Race and policing research has identified both macro-level structural factors and micro-level racial meanings that contribute to racial disparities in policing outcomes. However, prior research has not examined how the various features of communal contexts shape officers’ construction of racial meanings. The current study, which is based on ethnographic ride-along interviews with and observations of 52 officers in three suburban communities of varying racial, ethnic, and class diversity in a northeastern state, weds symbolic interactionist and macro-level studies by examining how communal contexts shape both the meanings that police officers attach to Latinos in relation to other pan-ethnic groups and officers’ patrolling of Latinos. The author finds that communal features and processes condition officers’ racial schemas and patrolling practices in significant, variable ways across the three communities. How officers perceived and approached Latinos not only varied across the three towns but differed from that of other pan-ethnic groups. Variability in the communal features and processes influencing officers’ racial schemas and patrolling of racial minorities across these towns suggests the need for a theoretical approach that treats officers’ racial meanings and patrolling approaches as communally situated.

The tasks that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have taken upon have progressively grown in complexity over the years, alongside with the level of autonomy with which they are carried out. In this work, we present an example of aerial screwing operations with a fully-actuated tilt-rotor platform. Key contributions include a new control framework to automate screwing operations through a robust hole search and in-hole detection algorithm. These are achieved without a-priori knowledge of the exact hole location, and without the use of external tools, such as vision based hole detection or force sensors. Wrench coupling is implemented to account for the platform's kinematic constraints during screwing. The application of a constant contact force and a compliant response to induced disturbances are obtained with the use of admittance control. The full framework is validated with extensive flight experiments that demonstrate the effectiveness of each subsystem, as well as the complete architecture. We also validate the robustness of the detection algorithm against false positives. Within the results we demonstrate the ability to perform the automated task with a 86% success rate over 35 flights, and measured hole search time of 9 s (median value).

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