Solving Crime
Residency Blues: The Unintended Consequences of Police Residency Requirements
Julia Payson & Srinivas Parinandi
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do residency requirements change bureaucratic performance? We study the case of municipal police departments. While residency rules were popular in the 1970s, many cities and states abolished these policies in the 1990s and early 2000s. Drawing from an original survey and local archival sources, we hand collect data on the police residency laws of nearly 800 of the largest municipalities in the U.S. over the past three decades. We then test competing theoretical predictions about how these rules impact the racial composition of city police forces and the probability of fatal police-civilian encounters. Using a two-way fixed effects design, we find that residency requirements modestly improve police diversity, but fatal encounters are actually more likely when residency requirements are in place. This study provides the most credible evidence to date that residency rules do little to improve police performance and may not offer a particularly fruitful avenue for reform.
AMBER Alert: An Ironic Antidote to "Missing White Girl Syndrome"?
Timothy Griffin, Colleen Kadleck & Catie Houk
Criminal Justice Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
"Missing White Girl Syndrome" (MWGS) has been coined in critique of news media coverage favoritism of victims fitting that description. The AMBER Alert child recovery system was in fact inspired by the abduction and murder of a missing white girl, and some have argued its issuance decisions reflect MWGS. We examine this question using secondary data, including the annual AMBER Alert reports provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children (NISMART), and the National Crime Information Center (NCIS). We compared the demographics of victims from official AMBER Alert data (NCMEC) with cross-comparable demographics from the two official missing persons data sources to test for potential main-effect bias favoring whites or girls. A fourth dataset derived from media accounts of AMBER Alerts is used to test for any potential interaction effect of issuance preference for white girls. Overwhelmingly the findings suggest AMBER Alert issuance decisions do not reflect MWGS. Thus, we argue the system has the potential to function as an ironic "antidote" to MWGS by virtue of the identities of the children for whom it is routinely deployed. However, we qualify by acknowledging limitations with available data, and that the "black box" of AMBER Alert issuance decisions remains unstudied, leaving open the question of race and/or gender bias occurring at that point. Policy discourse and future research implications are discussed.
Ban-the-box laws: Fair and effective?
Robert Kaestner & Xufei Wang
International Review of Law and Economics, June 2024
Abstract:
Ban-the-box (BTB) laws are a widely used public policy rooted in employment law related to unnecessarily exclusionary hiring practices. BTB laws are intended to improve the employment opportunities of those with criminal backgrounds by giving them a fair chance during the hiring process. Prior research on the effectiveness of these laws in meeting their objective is limited and inconclusive. In this article, we extend the prior literature in two ways: we expand the years of analysis to a period of rapid expansion of BTB laws and we examine different types of BTB laws depending on the employers affected (e.g., public sector). Results indicate that BTB laws, any type of BTB law or BTB laws covering different types of employers, have no systematic or statistically significant association with employment of low-educated men, both young and old and across racial and ethnic groups. We speculate that the lack of effectiveness of BTB laws stems from the difficulty in enforcing such laws and already high rates of employer willingness to hire those with criminal histories.
Lame duck law enforcement
Shannon Losak & Michael Makowsky
Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
Election losses for incumbent sheriffs result in lame ducks who oversee local law enforcement for as long as 10 months before the next sheriff takes office. Monthly arrest rates decline 11% subsequent to a primary election loss and 20.3% after losing a general election; violent crime arrests drop 24.8% in the two months following a general election loss. Our results demonstrate the costs of electoral turnover where day-to-day duties are sensitive to effort and conscientiousness.
Private Security and Public Police
Ben Grunwald, John Rappaport & Michael Berg
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Private security officers outnumber police by a wide margin, and the gap may be growing. As cities have claimed to defund the police, many have quietly expanded their use of private security, reallocating spending from the public to the private sector. It is difficult to know what to make of these trends, largely because we know so little about what private security looks like on the ground. On one prevalent view of the facts, a shift from public to private security would mean little more than a change of uniform, as the two labor markets are deeply intertwined. Indeed, academics, the media, popular culture, and the police themselves all tell us that private security is some amalgam of a police retirement community and a dumping ground for disgraced former cops. But if, instead, private officers differ systematically from the public police -- and crossover between the sectors is limited -- then substitution from policing to private security could drastically change who is providing security services. We bring novel data to bear on these questions, presenting the largest empirical study of private security to date. We introduce an administrative dataset covering nearly 300,000 licensed private security officers in the State of Florida. By linking this dataset to similarly comprehensive information about public law enforcement, we have, for the first time, a nearly complete picture of the entire security labor market in one state. We report two principal findings. First, the public and private security markets are predominantly characterized by occupational segregation, not integration. The individuals who compose the private security sector differ markedly from the public police; they are, for example, significantly less likely to be white men. We also find that few private officers, roughly 2%, have previously worked in public policing, and even fewer will go on to policing in the future. Second, while former police make up a small share of all private security, roughly a quarter of cops who do cross over have been fired from a policing job. In fact, fired police officers are nearly as likely to land in private security as to find another policing job, and a full quarter end up in one or the other. We explore the implications of these findings, including intersections with police abolition and the future of policing, at the paper's close.
