Her master’s degree prepared Ashley Viere ’15 MSPAS for her role working with patients at Regions Hospital.

Then, while continuing to care for patients, she became the hospital’s central director of advanced practice clinician fellowships in January 2023. As she took on additional responsibilities, Viere felt she needed to expand her skill set.

That led to her interest in a first-of-its-kind Augsburg University doctoral program in Minnesota.

Beginning Fall 2025, Augsburg’s Doctor of Medical Science program offers physician assistants/associates (PAs) a pathway to career advancement in health care leadership and administration, research, public policy, academia, and specialized clinical practice.

“I hope to learn skills that make me a more well-rounded and effective leader so I can help drive innovation in both PA education and practice. I’d also like to develop research skills that will allow me to contribute to evidence-based studies that may advance the PA profession,” she said.

Viere was impressed by how thoughtfully Augsburg faculty and staff approached the program to ensure students could achieve their individual professional goals. “The program’s mission to provide high-quality and impactful educational content with a health equity lens resonated with me,” she said.

“Our first cohort of 15 students includes experienced clinicians, innovative leaders, and dedicated educators,” said Diana Soran, program director for the Augsburg DMSc. “I am proud of the talent and commitment they bring. I know they will support one another to excel in the program and in their careers.”

The four-semester program is designed around the busy schedules of working PAs. Students take three online courses each semester for a total of 36 credits. The program contains a core series of focuses in leadership, health care management, health care education, and research. The asynchronous format allows for flexibility and adaptability, prioritizing individual needs and balanced schedules.

“We’ve established university and mentoring resources to support students to do original research in the program. This opportunity is not available at all DMSc programs,” Soran said.

To be eligible for admission, students must hold a master’s degree in PA studies (MPAS, MSPAS, or equivalent) or a bachelor’s degree in PA studies plus a minimum of five years practicing as a licensed physician assistant.

Augsburg established Minnesota’s first PA program in 1994, and Augsburg School of Health Director Vanessa Bester sees the DMSc as an opportunity for the university to be an innovator in the state again as many physician assistants seek career development opportunities.

“Without a doctoral degree, it is hard for PAs to get a seat at the upper administrative or leadership table. Part of that is because the foundation of a PA masters’ education does not include leadership, teaching, and management skills,” said Bester, who also serves as a faculty member in the DMSc program.

“We see that even PAs who have been in practice and in leadership positions are being overlooked or left out of critical conversations at a higher administrative level within the health care sector.”

As the curriculum of the PA master’s program was being updated in 2023, Bester led the proposal for the new doctorate.

The PA field emerged during the 1960s doctor shortage when medical programs were developed for Vietnam War veterans who had experience as medics but no formal training, Bester said. Similar to their nurse practitioner counterparts, PAs work with patients, order diagnostic tests, and can prescribe medicine.

Today, most PAs in the growing field earn a master’s degree to practice. While the credential prepares them for working with patients, it’s the physicians and nurses with doctorates who typically earn the majority of leadership roles within the health care sector.

Soran recalls working as a PA for 11 years when she started to feel she wanted more. “There are different avenues you can pursue, but too often you hit roadblocks with people viewing you as ‘just a PA,'” she said. “Our nursing colleagues have excelled at securing a seat at the leadership table through advocacy and professional development. The DMSc degree helps PAs build skills and credibility to ensure our voices are also part of the conversation on the future of health care.”

To move forward, Soran completed a DMSc at the University of Lynchburg in Virginia, focusing on trauma-informed care. As a result, she expanded into consulting, lecturing, and keynote speaking in addition to her clinical work.

Besides being the founding director of Augsburg’s DMSc program since February, Soran also serves as an Augsburg clinical assistant professor.

“I was really able to take control of my career trajectory in a way that was unique and fit my needs and my values—something that I wouldn’t have been able to without the doctorate degree,” she said. “Now I’m here at Augsburg working as program director. I’m loving the work and am excited to see where our students take the degree.”

More doctoral programs are emerging nationally to address the need for PAs to gain leadership and research tools. The development of Augsburg’s DMSc program was a direct response to Minnesota’s workforce needs.

The program is designed for students to integrate key learnings from the program into their clinical practice and, finally, toward their doctoral capstone project.

“I think there’s a concern among PAs nationally that we don’t have a doctorate simply to have letters after our name,” Bester said. “We want a doctorate to be meaningful and truly promote and propel PAs in their work. At Augsburg, we wanted to be able to create a program that gave people additional skills for the rest of their career.”

