Natalia Cabrera-Morales
- PhD Candidate
- Institutionalised crime. The case of police institutions: Is it a blind spot of criminal justice?
Contact
About
I am a Chilean lawyer and researcher. I hold a master’s in Sociology and another in Criminological Research (approved with distinction in both the overall programme and the dissertation). I am currently investigating police misconduct but I am more broadly interested in criminal justice institutions: collective action and responsibility attribution, and the interplay between structural and individual factors, especially in understanding misconduct in law-abiding institutions systemically.
In addition to my PhD research, I am currently perfecting my skills in Large Language Model Operations for social science research and I enjoy working on research design and methodology, particularly using quantitative methods.
Research
My research focuses on:
- Why law-enforcement institutions can fail to comply with the law themselves;
- (On a systemic level) how institutionalised misconduct is used to achieve the goals of an organisation (e.g., order in policing);
- How criminal courts are responding to institutionalised misconduct, and why they make the decisions they do.
I am also interested to discover and understand:
- The use of immoral or illegal means, norms, or orders to pursue the goals of institutions (use of weapons with poor discriminatory capacity, for example);
- Assessing if excessive rule-following and obedience can induce people to commit immoral or illegal acts. I welcome collaborations on these issues, especially related to criminal justice bureaucrats, bureaucracies, and military or police organisations.
Teaching and supervision
I currently supervise undergraduate students taking the Sociology (joint track) Tripos, Part II course Foundations in Criminology and Criminal Justice, and I am a teaching assistant on the MPhil programmes skills training course: Introduction to Quantitative Analysis.