Zoë Williams
Howard University
Faculty Advisor: Prof. Ariel White
Department: Political Science
Biography
Zoë Williams is a rising senior at Howard University, majoring in political science. She
is part of the inaugural cohort of the Humanities and Social Sciences Scholars Program and a
Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. Her research interests lie in how the use of habeas corpus
by African Americans and other legal tools has shaped American institutions, mainly police
departments, at the turn of the 20th century. This interest began in summer 2024 at the Digital
Legal Research Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she studied habeas corpus
use by marginalized groups in the 19th- and 20th-century American West. Zoë’s other research
experiences include participating in Vanderbilt University’s Accountability, Behavior, and
Conflict in Democratic Politics REU and serving as a research assistant in Howard University’s
Quantitative Histories Lab. Zoë enjoys both quantitative and qualitative research and plans to
pursue a PhD in political science.
The Impact of Civil Service Reform on Police Activity Across Cities with Different
Ethnic Compositions
Zoë Williams
Department of Political Science, Howard University
At the turn of the 20th century, civil service reform was a catalyst for the professionalization
of police departments across the country. The police cut ties with urban political machines and
implemented a merit-based hiring system and formal training. Previous scholarship observes
a decline in arrests during the progressive era, and a change in police focus away from public
order crimes. This project examines how police activity has been shaped by the adoption of
civil service reform, depending on a city’s ethnic makeup. Using data on civil service reform
and police in urban America, quantitative analysis shows that the adoption of civil service
reform does not have a significant impact on the arrest rates of cities regardless of immigrant
population. This project seeks to provide insight into how civil service reform shaped police
departments’ focus, particularly exploring where morality is being policed, as a result of a city’s
immigrant population.
