Carlos Bustamante

Carlos Bustamante received his Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining George Washington University, he spent two years as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Criminal Justice at State University of New York at Albany. His teaching and research focus on policing, inequality, sociology of race and ethnicity, urban sociology, and qualitative methods. He is broadly interested in the social and racial underpinnings of legality and legitimacy, comparative penality, police culture, and criminal legal reform.

He is currently working on two research projects. The first compares the policing of restricted forms of entertainment in Oakland, California, Stockholm, Sweden, and Lima, Peru. It investigates how city officials and police target local “problems,” and how policed groups respond to and resist different forms of control.

A second, more recent research project tracks procedural justice models of crowd control, known as dialogue policing, across different parts of the world. This work builds on his critical analysis of zero-tolerance and dialogue policing of crowds to develop participatory action research aimed at creating more procedurally just and democratic models of crowd facilitation.