Marah Czaja, an Augsburg clinical assistant professor in the Master of Physician Assistant Studies program who works one day a week at Hennepin Healthcare’s addiction medicine department, is also part of the first DMSc cohort. She expects the doctorate will boost her professional growth in academia and potentially into health care’s upper management ranks.

“I’m really hoping that I can integrate a lot of what I am learning in the program with my professional career as an instructor at Augsburg,” she said.

Clinton Billhorn ’18 MSPAS is pursuing the degree to become “an effective and competent researcher” and to improve his clinical practice caring for patients at Lakeview, Methodist, and Regions hospitals in the Twin Cities metro area.

The flexible format also appeals to him.

“I work seven days on and seven days off. The asynchronous design of the program, working at your own pace and meeting deadlines, will really help me maximize my time when I’m not at work,” said Billhorn, also an Augsburg adjunct faculty member in the Master’s-level PA program.

To give the cohort a sense of community, the program pairs students with a DMSc faculty mentor, links them to community PA leaders, and provides experiential learning designed to meaningfully support their professional development.

Viere is looking forward to the insights of her peers as well as the faculty expertise about broader issues in the rapidly evolving health care sector.

“Health care in the United States is so complex. I’m looking forward to learning more about the industry and how to strategize for the future. PAs are already an integral part of patient care, and if included in the conversations, I believe we can help make health care more sustainable for our patients, colleagues and organizations.”

Top image: DMSc Program Director Diana Soran speaks to members of the program’s first-ever cohort. (Photo by Courtney Perry)

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They both grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, and knew the family of Philando Castile, a Black man who was fatally shot by an officer during a 2016 traffic stop in nearby Falcon Heights.

“The interest in creating change started with Philando Castile. That was the initial gut punch,” Creighton said. “Flash forward to George Floyd in 2020, and it was like ripping off a Band-Aid to a wound that hasn’t healed. We decided we had to do something.”

Creighton, an accountant, and Frelix, who was in sales for Sony Electronics, left their stable day jobs in 2020. They teamed up with attorney Jazz Hampton, who is also an adjunct professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, and the three Black men launched a new company providing a technology-based solution to de-escalate traffic stops by police.

Timely launch

The motto says it all: “Drive with an attorney by your side.”

TurnSignl provides real-time, on-demand legal guidance from attorneys to drivers, all while drivers’ smartphone cameras record the interaction. The mission is to protect drivers’ civil rights, de-escalate roadside interactions with police, and ensure both civilians and officers return home safely at the end of the day.

As is true of many startups, the three co-founders wear multiple hats. Hampton serves as CEO and general counsel. Creighton is the chief financial officer and chief operating officer while Frelix is the chief revenue officer and chief technology officer.

When Daunte Wright was shot and killed by a police officer during a traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, in April, that only accelerated their pace to bring the app to market. “This has been an issue plaguing Black and brown communities,” Frelix said. “We’re thankful to have the ability and skill sets to get this off the ground.”

They introduced the TurnSignl app in May after they were able to leverage the public awareness of police stops ending tragically to raise more than $1 million to bring the app to market.

How TurnSignl works

Users open the app and immediately get connected to an attorney vetted by TurnSignl to guide them in order to de-escalate the encounter. Service launched in Minnesota and will be expanding to 10 states by the end of 2021. The founders also have created a foundation to provide service for those unable to pay for the app, which is available on the Apple and Google app stores. They expect the foundation to support 25% of the app’s user base.

While the app is intended for anyone, there is increasing attention to how Black drivers are treated by police.

Twin Cities NBC affiliate KARE 11 in May that new data shows that the majority of drivers pulled over this year by Minneapolis police for minor equipment violations are Black: Black drivers accounted for more than half of those stops despite making up only about 20% of the city’s residents, according to city data.

In St. Paul, Black drivers were almost four times more likely to be pulled over by police than white drivers, according to a Pioneer Press from 2016 to 2020. Asian, Latino, and Native American drivers were stopped at roughly the same rate as white drivers, the Pioneer Press reported.

The TurnSignl founders say their product is more than just an app. It’s a signal for change. “There’s no better opportunity to impact change than this moment, now,” Creighton said.

Defense attorney Taylor J. Rahm is one of the lawyers who has joined TurnSignl to be on call for motorists. “Anything we can do to make sure these situations are safe and that no one gets harmed is something I hope any lawyer would want to get involved with,” he said.

Sometimes, a motorist making sudden movements is interpreted as cause for alarm and can be construed by an officer as the driver going for a weapon or drugs, leading to potential conflict.

