Does a Helping Hand Put Others At Risk?: Affirmative Action, Police Departments, and Crime

Will increasing the number of minority and women police officers make law enforcement more effective by drawing on abilities that have gone untapped and creating better contact with communities and victims? Or will standards have to be lowered too far before large numbers of minorities and women can be hired? Using cross-sectional time-series data for U.S. cities for 1987, 1990, and 1993, I find that more black and minority police officers increase crime rates. This arises because lower hiring standards involved in recruiting more minority officers reduces the quality of both new minority and new nonminority officers. The most adverse effects of these hiring policies have occurred in the most heavily black populated areas. The annual victim costs for all categories of crimes was at least $5.4 billion. Other issues addressed are: the impact that this changing composition of police departments has on their organization as well as the murder of and assaults against police officers. ∗ University of Chicago Law School. I would like to thank Stephen Bronars, Tom Collingwood, Richard Epstein, Gertrud Fremling, Ed Glaeser, Linda Gottfredson, Robert Hansen, Dan Kahan, Larry Kenny, Dan Klerman, Bill Landes, Stan Liebowitz, Sam Peltzman, Paul Rubin, and the participants in seminars at UCLA, the University of Chicago, Heritage Foundation, the NBER Law and Economics Summer Institute, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, SUNY Binghamton, University of Washington, the Western Economic Association Meetings, the Southern Economic Association meetings, and my students at the University of Chicago for their helpful comments. Stephen Bronars also deserves more than normal thanks for the tremendous amount of work that he has put in helping me put this data set together. John Whitley also provided valuable research assistance. Chicago Working Paper in Law and Economics 2 I. Does a Helping Hand Put Others At Risk?: Affirmative Action, Police Departments, and Crime Using preferential standards to aid minority groups is frequently justified as rectifying past wrongs. Yet, since Richmond v. Croson Co. 1989,1 the U.S. Supreme Court has held that these preferences must pass the difficult “strict scrutiny test” and will be invalidated unless they promote a “compelling” governmental interest. Correcting “societal discrimination” was not viewed as a compelling interest. Remedial efforts to rectify past discrimination will only be approved if narrowly tailored to correct specific instances of discrimination. The question of what goals constitute a sufficiently “compelling” interest has never been clearly specified by the Supreme Court, though in a very closely decided case it reversed its own past decision that FCC allocation of licenses by race is acceptable to promote diversity in entertainment and news programming and applied these high standards of strict-scrutiny and “compelling” interest to federal building projects.2 The standards set by the Supreme Court in Richmond and Adarand were motivated by the desire that “The [strict scrutiny] test also ensures that the means chosen ‘fit’ this compelling goal so closely that there is little or no possibility that the motive for the classification was illegitimate racial prejudice or stereotype.”3 One can hypothesize what compelling goals would meet these standards where there is “little or no possibility” that an ulterior race-based 1 Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469, 109 S.Ct. 706, 102 L.Ed.2d 854 (1989). See also Epstein (1992, pp. 429-433). Coate and Loury (1993) provide an important discussion on the costs and benefits of affirmative action policies. They rigorously list out conditions under which these policies will breakdown negative stereotypes and those cases where they will make them even worse. 2 ADARAND CONSTRUCTORS, INC., PETITIONER v. FEDERICO PENA, SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION, ET AL. 515 U.S. 200; 115 S. Ct. 2097; 1995 U.S. LEXIS 4037; 132 L.Ed. 2d 158; 63 U.S.L.W. 4523; 67 Fair Empl. Prac. Cas. (BNA). This overturned the decision in Metro Broadcasting, Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission 497 U.S. 547, 110 S.Ct. 2997, 111 L.Ed.2d 445 (1990). 3 ADARAND CONSTRUCTORS, INC., PETITIONER v. FEDERICO PENA, SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION, ET AL. 515 U.S. 200; 115 S. Ct. 2097. 