By The Leadership Conference Education Fund, et al.

In 2021, The Leadership Conference Education Fund (The Education Fund), in partnership with the City of Dallas Office of Community Police Oversight (OCPO), released a report on misdemeanor arrests by the Dallas Police Department (DPD) titled “Public Safety in Dallas: An Analysis of Racial Disparities in Low-Level Arrests.”1 That report highlighted the disproportionate enforcement of misdemeanor offenses on Black and Brown residents. Since the publication of that report, there have been encouraging steps taken by DPD to decriminalize misdemeanor marijuana possession based on the report’s recommendation on low-level misdemeanor enforcement.2 As of April 2021, DPD introduced a change to their internal General Orders, 313.05, which states that given the right conditions (which include no intent to distribute, no companion charges besides a warrant hold, or there is a companion felony drug charge)3 DPD should no longer arrest or cite an individual with possession of marijuana indicative of personal use, which is considered 2 ounces or less. As a follow-up to the initial report, The Education Fund has once again partnered with a group of engaged advocates in Dallas to develop this report. This new publication reviews arrest data from 2018 through 2022 and provides an analysis of the impact of DPD’s instituted general order, which discontinues most arrests of marijuana possession of 2 ounces or less. Like the first report, this one also provides an analysis of other misdemeanor arrests to identify opportunities to minimize police interaction for misdemeanor nonviolent offenses, continue decriminalization of misdemeanor offenses, and eliminate disproportionate police arrests of residents of color by the Dallas Police Department. These insights are useful in order to adjust laws, practices, and procedures to align with a more fair and equitable public safety system in Dallas.

Dallas: Office of Community Police Oversight, 2023. 40p.

By Magnus Lofstrom, Brandon Martin and Steven Raphael

We analyze the disparate effects of a recent California sentencing reform on the arrest, booking, and incarceration rates experienced by California residents from different racial and ethnic groups. In November 2014 California voters passed state proposition 47 that redefined a series of felony and “wobbler” offenses (offenses that can be charged as either a felony or misdemeanor) as straight misdemeanors, causing an immediate 15 percent decline in total drug arrests, an approximate 20 percent decline in total property crime arrests, and shifts in the composition of arrests away from felonies towards misdemeanors. Using microdata on the universe of arrests in the state in conjunction with demographic data from the American Community Survey, we document a substantial narrowing in inter-racial differences in overall arrest rates and arrest rates by offense type, with very large declines in the inter-racial arrest rate gaps for felony drug offenses. Conditional on being arrested, we see declines in bookings rates for all groups, though we find a larger decrease for white arrestees. This relatively larger decline for white arrests is largely explained by difference in the distribution of arrests across recorded offenses. Despite the widening of racial gaps in the conditional booking rate, we observe substantial declines in overall booked arrests that are larger for African Americans and Hispanics relative to whites. For some offenses (felony drug offenses), inter-racial disparities in jail booking rates narrow by nearly half. Finally, we use data from the American Community Survey to analyze…..

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  change in the proportion incarcerated on any given day and how these changes vary by race and ethnicity. For these results, we present trends for the time period spanning the larger set of policy reforms that have been implemented in the state since 2011. We observe sizable declines in the overall incarceration rate for African Americans, with the largest declines observed for African American males. The one-quarter decline in total correctional populations in the state coincided with sizable narrowing in inter-racial difference in incarceration rates.  

Bonn: Institute of Labor Economics (IZA),  2019. 55p.

