By Frank Edwards, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito

This article from the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America estimates the variation in the risk of being killed by police use of force in the U.S. across racial groups. The authors found that risk of being killed by police peaks between the ages of 20 and 35 for men and women of all racial groups. Black men and women, as well as American Indian/Alaska Native men and women, and Latino men have a much higher lifetime risk of being killed by police than their white counterparts. The highest risk, however, was among Black men who face a one in 1000 chance of being killed by police over their lifetime. Presently, police violence is the leading cause of death for young Black men in the United States.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 2019; 116(34): 16793-16798.

By Desmond Ang and Jonathan Tebes

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 civic engagement. Exploiting hyper-local variation in how close residents live to a killing, we find that exposure to police violence leads to signicant increases in registrations and votes. These effects are driven entirely by Blacks and Hispanics 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.

Working paper, Harvard University, 2022. .30p.

By Desmond Ang, Panka Bencsik, Jesse Bruhn§ and Ellora Derenoncourt

How do high-profile acts of police brutality affect public trust and cooperation with law enforcement? To investigate this question, we develop a new measure of civilian crime reporting that isolates changes in community engagement with police from underlying changes in crime: the ratio of police-related 911 calls to gunshots detected by ShotSpotter technology. Examining detailed data from eight major American cities, we show a sharp drop in both the call-to-shot ratio and 911 call volume immediately after the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020. Notably, reporting rates decreased significantly in both non-white and white neighborhoods across the country. These effects persist for several months, and we find little evidence that they were reversed by the conviction of Floyd’s murderer. Together, the results illustrate how acts of police violence may destroy a key input into effective law enforcement and public safety: civilian engagement and reporting.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government,2021. 27p.

By Alex S. Vitale

The massive uprising that followed the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020— by some estimates the largest protests in US history—thrust the argument to defund the police to the forefront of international politics. That case had been put persuasively a few years earlier in The End of Policing by Alex Vitale, now a leading figure in the urgent public discussion over policing and racial justice.

The central problem, Vitale demonstrates, is the dramatic expansion of the police role over the last forty years. Drawing on firsthand research from across the globe, he shows how the implementation of alternatives to policing—such as drug legalization, regulation, and harm reduction instead of the policing of drugs—has led to reductions in crime, spending, and injustice.

London; New York: Verso, 2017. 247p. (Updated in 2021)

By Scott M. Stringer

This report, by New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer, is rooted in the view that we have conceived of public safety too narrowly for too long at an enormous cost to communities of color entangled in the criminal legal system, their families and neighbors, and the city as a whole. To change this paradigm and address the near-term spike in crime, we must pursue new and better ways to co-produce public safety in partnership with communities, ensure accountability, address chronic needs, and make the city safer for all. Identifying the interventions that will enable us to confront these challenges requires that we take a public health-first approach. Indeed, safety must be viewed both as freedom from violence and the ability to access all of what is necessary to thrive in our city – from stable housing and quality education, to health care and living-wage jobs. In June of 2020, Comptroller Stringer detailed ways to immediately achieve recurring savings from the NYPD to invest in communities. Some but not all of these proposals were adopted by the City Council and Mayor de Blasio and reflected in the Fiscal Year 2021 Adopted Budget. With this report, developed in the months since the passage of the City budget, the Comptroller’s Office seeks to build on that baseline proposal from June, presenting a more comprehensive plan that moves additional responsibilities away from the NYPD and identifies specific areas for community reinvestment.

New York: Office of the New York City Comptroller, Bureau of Policy and Research , 2021. 50p.

