The Impact of Race on Policing and Arrests

Race has long been recognized as playing a critical role in policing. In spite of this awareness, there has been little previous research that attempts to quantitatively analyze the impact of officer race on tangible outcomes. In this paper, we examine the relationship between the racial composition of a city’s police force and the racial patterns of arrests. Increases in the number of minority police are associated with significant increases in arrests of whites but have little impact on arrests of nonwhites. Similarly, more white police increase the number of arrests of nonwhites but do not systematically affect the number of white arrests. These patterns are particularly striking for minor offenses. Understanding the reasons for this empirical regularity and the consequent impact on crime is an important subject for future research. Race is a polarizing feature in American society. Nowhere is this more evident than in the criminal justice system. African Americans, who comprise 12 percent of the U.S. population, account for 47 percent of felony convictions and 54 percent of prison admissions. Studies suggest that one-third of AfricanAmerican males aged 20–29 are under the supervision of the criminal justice system on any given day. Minority communities are often suspicious of and hostile toward the criminal justice system in general and police in particular. * We would like to thank Dhammika Dharmapala, Lawrence Katz, Rob Sampson, two anonymous referees, and seminar participants at the Columbia Law School, Haas School of Business, National Bureau of Economic Research summer institute, Stanford Law School, and University of Southern California Law School for comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank Ron Edwards, chief of the Research and Technical Information Branch of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, for his cooperation in providing some of the data used. Michael Friedlander, Connie Taylor, and Justin Wood provided truly exemplary research assistance. 1 Marc Mauer & Tracey Huling, Young Black Americans and the Criminal Justice System: Five Years Later (1995). 2 U.S. Kerner Comm’n, Report of the National Advisory Comm’n on Civil Disorders (1968); R. Mast, Police-Ghetto Relations: Some Findings and a Proposal for Structural Change, 11 RACE 447 (1970); NAACP, Beyond the Rodney King Story: An Investigation of Police Conduct in Minority Communities (1995). 368 the journal of law and economics Conflicts between police and citizens have been the flashpoint for virtually every recent urban riot. As early as the Kerner Commission report, the potential social benefits of minority police officers have been recognized. Minority officers may have an advantage when it comes to dealing with problems in predominantly minority neighborhoods, both because of a greater understanding of cultural norms and because of increased community acceptance. It is frequently argued that without the cooperation of community members in reporting crimes and identifying criminals, there may be little that police can do either to prevent crime or to punish those who commit crimes. Same-race police may lead to a greater willingness of victims of crime to report offenses to the police, an increased ability to solve cases owing to community cooperation, and a reduction in the number of unjustified arrests or police harassment. The implication of such arguments is that matching police patrols to neighborhoods by race or ethnicity may provide social benefits. On the other hand, if police are more reluctant to arrest suspects of their own race even when the arrest is justified (as might be predicted from research in social psychology), same-race policing may be less effective in reducing crime than cross-race policing. Furthermore, the possibility of police corruption may increase with same-race policing. Enforcement of illicit contracts between enterprises engaged in criminal activities (for example, gangs, organized crime, and chop shops) and the police may be easier within a racial or ethnic group. There is ample anecdotal evidence of police-related 3 U.S. Kerner Comm’n, United States Kerner Commission Report (1968). 4 James Q. Wilson, Thinking about Crime (1983); Wesley Skogan, Fear of Crime and Neighborhood Change, in Crime and Justice: A Review of Research (Michael H. Tonry & Norval Morris eds. 1986); Jerome H. Skolnick & David H. Bayley, The New Blue Line: Police Innovation in Six American Cities (1986); Mark Harrison Moore, Problem-Solving and Community Policing, in Modern Policing (Michael Tonry & Norval Morris eds. 1992); George Akerlof & Janet L. Yellen, Gang Behavior, Law Enforcement, and Community Values, in Values and Public Policy (Henry J. Aaron, Thomas E. Mann, & Timothy Taylor eds. 1994). 5 Faye Crosby, Stephen Bromley, & Leonard Saxe, Recent Unobtrusive Studies of Black and White Discrimination and Prejudice, 87 Psychol. Bull. 546 (1980); Linda Hamilton Krieger, The Content of Our Categories: A Cognitive Bias Approach to Discrimination and Equal Employment Opportunities, 47 Stan. L. Rev. 1161 (1995). 