By The United States Commission on Civil Rights,  Minnesota Advisory Committee 

The nature and scope of the problem. There will be no end to disparate policing, and the accompanying resentment in the community, until sufficient data can be collected to better inform both policymakers and the People who elect them. Disparate policing is abusive on many levels, affecting the individuals involved, reopening unhealed wounds left by historical injustices, and reminding entire communities that their lives don’t matter. The Committee found that the lack of political will at all levels of government to enforce the limits on police conduct is the major impediment to meaningful change that would address the Constitutional violations identified in this report.  

Minneapolis:: Minnesota Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights ,2022. 62p.

By  Melissa Scaia, and Rhonda Martinson,

An assessment of the Minneapolis Police Department’s response to domestic violence identified practices that put survivor safety at risk and did not hold violent offenders accountable. In 2017, a study by the Police Conduct Oversight Commission on the police response to domestic violence (DV) cases in Minneapolis documented that police officers wrote reports or made arrests in only 20% of DV calls from 2014-2016. During that time, the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) received over 43,000 DV-related calls. Concern about the findings from the Office of Police Conduct’s review 2017 report led the Office of Police Conduct Review (OPCR) to request that Global Rights for Women (GRW), in coordination with local advocacy agencies, conduct an assessment of MPD’s response to DV cases. With a length of experience in international work on violence against women as a human rights issue, the GRW team is keenly aware that domestic violence is the most common form of gender-based violence around the world. No country or community is free from this crisis, including Minneapolis. …

Minneapolis: Global Rights for Women , Minneapolis Domestic Violence Working Group,  2023. 140p.

By Max Kapustin, Terrence Neumann and Jens Ludwig

How can we get more ‘output,’ and of the right sort, from policing? The question has only taken on greater importance with recent, widely publicized instances of police misconduct; declines in public trust in police; and a rise in gun violence, all disproportionately concentrated in economically disadvantaged communities of color. Research typically focuses on two levers: (1) police resources, and (2) policing strategies or policies, historically focused on crime control but increasingly also on accountability, transparency, and fairness. Here we examine a third lever: management quality. We present three types of evidence. First, we show there is substantial variability in violent crime and police use of force both across cities and within a city across police districts, and that this variation is related to the timing of police leader tenures. Second, we show that an effort to change police management in selected districts in Chicago generates sizable changes in policing outcomes. Third, as part of that management intervention the department adopted a predictive policing tool that randomizes which high-crime areas it shows to officers. We use that randomization to generate district-specific measures of implementation fidelity and show that, even within the context of a management intervention designed to improve implementation of the department’s strategies, there is variability in implementation.

Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2022. 104p.

By Stephen Wu

Objective.This study analyzes the relationship between the race of a city’s police chief and the incidence of fatal shootings by police officers.Methods.The Washington Post’s “Fatal ForceDatabase” is used to calculate per-capita rates of fatal shootings by police officers occurring between January 1, 2015 and June 1, 2020 for the 100 largest cities in the United States. I compare fatal shooting rates for cities with police chiefs of different races, both unadjusted and adjusted for differences in city characteristics.Results.Rates of fatal shootings by officers are almost 50 percenthigher in cities with police forces led by white police chiefs than in cities with black police chiefs.Of the 30 cities with the highest rates of fatal shootings, 23 have police departments led by whites and only four have departments led by blacks, while of the 30 cities with the lowest rates, 16 have police departments led by blacks and only 11 are led by whites. Differences in fatal shooting rates persist after controlling for city characteristics.Conclusion.Leaders in the highest position of au-thority may have a powerful effect on the culture of a police department and its resulting behavior.Each year, there are approximately 1,000 fatal shootings by police officers across theUnited States, a statistic that has been fairly steady over the course of the last several years.With recent efforts to track and compile more comprehensive data, researchers have been increasingly studying the factors that contribute to these deaths. Prior research has looked at many factors surrounding fatal officer-involved shootings, including racial and demo-graphic information of both officers and victims, situational and location characteristics,and structural and organizational factors. This study contributes to the literature by look-ing at one as of yet unstudied factor: the race of a city’s police chief.Much of the prior work on police shootings has focused on the demographics of vic-tims. Edwards, Lee, and Esposito (2019) show that age and race are significant factors in determining the risk of being killed by police. Specifically, individuals between the ages of20 and 35 have the highest risk of all different age groups. They also find that blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans are significantly more likely to be killed by police than whites. An important distinction between sheriffs and police chiefs (or commanders, commissioners, captains,and superintendents) is that sheriffs are directly elected, while other top leaders are appointed by the mayor or city council. Sheriff’s departments also may have additional duties for their jurisdictions including supervision of correctional facilities and providing court security. There are only two cities in the data with elected sheriffs,and the analysis is not affected by eliminating these two departments.

SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, Volume 102, Number 1, January 2021

By Keren Weitzberg

Despite widespread myths that the British police are unarmed and govern through consent, paramilitary-style policing has a long and ugly history in the UK and across the British Empire. This report looks at the increasingly blurry line between the police and military and the role of the UK in militarised policing globally. Challenging the idea that war and policing are fundamentally different powers, it examines the evolution of Britain’s policing industrial complex. It shows how a war mentality has infiltrated policing at various levels – from counter-terrorism to  anti-protest policing to border control to the policing of gangs.  

London: Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) , 2022. 56p.

By Andrew Bacher-Hicks and Elijah de la Campa

In an effort to thwart crimes in progress and deter future incidents, police in the US conduct
millions of civilian street stops each year. Though this practice is commonplace in most large
urban police departments, little is known about the net impact of this strategy on crime. This
paper exploits the naturally-occurring movement of New York Police Department commanders
during the height of New York City’s Stop and Frisk program to estimate commanders’ effects on
civilian stops and their subsequent impact on crime. We generate predictions of commanders’ effects on stops in a precinct, conditional on neighborhood demographics, crime rates, and policing strategies. Commanders’ effects—estimated using data only from tenures in prior precincts—are highly predictive of observed stops in new precincts, which highlights the transferability of commanders’ tactical preference for stops. We find that a high-stop strategy decreases misdemeanor crime within a precinct, but has no effect on more serious felony offenses. Moreover, we find suggestive evidence that the decrease in misdemeanor offenses is partially offset by crime displacement to adjacent neighborhoods. We conclude by demonstrating that commander stop effects are uncorrelated with their effects on other proactive policing strategies, and that commanders trade off their ability to build police legitimacy in the community with their preference for stops. Contrary to broken windows theory, our findings suggest that stop and frisk tactics do not deter more

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  serious criminal behavior, and thus, police should consider alternatives to strategies that emphasize the proactive enforcement of low-level offenses.

Unpublished paper 2020. 71p.

By Chris Giacomantonio

This book critically examines coordination work between police officers and agencies. Police work requires constant interaction between police forces and units within those forces, yet the process by which police work with one another is not well understood by sociologists or practitioners. At the same time, the increasing inter-dependence between police forces raises a wide set of questions about how police should act and how they can be held accountable when locally-based police officers work in or with multiple jurisdictions. This rearrangement of resources creates important issues of governance, which this book addresses through an inductive account of policing in practice.Policing Integration builds on extensive fieldwork in a multi-jurisdictional environment in Canada alongs.

Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 218p.