Shahill Parsons

This dissertation explores a novel theory—racial cooling periods: temporary, race-specific declines in police killings of Black people following high-profile deaths that ignite public outrage. While research documents racial disparities and protest dynamics, little is known about how institutions respond to moral scrutiny. Using Mapping Police Violence data (2013-2024), the project employs causal inference to establish when and where restraint emerges; game-theoretic simulation to reveal why it decays by modeling strategic interactions among officers, departments, media, and publics; and transformer-based text analysis to quantify how narrative framing sustains or erodes institutional responsiveness. This triangulation—rare in sociology—makes temporal dynamics of institutional response salient.