By Oeindrila Dube, Sandy Jo MacArthur and Anuj Shah

Prevailing views suggest that adverse policing outcomes are driven by problematic police officers and deficient policies. This study highlights an overlooked factor – cognitive demands inherent in police work. A training designed to improve officer decision-making under stress and time pressure, two key cognitive demands, lead to 23% fewer uses of force and discretionary arrests, and 11% fewer arrests of Black civilians. The results demonstrate the power of leveraging behavioral science insights to make policing more effective and equitable.

Policing practices have increasingly come under public scrutiny, spurring widespread calls for police reform. To date, prevailing views have attributed adverse policing outcomes (such as excessive force and unnecessary arrests) to factors such as prejudiced officers and deficient departmental policies. In this paper, the authors introduce a new focus that explores the role of cognitive demands in contributing to poor policing outcomes. Police work often involves making complex decisions in situations that produce stress, trigger many emotions, and require officers to act quickly. These cognitive demands make it more likely that officers will act without sufficient deliberation and that their actions will be driven by cognitive biases. In this paper, the authors explore this overlooked perspective, which suggests an additional avenue for improving policing outcomes.

WORKING PAPER · NO. 2023-118 . Chicago: University of Chicago, 2023. 99p.