“With TurnSignl, you have a lawyer on the phone to help individuals know their rights but also importantly know how to handle the situation so nothing goes wrong,” Rahm said. “The benefit is that the officer knows that there’s an attorney on the phone telling the person, ‘This is what you should do during the stop.’”

The TurnSignl app has the potential to make traffic stops safer for police as well as motorists, said Mylan Masson, retired director of the Hennepin Technical College law enforcement program and a former Minneapolis Park Police officer. “Every traffic stop can be dangerous for police officers,” said the police training expert. The TurnSignal app “could give someone a calming sense that, ‘I’m not here alone.’”

Business owner Phil Steger offers the app as an employee benefit for his 14-person Brother Justus Whiskey Company in Minneapolis, believing TurnSignl’s attorneys can act as mediators to keep a traffic stop from escalating into danger.

“If you think you’ve been stopped unlawfully, most people don’t know that they still have to cooperate,” said Steger, who was previously an attorney for law firm Dorsey & Whitney. “You can still be taken to jail.”

A TurnSignl attorney can advise in real time: “Every defendant has the right, if they think they have been stopped unlawfully, to challenge the case in court later,” he said.

Business project for ‘the times we’re in’

As the TurnSignl founders prepared to launch the company, they turned to Augsburg’s MBA program to assist them in developing the business plan.

“A key part of the Augsburg MBA experience is that we want students to have practical experience and apply critical thinking,” said George Dierberger, associate business professor and director of the MBA program.

Students in the MBA program grapple with real-world challenges faced by local businesses via a management consulting project, which supported TurnSignl’s launch. This is just one of the many MBA program experiences in which students collaborate on projects, case studies, presentations, and simulations.

The TurnSignl project represents Augsburg’s goals to be socially conscious, said Mike Heifner ’21 MBA, who worked on the pricing strategy of the TurnSignl business plan. “This was a good example of how capitalism could bring social value to society,” he said.

Augsburg graduate student Stephanie Oliver ’21 MBA hopes the TurnSignl app will open new conversations and foster a different way of thinking about how police and civilians interact during traffic stops.

“This project was my first choice because of the times we’re in,” she said.

Oliver’s role in the MBA group was to analyze the research and data about traffic stops nationally by race. What she found was a system with inconsistent reporting about race and traffic stops across states. What was clear was that even after accounting for those inconsistencies, the disparities were apparent in stops involving people of color.

One of the studies she reviewed was the , which analyzed data from nearly 100 million traffic stops and found significant racial disparities in policing and, in some cases, evidence that bias also played a role.

This didn’t surprise Oliver. Her husband is Black and was frequently pulled over when they first moved to their Twin Cities suburb years ago. Once, the police even questioned her then 5-year-old daughter about whether he was actually her father.

“I ask why I’m being pulled over when officers approach my vehicle, and they get angry at me,” Oliver said. “But I have a right to know why I’m pulled over.”

She worries about her two young Black sons but is optimistic that the TurnSignl app can start to change the dynamics during a police stop. “I know when my daughter goes to Augsburg this fall, I’m going to get this app for her.”

The TurnSignl app is available on the Apple and Google app stores.

Data on drivers and police traffic stops

Key findings from the national data research Stephanie Oliver ’21 MBA gathered for the TurnSignl business plan:

• On average, legal intervention death rates for Black men, were 4.7 times higher than those of white men from 1979 to 1988, and 3.2 times higher from 1988 to 1997. (2002 American Journal of Public Health study)
• Black men are 3 times more likely than other races to die from the use of police force. Oliver said this was particularly alarming as Black males make up only about 6% of the total U.S. population. (2016 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Vital Statistics Data 2010–14)
• When driver race/ethnicity was visible, Black drivers were nearly 20% more likely to be the subject of a discretionary traffic stop than were white drivers. (2014 San Diego State University research)
• Among males aged 10 years or older who were killed by police use of force, the mortality rate among non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic individuals was 2.8 and 1.7 times higher, respectively, than that among white individuals. (Racial/Ethnic Disparities in the Use of Lethal Force by U.S. Police 2010–14)
• Search rates for whites are significantly lower, at around 18% of the traffic stops, while search rates for Blacks and Hispanics total about 82%. (Compiled from Stanford Open Policing Project data for Connecticut; Illinois; North Carolina; Rhode Island; South Carolina; Texas; Washington; and Wisconsin; and municipal police departments in Nashville, Tennessee; New Orleans; Philadelphia; Plano, Texas; San Diego; and San Francisco)

Top image: Andre Creighton ’19 MBA (left) and Mychal Frelix ’19 MBA were motivated to leave their stable jobs in 2020 to focus on launching the TurnSignl app. (Photo by Courtney Perry)

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The new department aligns with Augsburg’s mission and responds to a proposal developed by a group of students, faculty, and staff that was presented to the administration and approved by the faculty this year. A group of students, led by Black women, made similar (as-yet unrealized) demands after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

The department aims to meet the needs of today’s students with culturally relevant courses and pedagogy that both centers and equips them to think critically about their experience in the world. It will advance the university’s public mission through connections with the community.

