Determinants and Effectiveness of Police Enforcement Behavior
Paper Session
Saturday, Jan. 7, 2023 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM (CST)
- Chair: Matthew Ross, Northeastern University
The Effect of Field Training Officers on Police Use of Force
Abstract
Over the past decade, police use of force has become an increasingly charged political issue with growing calls for reform. In this paper, we consider the link between a field training officer and a recruit’s subsequent enforcement behavior. We leverage a unique setting where recruits are as good as randomly assigned to field training officers and where we have detailed information on calls for service. We document meaningful differences across field training officers in terms of their propensity to use force prior to being paired with a recruit. Further, we find that a one standard deviation increase in a field training officer’s propensity to use force is associated with a 12 percent increase in their recruit’s subsequent propensity to use force. The effect of having a more forceful field training officer persists for as much as three years after the recruit completes training.Deterrence or Backlash? The Causal Effect of Arrest on the Dynamics of Domestic Violence
Abstract
Domestic violence is ubiquitous, with millions of women worldwide being repeatedly victimized by their intimate partners. So how should police officers respond to domestic violence incidents in order to maximize the likelihood that battered women will not be victimized again? We develop and apply a novel instrumental variable strategy to explore how arresting batterers is linked to repeat domestic violence. Drawing upon unique and extremely detailed administrative data on hundreds of thousands of domestic violence incidents recorded by a major police force in Great Britain, we exploit (i) that the availability and geographical location of patrol officers to assign to respond to a domestic violence incident is "as good as random", and (ii) that patrol officers differ systematically in their propensity to arrest suspected batters. We find that arrest can break cycles of domestic violence, decreasing the probability that victims are revictimized within 12 months by 31 percentage points. By contrast, OLS, which only shows negligibly small associations, would lead us to erroneously conclude that arrest does little in affecting domestic violence paths. Investigating mechanisms, we find that arrest is an important precursor to immediate criminal sanctions against suspected batterers: it increases the likelihood a suspect batterer faces a criminal investigation, is retained in custody during the investigation, and is charged with a crime. In stark contrast to recent calls for decriminalization of domestic violence, our results suggest that the optimal policy response to domestic violence involves a lower threshold of tolerance towards batterers.Stopped by the Police: The End of “Stop-and-Frisk” on Neighborhood Crime and High School Dropout Rates
Abstract
Over 3.5 million pedestrians are stopped by police in the United States every year. This paper explores the effectiveness of using pedestrian stops as a crime deterrence tool. Using administrative data from New York City, we test whether the concentration of pedestrian stops in higher-crime neighborhoods deters neighborhood crime and whether frequent exposure to police stops affects dropout rates of neighborhood high school students. Exploiting a 2012 reform that reduced stops by 95%, we compare neighborhoods that have similar crime rates but substantially different stop rates prior to the reform. Treated neighborhoods that experienced twice the reduction in stop rates do not display differential increases in felonies and violent misdemeanors, shootings, or killings over the five years following the reform. Analysis of police surges, however, indicates that when increased stop rates are accompanied by an increase in patrol officers, serious crime declines. But alone, heightened stop rates have no measurable impact on serious crime. Comparing students across schools that are differentially exposed to changes in stop rates, we estimate that the reform reduced the probability of high school dropout by about 660 students per academic year, carrying an annual social value of over $205 million.Discussant(s)
Benjamin Hansen
,
University of Oregon
Tom Kirchmaier
,
London School of Economics
Emily Owens
,
University of California-Irvine
John MacDonald
,
University of Pennsylvania
JEL Classifications
- K4 - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior
- H7 - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations