Essays on the Economic and Social Consequences of Policing

Abstract

This dissertation contains three essays on the economic and social consequences of policing. Chapters 1 and 2 examine the effectiveness and equity of the police's use of pedestrian stops as a crime deterrence tool. Over 3.5 million pedestrians are stopped by police in the United States every year. Using administrative data from New York City, Chapter 1 estimates the impact of pedestrian stops on neighborhood crime and high school dropout rates of neighborhood residents. Exploiting a 2012 reform that reduced stops by 95\%, we compare neighborhoods that have similar crime rates but substantially different stop rates prior to the reform. Treated neighborhoods that experienced twice the reduction in stop rates do not display differential increases in felonies and violent misdemeanors, shootings, or killings over the five years following the reform. Comparing students across schools that are differentially exposed to changes in stop rates, we estimate that the reform reduced the probability of high school dropout by $0.36-1.66$ percentage points per academic year.

Chapter 2 explores whether racial disparities in stop rates reflect true racial differences in criminal behavior or are the result of unfair targeting by patrol officers. By instrumenting for neighborhood stop rates with the reform, we trace out the marginal return curve of stops by race and find that Black and Hispanic residents were stopped at substantially higher rates than would be optimal for crime detection.

Chapter 3 explores spillovers of fatal police shootings on civic engagement. Roughly a thousand people are killed by American law enforcement officers each year, accounting for more than 5\% of all homicides. We estimate the causal impact of these events on voter registration and voting behavior. Exploiting hyper-local variation in how close residents live to a killing, we find that exposure to police violence leads to significant increases in registrations and votes. These effects are driven entirely by Black and Hispanic citizens and are largest for killings of unarmed individuals. We find corresponding increases in support for criminal justice reforms, suggesting that police violence may cause voters to politically mobilize against perceived injustice.