This year, the plan is to hire three new faculty in Pan-African, Latinx, and Asian American studies. Once they’re hired, Augsburg will review next steps, as well as how other departments can connect their own courses and faculty to the new department.

The post Augsburg to launch Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies department, major appeared first on Augsburg Now.

Robert Harper ’16 remembers the first time he was called the n-word.

His family had moved to Minnesota from the South Side of Chicago, seeking a better life. Since then, he’s achieved that better life, earning an undergraduate degree from Augsburg University and a master’s degree from the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. He is now a supplier diversity director for the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system.

“I think I’ve had a unique experience escaping poverty on the South Side of Chicago and North Minneapolis, only to be confronted with the daily decisions made by white people that only re-create those circumstances of oppression,” Harper said.

While he’s now a working professional in a state that prides itself on being “Minnesota nice,” Harper never gets too comfortable, recalling that painful moment when he was walking to middle school and a passing driver shouted the racial epithet at him. More recently, on a trip to northern Minnesota, Harper was told while visiting Gull Lake, ‘You don’t belong here,’ by a white man.

“It’s moments like that when you’re trying to do better, ‘pull yourselves up by your bootstraps,’ that society reminds you that there’s a glass ceiling for some,” Harper said.

Meanwhile, Augsburg University, one of the most diverse private colleges in the Midwest, is positioned to be a statewide leader in the turnaround, with students of color in the majority on campus after years of intentional work on diversity, equity, and inclusion. “I certainly feel that higher education is the clearest path to a middle-class life or better,” Augsburg President Paul Pribbenow said.

“Some people constantly remind you that they decide how far you go, what rooms you enter, and in the case of George Floyd, whether or not you live.”—Robert Harper ’16

Exposing the paradox

George Floyd’s murder three miles from Augsburg University put an international spotlight on not only the experiences of Black people at the hands of the criminal justice system but also the reality of the disturbing “Minnesota paradox.”

That’s how University of Minnesota Professor Samuel Myers describes how Minnesota has such a high quality of life and a history of progressive politicians but is one of the worst places to live for Black people.

“Measured by racial gaps in unemployment rates, wage and salary incomes, incarceration rates, arrest rates, home ownership rates, mortgage lending rates, test scores, reported child maltreatment rates, school disciplinary and suspension rates, and even drowning rates, African Americans are worse off in Minnesota than they are in virtually every other state in the nation,” Myers said.

The numbers illustrate the bleak story:

• Only 25.3% of Black households in Minnesota own homes versus 76.9% of white households, according to census data, a stark divide given that home ownership is considered the leading contributor to household wealth.
• The median household income for Black households in the state is the lowest of any group at $41,570, about half of what Asian and white households earn.
• In the Twin Cities, African Americans represent 9% of the overall population, but are incarcerated at 11 times the rate of whites who represent 76% of the population, the NAACP reported last year.
• Only 21.7% of Black people hold bachelor’s degrees or higher versus nearly 40% overall.

Meanwhile, between 2010 and 2018, the fastest growing racial group in Minnesota was the Black population, which grew by 36%, adding more than 96,500 people.

Many are immigrants but face the same backdrop of a state that hasn’t historically acknowledged that discrimination plays a role in the Black story here, Myers said.

“When it comes to race in the Twin Cities, in Minnesota, there was this instinctive belief that we already know what the problem is, that it’s not really a problem, and since it’s not a problem, we don’t need to find answers,” Myers said.

The COVID-19 pandemic compounded the inequities. The unemployment rate for Black Minnesotans in the aftermath of pandemic shutdowns rose to 15.3% last July, up 9 percentage points from a year earlier, versus 6.3% for white workers, the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development reported. According to a Pew Research report published in December: “Among Black Americans, 71% know someone who has been hospitalized or died because of COVID-19.”

