Police Staffing Shortages, Public Awareness, and Policy Preferences
Journal: CrimRxiv
Year: 2025

Since the summer of 2020, police agencies across the United States have continued to experience police staffing shortages. The consequences of understaffed police agencies are well studied, but little is known about whether the public is aware of the staffing problem and its consequences for public safety and police behavior. This study presents a pre-registered factorial survey experiment to 3,105 US adults, varying the information respondents see on the consequences of staffing shortages (e.g.