Safe Space
Police Response Time and Injury Outcomes
Gregory DeAngelo, Marina Toger & Sarit Weisburd
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
The delayed response of law enforcement to calls for service has become a hot button issue when evaluating police department performance. While it is often assumed that faster response times could play an important role in quelling potentially violent incidents, there is no empirical evidence to support this claim. In this paper, we measure the effect of police response time on the likelihood that an incident will result in an injury. To overcome the endogeneity of more severe calls being assigned higher priority, which requires a faster response, we take several steps. First, we focus on the subset of calls for service categorized as 'Major Disturbance - Violence' that all receive the same priority level. Second, we instrument for police response time with the number of vehicles within a 2.5-mile radius of the incident at the time it is received by the call center. When controlling for beat, month, and time-of-day fixed effects, this instrumenting strategy allows us to take advantage of the geographical constraints faced by a dispatcher when assigning officers to an incident. In contrast to the OLS estimates, our two-stage least squares analysis establishes a strong causal relationship whereby increasing response time increases the likelihood that an incident results in an injury. The effect is concentrated among female victims, suggesting that faster response time could potentially play an important role in reducing injuries related to domestic violence.
Behavioral Health Treatment and Police Officer Safety
Monica Deza et al.
NBER Working Paper, June 2023
Abstract:
We study the effect of community access to behavioral health (mental health and substance use disorders) treatment on police officer safety, which we proxy with on-duty assaults on officers. Combining agency-level data on police officer on-duty assaults and county-level data on the number of treatment centers within the community that offer behavioral health treatment, we estimate two-way fixed-effects regressions and find that that an additional four centers per county (average increase) leads to a 1.3% reduction per police agency in on-duty assaults against police officers. Previously established benefits of access to treatment on behavioral health extend to the work environment of police officers.
The Effect of Body-Worn Cameras on the Adjudication of Citizen Complaints of Police Misconduct
Suat Cubukcu et al.
Justice Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use citizen complaint data from the Chicago Police Department and Civilian Office of Police Accountability filed between 2013-2020 to determine the extent to which Body-worn camera (BWC) footage enhances the efficacy of evidence used to formulate a conclusion of responsibility, and whether racial disparities in investigation outcomes would subsequently be reduced. Accordingly, we exploit the staggered deployment of BWCs across 22 Chicago police districts over time to estimate the effect of BWCs on these outcomes. Findings indicate BWCs led to a significant decrease in the dismissal of investigations due to insufficient evidence (“not sustained”) and a significant increase in disciplinary actions against police officers (“sustained” “outcomes”) with sufficient evidence to sanction their misconduct. We further find that disparities in complaints across racial groups for the “unsustained” category faded away with the implementation of BWCs. The article concludes with theoretical and research implications based on the findings.
The Politics of Police
Samuel Thomas Donahue
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The connection between racially prejudiced policing and politics has a long history in the United States. In the current period, police organizations have displayed unprecedented support for Republican presidential candidates, and both have organized against social movements focused on addressing racial disparities in police contact. Yet despite strong connections between law enforcement and party politics, we know almost nothing about the relationship between partisan identity and the behavior of police officers. Using millions of traffic stop records from the Florida Highway Patrol and linked voter records, the present study shows that White Republican officers exhibit a larger racial disparity than White Democratic officers in their propensity to search motorists whom they have stopped. This result is robust to an array of alternative empirical tests and holds across varying sociodemographic contexts. I also find that both White Republican and White Democratic officers grew more biased between 2012 and 2020, a period characterized by the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the election of Donald Trump.
Defunding the police through shared service agreements: The impact on cost savings, staffing, and public safety using a bias-corrected synthetic control analysis
David Mazeika
Criminology & Public Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
New Jersey (NJ) is home to more than 460 municipal police departments, including close to 60 with fewer than 11 officers. In total, the state spends around $3 billion per year on policing, 20% of the typical municipal budget. In recent history, seven NJ municipalities have disbanded their local force and contracted services with a neighbor. Using the bias-corrected synthetic control method, results from this study reveal these locations saved on average $143 per person per year, close to $300,000 per municipality. There were fewer officers in the contracting force per capita postcontracting, but no effects on public safety. Contracting agencies also gained new services including a K-9 Unit and full-time detectives. However, the monies municipalities saved were largely used to cut taxes and fund capital improvements, not to fund reform efforts called for after the murder of George Floyd. Contracting thus was a way to maintain the status quo.
Spatiotemporal Analysis Exploring the Effect of Law Enforcement Drug Market Disruptions on Overdose, Indianapolis, Indiana, 2020–2021
Bradley Ray et al.
American Journal of Public Health, July 2023, Pages 750-758
Methods: We performed a retrospective (January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2021), population-based cohort study using administrative data from Marion County, Indiana. We compared frequency and characteristics of drug (i.e., opioids and stimulants) seizures with changes in fatal overdose, emergency medical services nonfatal overdose calls for service, and naloxone administration in the geographic area and time following the seizures.
Results: Within 7, 14, and 21 days, opioid-related law enforcement drug seizures were significantly associated with increased spatiotemporal clustering of overdoses within radii of 100, 250, and 500 meters. For example, the observed number of fatal overdoses was two-fold higher than expected under the null distribution within 7 days and 500 meters following opioid-related seizures. To a lesser extent, stimulant-related drug seizures were associated with increased spatiotemporal clustering overdose.
