Dr. Rocha Beardall is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. Her research examines how state violence shapes social life and social institutions for marginalized communities across time and place. Much of her work clusters in three research threads — policing, child welfare, and tribal-state relations — showing how legal procedures can absorb violence into routine administration, limit public accountability, and allow harm to persist.

Her forthcoming book, The Thick Green Line: How Police Labor Rights Harm Communities, Limit Reform, and Sustain a System of Impunity, develops a theory of transactional policing that treats police power as a labor regime. Drawing on nine years of research in Syracuse, New York, the book shows how union contracts, civil service rules, and administrative law route allegations of violence into grievance and arbitration systems that preserve officers’ jobs, pay, and pensions. It explains why reform efforts so often stall by showing how legal and labor infrastructures convert political crisis into administrative continuity, and it identifies concrete points of intervention in municipal contracting and governance.

Building directly on this policing-centered analytic, Dr. Rocha Beardall extends her analysis to Indigenous governance, tracing how jurisdiction, contracts, and administrative procedure structure state power in both urban jurisdictions and Indian Country. Her research on policing in Indian Country shows how jurisdictional complexity, federal contracting regimes, and intergovernmental law enforcement agreements heighten exposure to police violence while constraining tribal authority to regulate public safety.

She brings this analysis to family policing through her work on the Indian Child Welfare Act, showing how state agencies selectively comply with federal placement preferences and how bureaucratic discretion channels Native children into foster care and adoption systems. Her community-engaged research translates these findings into policy-relevant sociological analysis, including partnerships with tribal child welfare professionals and the National Indian Child Welfare Association’s Protect ICWA campaign, contributions to legal briefs, and advisory work with municipal and tribal leaders on police accountability, labor governance, and child welfare reform.

Dr. Rocha Beardall received her J.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2014 and her Ph.D. in Sociology from Cornell University in 2019. Her research appears in Criminology, Punishment & Society, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, the Columbia Journal of Race and Law, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Journal.

Her research has received funding from the William T. Grant, Ford, and Spencer Foundations. Her work has been recognized with the Law and Society Association’s John Hope Franklin Article Prize and the American Sociological Association Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Distinguished Early Career Award. She is a finalist for the William T. Grant Scholars Program Class of 2031, which supports scholars advancing theory, evidence, and policy on youth inequality.