The Heat is On: Does Civil Litigation Affect Policing Practices?

Abstract

We investigate the relationship between civil litigation and policing activity at a systems level and take a step toward a more rigorous understanding of the effect of civil litigation as an accountability mechanism for law enforcement misconduct. To investigate, we assemble original data on every civil lawsuit filed against a police department in North Carolina between 2003 and 2011, which we pair with existing traffic stops data from 2002 to 2016. We hypothesize that as an agency faces an accumulation of lawsuits, the agency will scale back its discretionary enforcement activities. Empirical tests reveal a 16 percent drop in the number of monthly stops made by officers in the aftermath of new civil litigation against their department. However, reductions in discretionary police behavior appear to benefit white motorists while rates of stops of Black motorists remain relatively unchanged. Our findings highlight the role of litigation in police accountability as well as the seeming intractability of racial disparities in discretionary police behavior.