Policing, Propaganda, and Race
Paper Session
Friday, Jan. 3, 2025 2:30 PM - 4:30 PM (PST)
- Chair: Erdal Tekin, American University
Coding Bias: The Role of Racial-Ethnic identity in 911 Call Dispatching Decisions
Abstract
This study is the first to empirically investigate racial bias in police dispatch process. Call-takers and dispatchers, the first to field emergency and non-emergency calls, play a crucial role in police dispatch operations. They assign a descriptive code to the incident, assess event priority, and dispatch assistance with an eye to urgency and special skills needed. However, anecdotal evidence suggests bias in dispatch decisions, which could be influencing police behavior. Using police administrative data from Columbus, Ohio, I examine if call-takers and dispatchers classify calls, prioritize calls, and/or dispatch police assistance differently when the individual involved in the call is non-white or Hispanic, as compared to being a white individual. To identify the causal impact of race, I compare dispatch outcomes by race within semantically similar calls from the same neighborhood. These semantically similar calls are identified using a large language model and clustering methods applied to text-based call summaries. For now, I examine only the calls that potentially involve a gun, considering a total of 275 clusters. I find, dispatch officials are more likely to assign a high-threat classification (e.g., “person with a gun” or “shooting”)—which requires an immediate and heavy deployment of police resources—to calls involving non white individuals. For instance, for domestic conflicts involving a gun threat, non-white individuals are 9.6 pp (33.8%) more likely to receive a “person with a gun” classification. For behavioral health crises involving a gun threat, they are 6.2 pp (29.1%) more likely to receive this classification. Additionally, I find suggestive evidence that these dispatch decisions could be mediating officer decisions, such as officer response times and decision to arrest, but only for domestic conflicts and not in other situations.When Reality TV Creates Reality: How "Copaganda" Affects Police, Communities, and Viewers
Abstract
Television shows with police officer protagonists are ubiquitous on American television. Both fictional shows and reality shows portray a world where criminals are nearly always apprehended. However, this is a distortion of reality, as crimes mostly go unsolved and police officers infrequently make arrests. What does the omnipresence of this genre mean for the general public's conception of police, for the practice of policing, and for the communities being policed? I use department-level and officer-level arrest data to find that arrests for low-level, victimless crimes increase by 20 percent while departments film with reality television shows, concentrated in the officers actively followed by cameras. These arrests do not meaningfully improve public safety and come at the cost of the local public's confidence. I then document quasi-experimentally and experimentally that these shows – particularly their overrepresentation of arrests – improve non-constituent viewer attitudes towards and beliefs about the police. The results are consistent with "copaganda" shows inflating trust in police nationally while subjecting some to harsher but not more effective enforcement. I consider the implications for police reform.The Thin Blue Line: Traffic Stops in the Wake of Police Fatalities
Abstract
This study examines the repercussions of police officer fatalities on law enforcement conduct, particularly in the context of traffic stops. Annually, over a hundred officers fall in the line of duty, a substantial fraction of whom are victims of felonious acts. Leveraging a quasi-experimental design, our research utilizes event-study and generalized difference-in-differences analyses to investigate individual police stops. We draw on the extensive Stanford Open Policing Project dataset, which chronicles about 95 million stops by 21 state patrols and 35 municipal police departments from 2011 to 2018. This database provides a rich tapestry of information, including officer demographics, stop outcomes, and driver characteristics, facilitating an in-depth analysis of the dynamics at play. First, we assess whether police officer killings lead to an uptick in the volume of traffic stops, accounting for the immediate and extended aftermath of such incidents and examining variations attributable to the incident's severity. Second, we explore changes in the demographic composition of drivers stopped post-incident, analyzing how the race of both the perpetrator and the fallen officer, along with the race of the conducting officer, influences stop outcomes. Additionally, our study considers the moderating effects of various jurisdictional policies and factors, including the deployment of Body Worn Cameras (BWC), the presence and influence of police unions, political climate, leadership, and oversight mechanisms. Through this multifaceted approach, we aim to unearth nuanced insights into how fatal incidents involving law enforcement officers shape subsequent police behaviors and strategies. Our findings promise to contribute significantly to the ongoing dialogue on law enforcement practices, with potential implications for policy and policing paradigms.Discussant(s)
Erdal Tekin
,
American University
Emily Owens
,
University of California-Irvine
Manuel Hoffmann
,
Harvard University
Roman Rivera
,
University of California-Berkeley
JEL Classifications
- K0 - General
- H0 - General