Civic Responses to Police Violence
Desmond Ang & Jonathan Tebes
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Roughly a thousand people are killed by American law enforcement officers each year, accounting for more than 5% of all homicides. We estimate the causal impact of these events on civic engagement. Exploiting hyperlocal variation in how close residents live to a killing, we find that exposure to police violence leads to significant increases in registrations and votes. These effects are driven entirely by Black and Hispanic citizens and are largest for killings of unarmed individuals. We find corresponding increases in support for criminal justice reforms, suggesting that police violence may cause voters to politically mobilize against perceived injustice.
Policing and crime: Dynamic panel evidence from California
Nicholas Lovett, David Welsch & Yuhan Xue
Oxford Economic Papers, July 2023, Pages 750–779
Abstract:
We exploit police and crime data from California over 26 years to construct a dynamic panel, which is then estimated using Arellano–Bover/Blundell–Bond techniques to address concerns about simultaneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and inertial effects in the policing-crime relationship. We find no evidence that increases in police staffing lead to meaningful reductions in crime through either deterrence or incapacitation. Estimates are not wholly supportive of a compelling relationship between prior criminal offending and current police staffing; providing suggestive evidence that, at least within our sample, simultaneity bias may be more modest in nature than has been previously supposed in prior studies.
The Impact of Fear on Police Behavior and Public Safety
Sungwoo Cho, Felipe Gonçalves & Emily Weisburst
NBER Working Paper, June 2023
Abstract:
We examine how changes in the salience of workplace risk affect police behavior and public safety. Specifically, we investigate cases of police officer deaths while on duty. Officers respond to a peer death by decreasing arrest activity for one to two months, consistent with heightened fear. Reductions are largest for low-level arrests and are more pronounced in smaller cities. Crime does not increase on average during this period, nor do we observe crime spikes in cities with larger or longer arrest declines. While shocks in fatality risk generate substantial enforcement responses, officer fear is unlikely to harm public safety.
Exploring changes in violence across two waves of the COVID-19 pandemic in Richmond, VA
Samuel West et al.
Aggressive Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
The first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic carried with it an increase in violence in the United States and abroad. The proportion of violence cases involving firearms also increased during this time, yet little research has examined these effects using data from the second wave of COVID infections. Explanations for these documented increases in gun violence put forward by scholars include increased firearm purchases, alcohol consumption, unemployment, and organized crime activity. The current work examined these trends in Richmond, VA. We collected data on patients (N = 1744) presenting with violent injuries from 2018 to 2022 from the emergency department of a Level-1 Trauma Center in Richmond, VA. Data were coded on the basis of whether they presented before the pandemic, during the first wave, or during the second wave. Logistic binomial regressions revealed that the risk of gunshot wounds increased by 32% during the first wave and 44% during the second wave, relative to the pre-COVID period, but that the increase between the first and second wave was not significant. These findings held after controlling for victim age, race, sex, and injury severity. Further analyses revealed that these effects were specific to violent injury, as we found no increase in firearm use among self-injury cases. The heightened violence reported during the COVID-19 pandemic was also observed in Richmond, VA. Gun violence in particular increased over time as other forms of violence (i.e., assaults, stabbings, and self-harm) decreased.
Dying to die: New micro and macro evidence that suicide terrorists are suicidal
Simon Varaine
Kyklos, forthcoming
Abstract:
The self-sacrifice of suicide terrorists is subject to sophisticated models of altruistic sacrifice. Yet, a simpler account is that it reflects common suicidal tendencies. This paper offers new micro and macro evidence supportive of this hypothesis. At the micro level, the paper compares a sample of suicide and non-suicide terrorists in the United States from 1948 to 2017. Results indicate that suicide terrorists are more likely to display various established suicidal risk factors including history of child abuse, absent parent/s, and relationship troubles. Results from Bayesian Model Averaging indicate that suicide risk factors outperform other individual factors (e.g., ideology and lone-actor terrorism) in explaining suicide terrorism. At the macro level, the paper takes advantage of the cross-national variations in suicidal tendencies to explain the incidence of suicide and non-suicide terrorist attacks worldwide from 1991 to 2014. Results reveal that countries with higher share of deaths from suicide display higher incidences of suicide attacks but similar incidences of non-suicide attacks. However, other contextual factors such as the share of Muslims also predict the incidence of suicide terrorism. The decision of some terrorists to sacrifice their life may well have been subject to over-theorization.
Does Homeownership Reduce Crime? A Radical Housing Reform from the UK
Richard Disney et al.
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
“Right to Buy” (RTB), a large-scale natural experiment whereby incumbent tenants in public housing could buy properties at heavily-subsidised prices, increased the UK homeownership rate by over 10 percentage points between its 1980 introduction and the 1990s. This paper studies the impact of this reform on crime by leveraging exogenous variation in eligibility for the policy. Results show that RTB generated significant property crime reductions. Behavioural changes of incumbent tenants and renovation of public properties were the main drivers of this crime reduction. This is evidence of a novel means by which subsidised homeownership and housing policy can reduce criminality.