The Effects of Police Violence on Inner-city Students

By Desmond Ang

Nearly a thousand officer-involved killings occur each year in the United States. This paper documents the large, racially-disparate impacts of these events on the educational and psychological well-being of Los Angeles public high school students. Exploiting hyperlocal variation in how close students live to a killing, I find that exposure to police violence leads to persistent decreases in GPA, increased incidence of emotional disturbance and lower rates of high school completion and college enrollment. These effects are driven entirely by black and Hispanic students in response to police killings of other minorities and are largest for incidents involving unarmed individuals.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government, 2020. 81p.