By United States. Government Accountability Office

From the document: "Critical infrastructure provides essential functions--such as supplying water, generating energy, and producing food--that underpin American society. Disruption or destruction of the nation's critical infrastructure could have debilitating effects. CISA [Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] is the national coordinator for infrastructure protection. The William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 includes a provision for GAO [Government Accountability Office] to report on the effectiveness of sector risk management agencies in carrying out responsibilities set forth in the act. This report addresses (1) how the act changed agencies' responsibilities, and the actions agencies have reported taking to address them; and (2) the extent to which CISA has identified and undertaken efforts to help agencies implement their responsibilities set forth in the act. GAO analyzed the act and relevant policy directives, collected written responses from all 16 sectors using a standardized information collection tool, reviewed other DHS documents, and interviewed CISA officials."

Wasginton D.C. United States. Government Accountability Office. 2023.

By Klare, Michael T.,

From the document: "Increasingly in recent years, advanced military powers have begun to incorporate and rely on new kinds or new applications of advanced technologies in their arsenals, such as artificial intelligence, robotics, cyber, and hypersonics, among others. The weaponization of these technologies may potentially carry far-ranging, dangerous consequences that expand into the nuclear realm by running up the escalation ladder or by blurring the distinction between a conventional and nuclear attack. Arms control, therefore, emerges as a tool to slow the pace of weaponizing these technologies and to adopt meaningful restraints on their use. This report examines four particular new kinds or new applications of technologies-- autonomous weapons systems, hypersonic weapons, cyberattacks, and automated battlefield decision-making--and proposes a framework strategy aimed at advancing an array of measures that all contribute to the larger goal of preventing unintended escalation and enhancing strategic stability."

Washington, D.C.. Arms Control Association. 2023. 76p.

By Romanoff, Tom; Farshchi, Jamil; Neschke, Sabine; Lord, Ben; Draper, Danielle; Douglas, Ahmad

From the document: "The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) convened a working group of leaders to strengthen America's cybersecurity. The group's approach was to identify the nation's top cybersecurity risks to raise awareness so policymakers and businesses can take pragmatic action and invest in countermeasures. In assembling the working group, the co-chairs sought broad inclusivity from strategically important industries, government, and civil society. Every sector with a stake in cybersecurity was included--banking, communications, digital platforms, health, energy, and more. The working group drew from a wide range of important perspectives, including stakeholders representing privacy concerns and digital identities. [...] Identifying cybersecurity risks is the first step in managing them. This report--unlike other, more technical sources that identify cyber risks--frames them for the strategic audience of business and government decision-makers. We intentionally focused on identifying risks, not solutions, because various stakeholders may need to take different approaches. There are no one-size-fits-all fixes. Rather, these top risks must be considered individually by companies and collectively by the nation. Many will require a multifaceted response, across business and government, who will need to work various levers including policy, organizational culture, technology, and processes."

Bipartisan Policy Center 2023. 28p.

By David Garland

From the cover: The past 30 years have seen vast changes in our attitudes toward crime. More and more of us live in gated communities; prison popula­tions have skyrocketed; and issues such as racial profiling, community policing, and “zero- tolerance” policies dominate the headlines. How is it that our response to crime and our sense of criminal justice have come to be so dramatically reconfigured? David Garland charts the changes in crime and criminal jus­tice in America and Britain over the past twen­ty-five years, showing how they have been shaped by two underlying social forces: the dis­tinctive social organization of late modernity and the neoconservative politics that came to dominate the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1980s. Garland explains how the new policies of crime and punishment, welfare and security— and the changing class, race, and gender rela­tions that underpin them—are linked to the fundamental problems of governing contempo­rary societies, as states, corporations, and pri­vate citizens grapple with a volatile economy and a culture that combines expanded person­al freedom with relaxed social controls. It is the risky, unfixed character of modern life that underlies our accelerating concern with con­trol and crime control in particular. It is not just crime that has changed; society has changed as well, and this transformation has reshaped criminological thought, public policy, and the cultural meaning of crime and crimi­nals. David Garland’s The Culture of Control offers a brilliant guide to this process and its still-reverberating consequences..

Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 2001. 304p.

By Special Advisor Board of Police Commissioners on Civil Disorder in Los Angeles.