The path to today’s Minneapolis

High profile police killings of Black men in this region—including George Floyd, Philando Castile, and Jamar Clark—have heightened the protests and urgency for change. The viral video of Floyd’s murder with his neck under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer seemed to dawn a new era in the fight for justice.

Protesters took to the streets for weeks around the globe. Graffiti images of Floyd sprang up worldwide, even on a West Bank barrier in the Middle East. CEOs of Fortune 500 corporations in Minnesota wrote an open letter of outrage. Athletes of all races took the knee before matches to show their support for racial equity.

In the city of Minneapolis, at the center of the controversy, there was swift action against the officers, something unprecedented.

“Despite decades of police incidents that resulted in the deaths of people of color, today’s actions by the mayor represent the first time in modern history that Minneapolis police officers were fired within 24 hours for unjustly murdering a citizen,” said Michael Lansing, associate professor and chair of Augsburg’s history department, in a about the Minneapolis Police Department. (Lansing’s comments on the history of uprisings and Minneapolis police were also carried by and .)

Now, many are acknowledging the systems that are behind today’s Minneapolis. Even the South Minneapolis street where George Floyd was killed is in a historically Black working-class and middle-class neighborhood created by housing segregation, Lansing said in his tweet series.

Indeed, Mapping Prejudice Project, a team of community members, geographers, and historians based at the University of Minnesota, have unearthed thousands of racial covenants in Minneapolis that reserved land for the exclusive use of white people.

Those restrictions served as powerful obstacles for people of color seeking safe and affordable housing. Racial covenants, dovetailed with redlining and predatory lending practices, depressed homeownership rates for Black residents. They also limited access to community resources like schools and parks.

While contemporary white residents of Minneapolis like to think their city never had formal segregation, those racial covenants did the work of Jim Crow in the Twin Cities, said Kevin Ehrman-Solberg ’15, a co-founder of Mapping Prejudice.

“The reputation of Minneapolis is that it’s a liberal bastion, yet there’s a racist reality that people live in.”—Kevin Ehrman-Solberg ’15

Looking forward with a pragmatic lens

While the period following George Floyd’s murder looked like a change moment, Augsburg University’s M. Anita Gay Hawthorne Professor of Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies William Green worries that the momentum started to diminish as the summer progressed. “The challenge that we face is to do the hard work to define what change means, and second, how to get at the root of the problems that lead to disparities in society.”

Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce President Jonathan Weinhagen looks ahead to the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder and to the question of how much progress has been made in raising awareness about and working to eliminate the disparities experienced by people of color.

“[Closing the racial divide] is not going to be resolved in a year. It’s going to take more time, but it’s going to have to be far more rapid than anything we’ve done to date.”—Jonathan Weinhagen

The implications of these disparities are wide-reaching, with government officials and the business community concerned that a growing population that isn’t able to fully participate in or benefit from the economy will threaten the vitality of the state as a whole.

“To have a large and growing part of our economy be marginalized is a huge disadvantage to all of us because it takes a huge part of the population out,” said Susan Brower, Minnesota’s demographer.

The NAACP’s 48-page issued in 2019 calls for a comprehensive, multi-pronged policy agenda anchored by five basic principles: economic sustainability, education, health, public safety and criminal justice, and voter rights and political representation.

The role of education

Many are looking to young people to be the lasting change.

The nonprofit in Minneapolis has emerged to support children from “cradle to career,” envisioning a future in which “every child has the academic, social, and emotional skills to thrive in a globally fluent world.”

Alan Page, retired Minnesota Supreme Court justice, and Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, amending Minnesota’s constitution to give every child a civil right to a quality public education. They define the current approach as a system that works well for children from well-to-do families but fails children from low-income families.

“A quality education is without question the most powerful tool we have to break the cycle of poverty and create a society in which everyone can fully participate,” . “It doesn’t just change one child’s life. It has the potential to improve the future for generations to come and lead to a more productive, vibrant society for all of us.”

Meanwhile, Augsburg University is positioned to be a statewide leader in the turnaround, with years of intentional work on diversity, equity, and inclusion. “I certainly feel that higher education is the clearest path to a middle-class life or better,” Augsburg President Paul Pribbenow said.

Despite Harper’s success after graduating from Augsburg, he views the disparate outcomes as a call to action, even forming his own economic development consulting firm, R.D.T.H Consulting, LLC, focused on social impact in addition to his day job. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

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Augsburg’s efforts to address disparities and work toward equity

After the murder of George Floyd only a few miles from campus, Augsburg University introduced in June the Justice for George Floyd Initiatives to focus on working to heal the community, creating leadership and structures that make tangible change, and ensuring accountability for the work of undoing racist systems.

