{"title":"Police brutality, law enforcement, and crime: Evidence from Chicago","authors":"Kadeem Noray","doi":"10.1016/j.jue.2023.103630","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>It is a popular belief that police brutality incidents increase crime either by causing retaliation (i.e. rioting) or depolicing. But, these incidents may also deter crime, which makes the sign of the effect of brutality and crime ambiguous. In this paper, I build a simple model that highlights this theoretical ambiguity and provides guidance on how to use the joint effects of brutality on crime and arrests to distinguish between these three mechanisms: retaliation, depolicing, and deterrence. Using data on excessive force complaints in Chicago from 2011 to 2015, I exploit variation in the timing and location of serious excessive force incidents to estimate the effect of police brutality on crime rates and arrests rates within Chicago. I find that communities that experience serious brutality incidents experience a 2.1% increase in total crime in the month following the incident. These local crime rate increases are roughly five times larger when the victim is black and the officer is white (i.e. when incidents are <em>racially charged</em>). Racially charged incidents also result in large short-term increases in arrest rates (especially for violent crimes). These results are inconsistent with deterrence at the local level and highlight that the joint criminogenic and enforcement response to police brutality varies substantially by the racial composition of those involved. In addition, I also document some evidence of small post-incident city-wide declines in crime and arrests, highlighting the possibility that different mechanisms may matter at different scales of analysis. Contrary to public perception, I do not any find clear evidence of depolicing.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48340,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Urban Economics","volume":"141 ","pages":"Article 103630"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7000,"publicationDate":"2024-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Urban Economics","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094119023001006","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
It is a popular belief that police brutality incidents increase crime either by causing retaliation (i.e. rioting) or depolicing. But, these incidents may also deter crime, which makes the sign of the effect of brutality and crime ambiguous. In this paper, I build a simple model that highlights this theoretical ambiguity and provides guidance on how to use the joint effects of brutality on crime and arrests to distinguish between these three mechanisms: retaliation, depolicing, and deterrence. Using data on excessive force complaints in Chicago from 2011 to 2015, I exploit variation in the timing and location of serious excessive force incidents to estimate the effect of police brutality on crime rates and arrests rates within Chicago. I find that communities that experience serious brutality incidents experience a 2.1% increase in total crime in the month following the incident. These local crime rate increases are roughly five times larger when the victim is black and the officer is white (i.e. when incidents are racially charged). Racially charged incidents also result in large short-term increases in arrest rates (especially for violent crimes). These results are inconsistent with deterrence at the local level and highlight that the joint criminogenic and enforcement response to police brutality varies substantially by the racial composition of those involved. In addition, I also document some evidence of small post-incident city-wide declines in crime and arrests, highlighting the possibility that different mechanisms may matter at different scales of analysis. Contrary to public perception, I do not any find clear evidence of depolicing.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Urban Economics provides a focal point for the publication of research papers in the rapidly expanding field of urban economics. It publishes papers of great scholarly merit on a wide range of topics and employing a wide range of approaches to urban economics. The Journal welcomes papers that are theoretical or empirical, positive or normative. Although the Journal is not intended to be multidisciplinary, papers by noneconomists are welcome if they are of interest to economists. Brief Notes are also published if they lie within the purview of the Journal and if they contain new information, comment on published work, or new theoretical suggestions.