Motion: “In light of the events that have consumed this City since the verdict in the criminal prosecution of the four officers involved in the arrest of Rodney King, the Police Commission will undertake an investigation to examine the Police Department's preparations in the event of a civil disturbance and to understand what worked and what did not work In the days following April 29, 1992, with a view toward improving Departmental systems intended for that purpose.”

Board of Police Commissioners on Civil Disorder in Los Angeles. 1992. 227p.

By The Police Executive Research Forum

For decades, enforcing laws against illegal drug trafficking, drug dealing, and drug possession was the primary role of police departments and sheriffs’ offices across the United States. During the Just Say No era of the 1980s and 1990s, arrests for illegal drug possession more than doubled as part of law enforcement’s efforts to deter and diminish drug use. Through time, however, the role of police and sheriffs has evolved and expanded as “demand-reduction policies” have become increasingly prominent. Today, for example, many police agencies administer naloxone, a life-saving medication that quickly reverses the effects of an opioid overdose. Police in some cities and towns also work to connect addicted persons with drug treatment and other services. In many jurisdictions, police have reprioritized their enforcement of laws against possession or use of illegal opioids. Police have had to adjust to what remains a major—and evolving—public health crisis. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, an average of 128 people in the United States died every day in 2018 after overdosing on opioids. And there are reports that the COVID-19 pandemic may be resulting in higher numbers of overdose deaths.Through time, police responsibilities have grown to encompass at least three different roles on the frontlines of responding to the opioid crisis: 1. Emergency response. Preventing an opioid overdose from becoming a fatal opioid overdose. 2. Public safety. Helping individuals protect themselves from opioid-related harms. 3. Law enforcement. Investigating and disrupting opioid-related criminal activity.   

Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. 2021  88p.  

By The Police Executive Research Forum (PERF)

When a police officer or sheriff’s deputy is killed in the line of duty, either in an act of violence by a criminal offender or in a motor vehicle crash or other accident, there is a time-honored response. Agencies conduct a thorough investigation to understand every detail of what happened, how it happened, and why. There is typically extensive news media coverage of the tragedy, and police executives and other leaders speak about the incident and the fallen officer. Officers are laid to rest with honors, and their survivors can receive emotional support and financial assistance through a combination of local, state, and federal programs. At the national level, the FBI, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, and other groups collect detailed data about line-of-duty deaths—how, when, and where they occurred—and these organizations issue periodic reports examining trends in officer fatalities. This information is used to develop policies, new training programs, and procurement of equipment that can help keep officers safe and prevent tragedies in the future.  

Washington, DC: Police Executive Research Forum, 2019. 72p.

By James D. Sewell

Since the 1990s, law enforcement professionals have come to understand the impact of job stress on their personal and professional lives. Sadly, much of this awareness has come as a result of the negative manifestations that have become too observable: cardiovascular disease and high blood pressure; substance abuse and post-traumatic stress; abnormally high divorce rates and domestic violence; and, too frequently, suicide of law enforcement personnel. With police personnel suffering physical, psychological, medical, and behavioral issues as a result of such stress, the question becomes: How do we make sure our cops live . . . and live better, healthier, and more productive lives on and off the job? The answer—and the focus of this paper—begins with and requires effective and progressive law enforcement leadership. Contemporary law enforcement leadership cannot ignore the existence of the problems caused by stress, deny that job stress is an issue in any agency, or avoid taking action to ensure the health and well-being of their employees. It is clear that effective leaders cannot distance themselves from their personnel during times of stress or crisis, nor can they afford to send the unintentional message that they just do not care about those under their command. The personnel of an agency are its most valuable asset, and the actions of those at the highest level of an agency must recognize, respect, and reinforce that value.   

Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, 2021. 44p.