New efforts were introduced to combat systemic racism, including a critical race and ethnicity studies department; diversity, equity, and inclusion training; and a requirement that all faculty and staff complete antiracism training. Augsburg also canceled classes and suspended operations June 4 and 5 so students, faculty, and staff could have an opportunity to grieve.

“We acknowledge the pain, fear, and trauma faced by the Augsburg community—especially our students, faculty, and staff of color—remain a lived reality every day,” Pribbenow said. “This work by Augsburg will be persistent, resolute, courageous, and integrated into everything the university does.”

This ongoing work includes several components:

• Augsburg named William Green, professor of history, the inaugural holder of the M. Anita Gay Hawthorne professorship of critical race and ethnic studies.
• The university is employing new accountability for inclusive, antiracist leadership across the institution and reviewing Augsburg’s major academic and administrative policies and practices with a special focus on undoing bias and discrimination and enhancing student success.
• Augsburg created a scholarship in memory of George Floyd and established a fund that matched donations from students, faculty, and staff for organizations doing important work, especially for Black-owned businesses and nonprofit organizations.
• Augsburg appointed the first Chief Diversity Officer, , in 2016 and became home in 2019 to , the nation’s largest workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion conference.

These moves are an important continuation of Augsburg’s efforts to build and maintain an equitable and inclusive campus that became a strategic focus in 2006, resulting in Augsburg welcoming its most diverse incoming first-year class ever in 2017. Students of color are now in the majority of traditional undergraduates, making Augsburg one of the most diverse private colleges in the Midwest.

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Top Image: Minneapolis is a city with a liberal reputation, but racial disparities persist. (Photo by Courtney Perry)

The post Confronting the Minnesota paradox appeared first on Augsburg Now.

A crime is committed. An eyewitness identifies a suspect in the lineup. The suspect is prosecuted and relegated to years of incarceration. Justice is served … until DNA evidence exonerates the suspect.

Augsburg University Professor of Psychology Nancy Steblay believes these crucial questions deserve answers: How reliable is eyewitness identification, and how trustworthy are the law enforcement procedures that collect eyewitness evidence?

“I was trained as a social psychologist. As I was teaching after graduate school, I saw that many of the principles I’d learned about social psychology and experimental methods really applied to this area of psychology and law,” said Steblay, who is entering retirement after 32 years at Augsburg. “What became interesting to me are principles through which we could change the justice system.”

Activists and community leaders in the United States have long decried the injustices of racial discrimination and violence perpetuated in the criminal justice system. More than six years before Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, prompting a growing number of citizens and leaders to call for greater accountability for law enforcement officers—with some calling into question the legitimacy of police policies and even police presence as a whole—Steblay and her team collected data, evaluated methods, and drew scientific conclusions about a specific mechanism within the law enforcement system that many believe is, at the very least, in desperate need of reform.

That component of the justice system is the police practice of lineups: a law enforcement process designed to confirm an eyewitness’s identification of a criminal suspect among a lineup of several people with similar appearance, build, and height as the suspect. However, this process is far from flawless.

Mistaken eyewitness identification is observed in seven of every 10 cases when the true identity of the criminal is revealed by forensic DNA testing, said Gary Wells, an Iowa State University psychology professor who collaborated with Steblay. “It’s a national problem and has major implications for our criminal justice system and our belief in the reliability of that system.”

Real People in Real Cases

Eyewitness identification of criminal perpetrators is a staple form of evidence in courts of law.

“Think of eyewitness memory like trace evidence, such as blood, gunshot residue, or other physical evidence,” Steblay said. “You don’t want to contaminate it.”

Steblay, along with Wells, is among the top national experts in eyewitness identification. As an experimental social psychologist who has conducted research on eyewitness memory, police procedures, and eyewitness evidence for 30 years, she is often called upon by defense attorneys to testify when they believe a suspect is being wrongly accused based on faulty identification.

Her ability to speak with authority on the subject has been reinforced by her research findings. Assisted by Augsburg student researchers, Steblay and Wells led studies that, for the first time, sought to understand and predict eyewitness identification errors using actual lineups.

Before these studies, scientific psychology’s understanding of eyewitness identification accuracy was based almost exclusively on controlled laboratory studies that simulate eyewitness experiences.

Steblay and Wells were awarded a National Science Foundation grant to pursue a four-phase study from 2014-2018. The research followed up on their prior work, in which police lineups were presented to real eyewitnesses by detectives using laptop computers with a software program developed specifically for the field experiment. Data was collected from 855 lineups in four cities: Austin, Texas; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; San Diego; and Tucson, Arizona.

