. Specifically, I use a regression discontinuity design to test for changes in sentencing decisions occurring on an offender's 20th birthday using data on sentencing decisions from the state of Pennsylvania. I find that an offender sentenced just after his/her 20th birthday is 3.5 percentage points more likely to be sentenced to incarceration than an offender sentenced just before his/her 20th birthday. I test for evidence of conscious mechanisms underlying this effect and find no such evidence, leaving an unconscious bias as the best available explanation. Chapter two examines the impact of highly publicized police killings of black individuals on the racial gap in birth outcomes. Police killings of Black Americans are increasingly being met with significant media coverage and public response, including civil unrest. Given the frequency with which these events occur, it is vital to understand both their direct and indirect impacts. Using national birth certificate data and an event study design, I test for the impact of high-profile police-involved killings of Black Americans on racial disparities in maternal stress levels and birth outcomes. I find a large, statistically significant, and persistent increase in gestational hypertension of Black mothers relative to White mothers, strongly indicating an increase in the racial gap in maternal stress following these high-profile killings. I find limited evidence of an accompanying effect on the racial gap in birth outcomes. However, many existing papers similarly find no impacts of maternal stress on birth outcomes while simultaneously finding significant impacts on later-life outcomes, leaving room for additional future work based on these findings. How does the content of public communication by elected representatives change in response to highly salient, politically polarizing events? In Chapter 3, I examine this question using the text of tweets from members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, an n-gram text regression model and sentiment analysis alogorithms, and an event study design focused on mass shootings in the U.S. Observable effects on communication are concentrated on the day of and the day following a mass shooting. Republican members of Congress exhibit a reduced tweet frequency relative to Democratic members of Congress in the immediate aftermath of a shooting, while Democratic members of Congress speak with a more clearly differentiated Democratic vocabulary. Members from both parties speak with a more negative vocabulary. With Republicans collectively disengaging and Democrats collectively highlighting their partisan identification, this may suggest that Democrats are taking advantage of an opportunity for a political and/or policy win while Republicans in the same period are choosing to avoid additional political and/or policy losses.