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 Michael German

Racial disparities have long pervaded every step of the criminal justice process, from police stops, searches, arrests, shootings an the country, federal, state, and local governments are doing far too little to proactively identify them, report their behavior to prosecutors who might unwittingly rely on their testimony in criminal cases, or protect the diverse communities they are sworn to serve.

Efforts to address systemic and implicit biases in law enforcement are unlikely to be effective in reducing the racial disparities in the criminal justice system as long as explicit racism in law enforcement continues to endure. There is ample evidence to demonstrate that it does.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice, 2020.

By The International Association of Chiefs of Police

This guide provides evidence-based policing practices (EBPP) for small, rural, and tribal agencies. The information comes from published research studies and working group conversations with command staff from various small, rural, and tribal agencies. In this guide, we use the terms small and rural or small, rural, and tribal broadly. The types of agencies that fall within these categories vary in terms of size, crime rates and types, and community characteristics. More than 12,000 local police agencies in the United States are “small” or serve small populations—75 percent employ fewer than 25 sworn officers, and 71 percent serve populations of fewer than 10,000 residents (Hyland and Davis 2019). However, not all small agencies serve rural communities. For example, some small agencies serve independent towns within densely populated metropolitan areas. On the other hand, some county police agencies with hundreds of sworn officers serve predominantly rural communities (e.g., Yang et al. 2018). Police agencies that serve tribal communities operate within a unique cultural, historical, and legal context. While we use the terms small, rural, and tribal somewhat interchangeably, the main guiding principle for police agencies trying to implement evidence-based policing is that strategies, interventions, and practices must be specific, tailored, and based on the best available information relevant to the department and jurisdiction. This is with the understanding that there is no one-size-fits-all approach.   

Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, 2021. 64p.

By Stephen Rushin

Before punishing an officer for professional misconduct, police departments often provide the officer with an opportunity to file an appeal. In many police departments, this appeals process culminates in a hearing before an arbitrator. While numerous media reports have suggested that arbitrators regularly overturn or reduce discipline, little legal research has comprehensively examined the outcomes of police disciplinary appeals across the United States. In order to better understand the use of arbitration in police disciplinary appeals and build on prior research, this Article draws on a dataset of 624 arbitration awards issued between 2006 and 2020 from a diverse range of law enforcement agencies. It finds that arbitrators on appeal reduced or overturned police officer discipline in 52% of these cases. In 46% of cases involving termination, arbitrators ordered police departments to rehire previously terminated officers. On average, arbitrators reduced the length of officer suspensions by approximately 49%. Arbitrators gave several common justifications for reductions in officer discipline. Frequently, arbitrators found the original discipline to be excessive relative to the offense committed or relative to punishments received by other officers. In a somewhat smaller number of cases, arbitrators cited insufficient evidence or procedural flaws in the investigation or adjudication of the original internal disciplinary process. This Article concludes by considering the implications of these findings for the literature on police accountability. It also considers emerging efforts in states like Minnesota and…..

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  Oregon to reform police arbitration procedures in order to better balance officers' interests in due process with the public's interest in accountability.   

Chicago: Loyola University Chicago, School of Law, 2021. 57p.

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  Frank Edwards, Hedwig Leeb  and Michael Espositoc

We use data on police-involved deaths to estimate how the risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States varies across social groups. We estimate the lifetime and age-specific risks of being killed by police by race and sex. We also provide estimates of the proportion of all deaths accounted for by police use of force. We find that African American men and women, American Indian/Alaska Native men and women, and Latino men face higher lifetime risk of being killed by police than do their white peers. We find that Latina women and Asian/Pacific Islander men and women face lower risk of being killed by police than do their white peers. Risk is highest for black men, who (at current levels of risk) face about a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by police over the life course. The average lifetime odds of being killed by police are about 1 in 2,000 for men and about 1 in 33,000 for women. Risk peaks between the ages of 20 y and 35 y for all groups. For young men of color, police use of force is among the leading causes of death.

PNAS Journal Article: 6p.