The field data collected in these cities provided lineup photos and eyewitness identification decisions, investigator reports, and audiotapes of the verbal exchange between the lineup administrator and eyewitness during each lineup procedure. A startling discovery emerged from a pattern of cases when lineup administrators, who were also the case detectives, knew who the suspects were and behaved in a leading fashion with the eyewitnesses.

Learning From Lineups

Augsburg student researchers collected data and assessed 190 real lineups for fairness or bias. “It’s powerful to bring students into research by saying, ‘Here’s the problem of wrongful convictions, and let’s figure out how to solve them,’” Steblay said.

Psychology majors made up the research team at Augsburg, adding laboratory skills to what they learned in the classroom. Steblay and 27 student researchers conducted the first and second studies across multiple semesters.

Verbal exchanges between police lineup administrators and eyewitnesses to crimes were audio-recorded. There had never been an analysis of recorded verbal comments from actual witnesses because such recordings had never existed until this study.

The Augsburg students coded 102 audio transcripts to examine the association between witness comments and lineup selection, finding that an instant identification by an eyewitness was less likely to produce an error than when the witness was deliberative.

Natalie Johnson ’18, who’s pursuing a master’s degree in counseling psychology at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, was one of the students who listened to police audiotapes and coded them based on whether the decision-making process was immediate or deliberative.

She and other students were startled to realize that the police push for a conviction could, in some cases, influence how criminal cases are pursued.

“Doing the work on police lineups made me realize how flawed our system can be,” she said. “It made me realize our criminal justice has a long way to go.”

 Sean Adams ’17, who is currently a legal assistant, said he was shocked by how poorly some of the lineups were constructed.

The tests were designed to include fake witnesses, and these mock witnesses in Augsburg’s laboratory studies represented the worst possible scenario: a witness with no memory of the offender. Mock witnesses should not be able to pick the police suspect from  a lineup at a rate higher than chance. “The worst lineup I saw had such a leading description that the [laboratory] witnesses picked the police suspect 80% of the time,” Adams said. “That should have statistically been less than 20% of the time.” Lineups should be constructed so that the suspect and the fillers (innocent people added to the lineup) match the suspect description.

Relevant Research

Along with stunning insights into eyewitness identification, these studies brought to light more questions worth exploring. The research resulted in 12 conference poster presentations involving 23 students, and it fostered two student honors projects and spinoff projects that are ongoing.

“It was time-consuming, but it was important. I think the student researchers had a sense of the importance,” Steblay said. “It was really fun to work with them. Their work enabled me to complete the project.”

Augsburg student researchers saw the subject material’s importance for effective law enforcement practices as well as its resonance with people beyond their research group. When Austin Conery ’17 began researching how to predict eyewitness identification errors, he discovered that his Augsburg University research project was a hot topic with friends and family.

“Every party or every family event, someone would ask what was going on at school, and I could talk about the research for hours because it was so relevant,” Conery said.

Besides a view into a major criminal justice system issue, students said the research opportunity gave them practical experience.

Conery said the research gave him the confidence to read, understand, and apply studies in his current job as a site director at a children’s mental health provider, PrairieCare. “It was a great way to implement the things I was learning in class,” he said. “It gave me the place to think critically in a controlled environment.”

As Adams considers his future work, he’s looking back to his time at Augsburg. “I’ve been thinking of what I enjoyed in college, and a lot of it was the work I did with Nancy,” he said.

Turning Research Findings into Practical Policies

Steblay’s influence may not make her a household name, but her research findings are being put to practical use in a variety of ways.

Minnesota judges view a webinar module she created, “Eyewitness Science: Protection and Evaluation of Eyewitness Identification Evidence,” as part of their judicial e-learning program. Steblay also published a chapter in the 2019 book, “Psychological Science and the Law.”

The findings of the research by Steblay, Wells, and Augsburg student researchers are leading to major reforms nationally. The best practices include critical stipulations: that lineups must be double-blind, meaning the administrating officer doesn’t know who the suspect is, and that the non-suspect fillers in the lineup must resemble the suspect and match the description of the offender that was provided by the eyewitness.

“There are hundreds of thousands of police officers who are using these eyewitness identification protocols that we didn’t use 20 years ago, and they don’t know Nancy Steblay’s name,” said William Brooks, a police chief in Norwood, Massachusetts.