Quantifying the risk of mass shootings at specific locations
Xue Lei & Cameron MacKenzie
Risk Analysis, April 2024, Pages 868-882
Abstract:
Mass shootings are horrific events that annually take scores of innocent lives in the United States. Federal, state, and local governments as well as educational, religious, and private-sector organizations propose and enact polices and strategies to protect people from and during active shooter situations. A probabilistic risk assessment of a mass shooting for a specific organization, jurisdiction, or location can be the first step toward evaluating the effectiveness of risk mitigation strategies and determining which strategies might be most appropriate for a location. This article proposes a novel hierarchical method to assess the probability of a mass shooting at specific locations based on available historical data. First, the method generates a probability distribution over the annual number of mass shootings in the United States. Second, the article uses this national number of mass shootings to determine the risk for each state. Third, the state risk assessment is decomposed to calculate the probability of a mass shooting in a specific location such as a school. Multiple ways to assess the risk are presented, leading to slightly different probability assessments for a location. Results indicate that annual probability of a mass shooting in the largest high school in California is on the order of 10^-6 - 10^-5, and the annual probability of a mass shooting in the largest high school in Iowa is about half as likely as in the California school.
Evaluating the effectiveness of a 5-day training on science-based methods of interrogation with U.S. federal, state, and local law enforcement investigators
Melissa Russano et al.
Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, May 2024, Pages 105-120
Abstract:
As accusatorial approaches to interrogation in the United States have increasingly come under scrutiny, interest in science-based methods of interviewing and interrogation has risen. The purpose of the current study was to assess the effectiveness of a 5-day science-based interrogation course delivered by the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group to U.S. federal, local, and state law enforcement investigators. Core aspects of the training included the use of productive questions, developing interrogator-suspect rapport, and conducting a cognitive interview. Ninety investigators who participated in the training submitted pre- and posttraining recordings of real-world suspect interviews. As hypothesized, investigators increased their use of science-based approaches after training and decreased their use of unproductive questions. Training did not influence how frequently they employed customary accusatorial techniques. Using a path model analysis, we also explored the relationships between use of science-based techniques and accusatorial approaches on the key outcome variables of cooperation, information disclosure by the suspect, and confession. We found positive indirect effects of training on cooperation and information disclosure via the use of science-based approaches. Moreover, science-based approaches were positively associated with increased cooperation and information disclosure and, indirectly, confession rates. In contrast, accusatorial approaches were associated with increased use of suspect counter-interrogation strategies and decreased cooperation and information gain. Implications for future training programs are discussed.
"Something Works" in U.S. Jails: Misconduct and Recidivism Effects of the IGNITE Program
Marcella Alsan et al.
NBER Working Paper, March 2024
Abstract:
A longstanding and influential view in U.S. correctional policy is that "nothing works" when it comes to rehabilitating incarcerated individuals. We revisit this hypothesis by studying an innovative law-enforcement-led program launched in the county jail of Flint, Michigan: Inmate Growth Naturally and Intentionally Through Education (IGNITE). We develop an instrumental variable approach to estimate the effects of IGNITE exposure, which leverages quasi-random court delays that cause individuals to spend more time in jail both before and after the program's launch. Holding time in jail fixed, we find that one additional month of IGNITE exposure reduces within-jail misconduct by 49% and reduces three-month recidivism by 18%, with the recidivism effects growing over time. Surveys of staff and community members, along with administrative test score records and within-jail text messages, suggest that cultural change and improved literacy and numeracy scores are key contributing mechanisms.
Fuck: The Police
Ian Adams
Police Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study focuses on police profanity, with a particular interest developing reasonable policy to regulate the use of the word "fuck." Officers employ "fuck" as a linguistic tool to accomplish a range of goals, such as establishing authority, fostering solidarity, and diffusing tension. However, "fuck" can also be used derogatorily, and negatively impact public assessments of police actions. Policy in this area is either absent, overly broad, or inappropriate to its intended use. Following brief, unstructured interviews with line and executive officers, I propose a novel policy theory of profanity, deriving target and intent. I test the theory with a pre-registered experiment administered to a national sample of police and human resources executives (n = 1492), with each respondent evaluating multiple vignettes (n = 5280 observations). Results support the proposed theory and generate useful recommendations for practitioners interested in strengthening the ability of agencies to constrain professionally inappropriate use of profanity in the police workplace.
The Effect of the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests on Police Budgets: How "Defund the Police" Sparked Political Backlash
Mathis Ebbinghaus, Nathan Bailey & Jacob Rubel
Social Problems, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article investigates whether a core political demand of the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests was realized: "defund the police." Original hand-compiled data containing budget information on 264 major cities in the United States and comprehensive protest data enable us to assess the effect of protests on changes in city police budgets. We find no evidence that BLM protests led to police defunding. In cities with large Republican vote shares, protest is associated with significant increases in police budgets. We demonstrate that electoral incentives cannot explain this policy backlash. Instead, we provide tentative evidence that backlash in Republican cities might stem from policymakers' own conservatism and entrenched right-wing influences within city politics. The analysis offers novel evidence on the consequences of the largest protest movement in U.S. history and reveals the importance of backlash in explaining policy outcomes of social movements.
How Do Crypto Flows Finance Slavery? The Economics of Pig Butchering
John Griffin & Kevin Mei
University of Texas Working Paper, February 2024
Abstract:
Through blockchain addresses used by ''pig butchering'' victims, we trace crypto flows and uncover methods commonly used by scammers to obfuscate their activities, including multiple transactions, swapping between cryptocurrencies through DeFi smart contracts, and bridging across blockchains. The perpetrators interact freely with major crypto exchanges, sending over 104,000 small potential inducement payments to build trust with victims. Funds exit the crypto network in large quantities, mostly in Tether, through less transparent but large exchanges -- Binance, Huobi, and OKX. These criminal enterprises pay approximately 87 basis points in transaction fees and appear to have recently moved at least $75.3 billion into suspicious exchange deposit accounts, including $15.2 billion from exchanges commonly used by U.S. investors. Our findings highlight how the ''reputable'' crypto industry provides the common gateways and exit points for massive amounts of criminal capital flows. We hope these findings will help shed light on and ultimately stop these heinous crimes.