Action or Distraction? Assessing the Impact of Post-2020 Police Use of Force Reforms in American Cities
by Vineet Chovatia
Abstract
Between 2013 and 2024, police killed 13,468 people in the United States. Low-income communities of color, who are disproportionately targeted, bear the brunt of this violence. This reality reflects a legacy rooted in a deeply racist history that continues to shape American policing today. In the wake of regular, highly-publicized killings of unarmed Black and Brown Americans and large-scale social movements advocating for police reform, police departments in many American cities implemented a range of reforms over the course of the 21st century. We use data on the adoption of seven of these reforms along with police shootings and killings data from 94 of America’s largest cities to construct fixed effects difference in differences models that estimate the effect of these policies individually and in combination on police shootings and killings. Our findings suggest that chokehold bans, de-escalation policies, and comprehensive reporting reforms are associated with reductions in police shootings when implemented together while findings with regards to police killings are more mixed, but indicate that combinations of these policies are associated with reductions in killings as well.
Professor Michelle P. Connolly, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: C23, K42, K14
Keywords: Police Use of Force; Fixed Effect Difference in Differences; Post-2020 Police Reforms
The Case for Clemency: Differential Impacts of Pretrial Detention on Case and Crime Outcomes
by George Rateb
Abstract
About half-million of individuals in US jails are detained pretrial while legally presumed innocent. Using data on quasi-randomly assigned bail judges in the third-largest court system in the U.S., we study the impact of pretrial detention on defendants’ court and crime outcomes between 2008 and 2012. We supplement our primary analysis to document patterns on bail amounts and how they differentially impact Black defendants relative to their white and Hispanic counterparts. Instrumental variable estimates suggest that pretrial detention increases the likelihood of being found guilty, mainly driven by the uptake of guilty pleas, especially for minorities. By linking court and jail data, we provide mechanistic evidence that jail time is positively correlated with the uptake of these guilty pleas. To the best of our knowledge, these findings have not been empirically documented due to a lack of previous data availability.
Professor Bocar Ba, Faculty Advisor
Professor Michelle Connolly, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: C26; J15; K14
Security Without Equity? The Effect of Secure Communities on Racial Profiling by Police
By Jack Willoughby
Anecdotal and circumstantial evidence suggest that the implementation of Secure Communities, a federal program that allows police officers to more easily identify illegal immigrants, has increased racial bias by police. The goal of this analysis is to empirically evaluate the effect of Secure Communities on racial bias by police using motor vehicle stop and search data from the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation. This objective differs from most previous research, which has largely attempted to quantify racial profiling for a moment in time rather than looking at how an event influences racial profiling. I examine the effects of Secure Communities on police treatment of Hispanics vs. whites with an expanded difference-in-difference approach that looks at outcomes in motor vehicle search success rate, search rate conditional on a police stop, stop rate, and police action conditional on stop. Statistical analyses yield no evidence that the ratification of Secure Communities increased racial profiling against Hispanics by police. This finding is at odds with the anecdotal and circumstantial evidence that has led many to believe that the ratification of Secure Communities led to a widespread increase in racial profiling by police, a discrepancy that should caution policy makers about making decisions driven by stories and summary statistics.
Advisor: Frank Sloan | JEL Codes: J15, K14, K37, K42 | Tagged: Racial Policing, Bias, Immigration Law, Secure Communities