Brooks travels the country training police on what he regards as groundbreaking science-backed best practices for lineups. “I don’t think there’s been as wide of an impact in other areas of investigation as in how we deal with eyewitness memory,” he said.

In mid-May, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signed bipartisan legislation that requires uniform science-backed eyewitness identification practices for all law enforcement, which goes into effect in early 2021.

Still, the eyewitness identification best practices face resistance. “Some of it is individual police jurisdictions just not wanting to be told how to do things,” Steblay said in an interview with Yahoo News. “Sometimes police or prosecutors say they don’t want rules to be so rigid, because then if we just violate one of the rules, then that ruins our prosecution or we can’t catch the bad guys or whatever. So they feel like it’s undermining their ability to do the good job that they should do.

“I don’t see it that way,” Steblay said. “I just think these are not difficult changes.” Steblay views the recommended lineup reforms as a means to strengthen eyewitness evidence and reduce the likelihood of a mistaken identification.

The Innocence Project, a nonprofit founded in 1992 to exonerate the wrongly convicted through DNA testing, has worked to pass laws throughout the country that embrace the scientifically supported best practices advanced by Steblay and Wells.

“When we began our work, a handful of states had embraced best practices. Today more than half of the states in the country have adopted key eyewitness identification reforms,” said Rebecca Brown, the nonprofit’s policy director.

Steblay hopes more police departments will enact these reforms. “We have at least part of the answer to how police can reduce mistaken identification and wrongful convictions.”

Reforms in action

States where core eyewitness reforms have been implemented through legislation, court action, or substantial voluntary compliance:

via Innocence Project

 

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Augsburg, home of The Forum on Workplace Inclusion since last summer, is “proud to partner with the forum to help expand diversity, equity, and inclusion skills, so our students can fully participate and succeed in the workforce,” Pribbenow said. The 32nd annual, three-day conference attracted more than 1,500 people from around the world and across sectors.

The Star Tribune recently published an article featuring Steve Humerickhouse, executive director of the forum, in which he explained the importance of creating safe places for difficult conversations.

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Augsburg’s student government approved increasing the green fee by $5 to $20 per semester to pay for the Auggie Pass in order to reduce students’ out-of-pocket costs while improving their chances of accepting jobs and internships that involve a commute. Day Student Government is officially responsible for overseeing the green fee that supports sustainability efforts.

The Auggie Pass is valid throughout the school year and is paid for from both the student green fee and university operating funds. All traditional undergraduate students who pay the semester green fee are eligible for the pass at no additional cost.

“As someone who uses the bus every day, it’s great not to have that financial burden,” said Skye Ryge ’20, who advocated for the pass. “It’s really economically advantageous to students who pay for school, like me, to not have to choose between textbooks and bus fare.”

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The building’s location, at 701 25th Avenue South in Minneapolis, puts it among the medical facilities of the University of Minnesota Medical Center and the Masonic Children’s Hospital and just a short walk from the Augsburg University campus. The program’s move in August came after four years at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The new space, which features an increased footprint for classroom and clinical lab instruction, supports potential future departmental growth and allows the program faculty, students, and staff to engage with Minneapolis campus activities. “The curriculum was redesigned to be more case-based and hands-on, and this new space will allow for a more creative and innovative learning environment,” said Alicia Quella, the physician assistant studies program director and department chair.

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The Sundquist professorship supports business administration, Augsburg’s largest academic department with the most undergraduate students on campus. Boeh, a professor of economics, has been teaching at Augsburg since 1990 and often appears in media interviews and on business panels using her talent for bringing complex business concepts to life.

“Jeanne Boeh will lead Augsburg’s efforts to attract top business faculty, thanks to this generous endowment,” said Augsburg University President Paul Pribbenow. “She is known as a faculty leader on campus and for her strong commitment to students as they prepare for careers in business.”

This endowed professorship is named for alumnus Dean Sundquist ’81, an Augsburg Board of Regents member and chairman and CEO of Anoka, Minnesota-based Mate Precision Tooling. Sundquist and his wife, Amy, have made several major investments in Augsburg.

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In this new space, sports medicine support staff from on and off campus—including team physicians, chiropractors, physical therapists, and dietitians—can work collaboratively with athletic trainers to better serve Augsburg’s more than 500 student-athletes from 22 varsity sports. Philanthropic gifts paid for the upgrades, with student-athletes gaining the benefit of more efficient scheduling.

“The ability to serve multiple teams at the same time in the larger space, with state-of-the-art equipment, will be the biggest advantage and benefit for the student-athlete,” said Missy Strauch, Augsburg’s head athletic trainer.

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