6 If favoritism or corruption operated powerfully for within-race policing, then these factors might argue for increased minority hiring with greater cross-race policing. That is, under these assumptions, the optimal allocation of minority officers would be to predominantly white neighborhoods, and vice versa. Roger Bowles & Nuno Garoupa, Casual Police Corruption and the Economics of Crime, 17 Int’l Rev. L. & Econ. 75 (1997), provides a recent theoretical examination of police corruption. In addition, there is a burgeoning literature on corruption more generally. Important contributions to this literature include Andrei Shleifer & Robert W. Vishny, Corruption, 108 Q. J. Econ. 599 (1993); Paolo Mauro, Corruption and Growth, 110 Q. J. Econ. 681 (1995); and Mancur Olson, Jr., Why Poor Economic Policies Must Promote Corruption: Lessons from the East for All Countries, 111 Rivista di Politica Economica 9 (1996). race and policing 369 corruption. In fact, widespread corruption was one of the critical factors underlying the initial movement away from politically based police appointments and toward the professionalization of policing. In spite of the importance of the issue of race in policing, we are aware of very little relevant academic research that tries to directly assess the influence of race on arrests and crime. Most of the analysis to date has taken the form of ethnographic research and case studies, often with a focus on the question of whether the community would be more contented if the police better reflected the demographics of the areas being policed. The President’s Commission on Law Enforcement argued that minority officers were more sensitive to needs of minority citizens and therefore were better able to serve as role models for improved police-community interactions. A host of studies have sought to test this view, with mixed results. Nicholas Alex concluded that African-American officers were more likely to challenge existing police behavioral stereotypes than white officers. Eugene Groves and Peter Rossi, on the basis of interviews of 391 white and 124 black officers who worked in predominantly black districts in 13 major cities, found that virtually all officers believed that black communities are either hostile or indifferent to law enforcement, although black officers tended to view black neighborhoods as less hostile than did white officers. The authors also concluded that black officers formed assessments of black neighborhoods that were more closely related to actual differences in community characteristics than did white officers. Scott Decker and Russell Smith analyzed a 1968 survey of citizen attitudes about public-sector services including police in 14 large cities and found that it gave modest support to the view that more black police meant higher satisfaction by black citizens. But Samuel Walker and Lawrence Sherman found no empirical support for the argument that increasing the number of minority officers improved police-community relations. Sherman also suggested that early occupational socialization experiences and specific career events were more predictive of 7 James Q. Wilson, Varieties of Police Behavior: The Management of Law and Order in Eight Communities (1968); Knapp Comm’n, The Knapp Commission Report on Police Corruption (1972); James Morton, Bent Coppers: A Survey of Police Corruption (1993). 8 Eric H. Monkkonen, History of Urban Police, in Tonry & Morris eds., Modern Policing, supra note 4. 9 President’s Comm’n on Law Enforcement and Admin. Justice, Task Force Report: The Police (1968). 10 Nicholas Alex, Black in Blue: A Study of the Negro Policeman (1969). 11 Eugene W. Groves & Peter H. Rossi, Police Perceptions of a Hostile Ghetto, 13 Am. Behav. Sci. 727 (1970). 12 Scott H. Decker & Russell L. Smith, Police Minority Recruitment: A Note on Its Effectiveness in Improving Black Evaluations of the Police, 8 J. Crim. Just. 387 (1980). 13 Samuel Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform: The Emergence of Professionalism (1977); Lawrence W. Sherman, Causes of Police Behavior: The Current State of Quantitative Research, 17 J. Res. Crime & Delinq. 69 (1980). 370 the journal of law and economics police officer’s attitudes toward communities than was race. Using data from a self-administered survey of 2,800 Los Angeles patrol officers in 1992, James Lasley reached virtually the same conclusion: race and gender “did not predict the extent to which a police officer will favor or oppose closer contact with citizens,” and “police officer attitudes toward the community are more likely a product of occupational socialization than demographic background.” Although these studies are immensely useful in exploring police and community perceptions, virtually no work has provided systematic quantitative evidence of the impacts of the race of police officers on tangible social outcomes