Matthew B. Ross

Matthew B. Ross, a professor at Northeastern University who often serves as an expert witness in cases in which the department reaches consent decrees to reform local police departments, said he had heard from lawyers in the division he had worked with that they would be leaving.

Police departments across the country are also facing staffing shortages, said Matthew Ross, an associate professor at Northeastern University whose research focuses on policing and the criminal justice system. 

Asked about the slowdown, leaders of the three labor unions that represent roughly 3,200 sworn State Police officers all pointed to the critical report by Matthew B. Ross, a Northeastern University professor hired in 2021 by a former attorney general to review 6.2 million traffic stops troopers made between 2009 and 2021.

Matthew Ross, an associate professor of public policy and economics at Northeastern University, who assisted with the study’s analysis and conducted his own meta-analysis, joined All Things Considered host Arun Rath to discuss the findings. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Ross, an associate professor at Northeastern University’s School of Public Policy & Urban Affairs and Department of Economics, said the USA TODAY Network’s findings “makes any statistical analysis less likely to find evidence of discrimination even if it exists.” He called that “deeply troubling.”

“If you’re working on a project that looks like it’s going to be received really well, there’s more jockeying and competition to get on the authorship list — and basically what we find is that in those cases, it actually looks like women are less likely to end up on the authorship list,” said co-author […]

Measuring what isn’t there, however, is challenging. To overcome this, Matthew Ross, an economist at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues used a large data set on almost 10,000 research teams in the United States to investigate who did and did not receive credit for work. 

Co-author Matthew Ross, associate professor of economics and public policy and urban affairs at Northeastern University, whose work centers on discrimination, said that the survey revealed in some cases women had stepped back from their work for various reasons and saw a corresponding reduction in credit. 

“We really ought to care about attribution,” adds study lead author Matthew Ross, an economist and associate professor at Northeastern University.