By Elizabeth M. Luh

This dissertation contains two essays on disparate treatment in policing. The first chapter links this disparate treatment to bias in the context of highway trooper's stop and search decision. Highway police officers, or troopers, may misreport the race of people that they engage with in order to evade detection of racial bias. I propose a new test of racial bias in the presence of misreporting that is well-suited to explore the rich heterogeneity in bias behavior. Using a unique event in Texas where troopers were caught deliberately misreporting minority motorists as white, I find bias against all minority motorists, but especially against Hispanic motorists. I estimate bias for each trooper and find that over 30\% of troopers were engaging in this behavior. Using my trooper level measure of bias, I identify causal relationships between bias and labor outcomes using a panel data set of trooper employment outcomes. I show misreporting was used effectively to evade detection of bias, with bias having no effect on labor market outcomes when the misreporting was possible. I find that after a rule change to trooper stop recording policy in response to the misreporting led to negative labor outcomes for biased troopers, specifically, lower rates of promotion and had lower salary growth. I further test how individual trooper bias changes in response to changes in peer, demographic compositions. In particular, black or Hispanic troopers are sensitive to changes in peer composition, while white troopers are unaffected. The second chapter tests whether police officers disparately enforce parking…..

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  tickets across black and non-black neighborhoods. Using a plausibly exogenous increase in the fine for failing to purchase annual vehicle registration in 2012, colloquially known as the sticker tax, I test if Chicago police disparately enforced parking compliance across black and non-black neighborhoods from 2007 to 2017. I find that police behavior is responsive to the penalty structure of the fine and are 20 to 50 percent more likely to apply the sticker fine to black neighborhoods after the increase. This disparate enforcement is robust to employment controls and is not driven by changing compliance rates across neighborhoods. In contrast, I find that parking enforcement agents do not disparately enforce the tickets across black and non-black neighborhoods. I attribute this difference in behavior between parking enforcement agents and police officers to the lack of ticket quotas for police officers. Since police officers are not evaluated by their parking citation productivity, they do not behave as revenue-maximizing agents.

Houston, TX: University of Houston,  Department of Economics, 2020. 103p.

By Aaron Chalfin and Maxim N. Massenkoff

In 2015, for the first time in nearly forty years, the rate of motor vehicle fatalities for Black Americans exceeded that of white Americans. By 2020, the gap in death rates stood at 34%, accounting for approximately 4,000 excess deaths between 2014 and 2020. This disproportionate increase occurred in nearly all states, in rural as well as urban areas, and was shared by drivers of all ages and genders. We consider a variety of potential explanations for the emerging race gap including race-specific changes in time spent driving, the circumstances of driving, the quality of medical care for crash victims, decreases in other types of mortality, changes in policing, and risky driving behaviors such as speeding, driving without a seat belt and driving while intoxicated. We can rule out many of these factors as important contributors to the race gap, but find evidence for two of them. The first is opportunity: Relative to white Americans, Black Americans are spending more time in vehicles than they have in the past. Changes in time spent driving, while modest, likely explain an important share of the emergent race gap. The second is a relative increase in drug use, manifested by a quadrupling of the rate of overdose deaths among Black Americans after 2014. Increased drug use appears to have resulted in a concomitant increase in fatal crashes involving drivers under the influence of drugs. Finally, we consider whether the emerging race gap is explained by the so-called "Ferguson effect," the idea that police officers have pulled back from enforcement activity in recent years. On the one hand, traffic stops

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  made by police officers do appear to have declined after 2014. However, the decline in traffic stops does not appear to be race-specific and there is little evidence of a broad increase in risky driving behaviors like speeding and driving without a seat belt.

Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2022. 58p.

By Emily Owens and Jaclyn Rosenquist

In order to better understand the role that race or ethnicity may play in who is stopped by their officers, the California Highway Patrol (CHP) provided the California Policy Lab (CPL) with a data set of 2,141,817 enforcement stops made by the CHP from January to December of 2019. The data was collected pursuant to California’s Racial and Identity Profiling Act of 2015 (RIPA). In order to extend the statistical analysis presented in the 2021 Annual RIPA Board Report, we evaluated enforcement stops in combination with non-enforcement stops using two generally accepted approaches to measure racially disparate policing: benchmarking and a hit rate analysis.

Los Angeles: California Policy Lab, 2021. 59p.