3 Does a Helping Hand Put Others at Risk? motive might be the true motivation behind an affirmative action rule, but the most obvious case would be when the racial preferences actually help to further the central purpose of the governmental agency.4 In the case of police, that means that minority police officers are being employed not because diversity is intrinsically valued, but because it is believed to help lower the crime rate. The potential law enforcement advantages from multiracial or female officers seem obvious. Minority police officers may be more effective in minority areas simply because residents could be more forthcoming about information that will lead to arrests and convictions or because of the officers’ ability to serve as undercover agents. Trust is also important for other reasons: as reports of riots erupting after white police officers have shot a black man may attest.5 Officers from a community may also be better at understanding the behavior of criminals in those areas or even 4 A distinction must be drawn between two different types of affirmative action programs: quotas and preferential treatment. While preferential treatment already must meet a very high treshold to be approved, the requirements are if anything even more difficult for quotas. “It is doubtful that even a federal law establishing an affirmative action racial classification would be upheld if the law used a racial quota system” (Nowak and Rotunda, 1995, p. 695). 5 For example, in 1996 riots errupted in St. Petersburg Florida after a white police officer shot and killed an 18-year-old black man driving a stolen car and in Leland, Mississippi after a white police officer fatally shot a black businessman named Aaron White (“Kissimmee chief wants riot gear for police: The city should learn from St. Petersburg’s riots, John Sutphin said,” The Orlando Sentinel, Saturday, April 26, 1997, p. 1 and Bartholomew Sullivan, “Shooting death prior to Leland riot ruled accidental,” The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), FRIDAY, April 18, 1997, p. A15). Further back “In 1980, one of the worst recent U.S. race riots erupted in Liberty City and spread through Miami after an all-white jury acquitted white police officers accused of killing a black man” (Angus MacSwan, “Drug gangs rule, children suffer in Miami's Liberty City,” Reuters World Service, Friday, February 14, 1997). Of course, probably the worst recent riots occurred in 1992 after white police officers were found not guilty in the Rodney King beating. On the other hand, having a racially diverse police department does not guarantee that these riots will be prevented. The Los Angeles Police Department’s share of blacks very closely matched blacks share of the city’s population in 1991 when the city had its most recent riots. Chicago Working Paper in Law and Economics 4 something as basic as understanding the language of immigrants.6 In any event, police efforts to reduce crime are surely dependent upon the help that they receive from the community (Wilson, 1983). Rape victims or women abused by their spouses plausibly find it easier to discuss the traumatic events with women officers. Without female officers, many attacks against women may go undetected—thus lowering the cost of attacking women and resulting in even more attacks. Policing is a rare case where the government output is likely to be advanced by race or sex based preferences. Indeed, reducing reliance on cognitive tests for police entrance examinations has been justified with the motivation that “police departments cannot function effectively in minority neighborhoods when virtually all police officers are white males” (Dunnette et. al., 1996). Another case might be education, where a frequently made claim is that a diverse student body better prepares students for a “diverse world.”7 These goals have also been used to justify weighting applicants by race or sex rather than their test scores. By contrast, how people use roads or machines seems likely to be unrelated to the race of those who built them. Even the case of fire departments obtaining racial diversity seems tangential to the ultimate goal of extinguishing a fire. While the foregoing benefits are clear, there are countervailing factors that must be taken into account. Most important is whether explicit race or sex preferences result in less capable individuals being hired. For women, this might result because of less stringent physical requirements.8 Slower running speed might make it more difficult 6 Community leaders frequently claim that “We want police who know the community. We want them to spend time and become part of the community.” (Quote from Dennis L. Chinn, founder of the Asian Plaza Youth Foundation, as reported by Phat X. Chiem (1995, p. B1). The same article reports on the importance of having bilingual officers. 7 For example, see Katyal (1995) and Keohane (1995). 8 Testing of the physical strengths of men and women public safety employees consistently finds large differences. These studies indicate that “women’s strength rang[es] from 44 to 68% of men’s in the upper body and 55 to 82% in the lower body” (Landy, 1992, p. 4-56). The norming adopted by most police departments for physical fitness tests creates equal probabilities for passing by 5 Does a Helping Hand Put Others at Risk? for women to catch criminals.9 Weaker physical strength might cause police departments to substitute away from single officer patrol units (either foot or car) and into units with two officers. If criminals believe that they have a greater chance of resisting arrest when officers are weaker, more assaults may be committed by criminals against