By GBD 2019 Police Violence US Subnational Collaborators

The burden of fatal police violence is an urgent public health crisis in the USA. Mounting evidence shows that deaths at the hands of the police disproportionately impact people of certain races and ethnicities, pointing to systemic racism in policing. Recent high-profile killings by police in the USA have prompted calls for more extensive and public data reporting on police violence. This study examines the presence and extent of under-reporting of police violence in US Government-run vital registration data, offers a method for correcting under-reporting in these datasets, and presents revised estimates of deaths due to police violence in the USA.

The Lancet 2021; 398: 1239–55  

By Andrew C. Forrester and Alex Nowrasteh 

The 287(g) program enables local law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration laws. We examine 287(g)’s implementation across multiple counties in North Carolina and identify its impact on local crime rates and police clearance rates using a staggered difference-in-differences research design. Under multiple empirical specifications, we find no evidence to suggest that 287(g) programs had an effect on crime rates in North Carolina counties following their implementation. These results hold for simple measures of program adoption and program intensity. Our findings suggest that 287(g) in North Carolina counties did not meet its intended objective of improving public safety by facilitating the removal of violent offenders.   

Logan, UT: Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University , 2020. 40p.

By Joel A. Capellan; Evan T. Sorg

The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 has facilitated the arrest, detention, and deportation of illegal immigrants by local law enforcement officials by adding 287(g) to the Immigration and Nationality Act; however, there has not been a nationwide examination of the crime reduction benefits of these agreements. Using crime, demographic, and detention data from the 167 counties that applied for 287(g) status from 2005-2010, the authors estimated three cross-lagged panel models to assess the impact on total crime of 287(g) interventions resulting in detention or deportations on total crime, violent crime, and property crime. The study found no evidence that 287(g) arrangements were linked to meaningful crime reduction. Due to the potential adverse consequences from these agreements, this study questions the continued use of such agreements under 287(g).

Glassboro, NJ: Rowan University, 2022. 40p.

By Maxime Ricard and Kouamé Félix Grodji

Africa’s rapidly expanding cities are witnessing unprecedented levels of violent crime and the growing menace of criminal gangs. Exceeding the capacity of police, these dangers pose threats to citizen security, livelihoods, and the governability of urban areas.

• In response to these security crises, community-based security groups are emerging as a form of collaborative policing. While not a substitute for police, these groups can help address rising urban crime. Since they know their neighborhoods, these groups can act as go-betweens for overstretched local police and citizens.

• The most effective vigilance committees recognize that coercive tactics and violent confrontations with youth gangs escalate hostilities and fail to address deeper community problems. This will require tackling systemic factors linked to high crime rates in order to redirect youth gangs and stem urban violence.

• Experience from Abidjan reveals the limits of these vigilance committees in tackling serious crimes as well as the risk that these committees can turn to extrajudicial violence and become a threat themselves. This highlights the importance of close partnerships between vigilance committees and the police if collaborative policing models are to contribute to community security.

• Civil society engagement and community oversight are needed to regulate community-based security groups and ensure that they are not misused by local elites or corrupt police.

Washington, DC: Africa Center for Strategic Studies, 2021. 

By Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary

Serious acquisitive crime (SAC) strikes at the heart of people’s feelings of safety in their homes and communities. It isn’t just a ‘volume crime’. It affects people on a daily basis. And failing to target it damages public confidence in policing. The response to SAC from policing isn’t consistently good enough. Too many offenders remain at liberty and most victims aren’t getting the justice they deserve. Forces are missing opportunities to identify and catch offenders, from the moment a member of the public reports the crime to the point where a case is finalised. Depending on where in England and Wales they live, some victims of SAC are more likely than others to get a thorough investigation from their force. This can’t be justified. This report brings together some of our findings from recent police effectiveness, efficiency and legitimacy (PEEL) and thematic inspections in England and Wales. It shows where forces need to make improvements in the way they tackle SAC, and it reports on the good practice we identified. The onus is on forces to learn from each other. They should consider whether they can apply the positive examples in this report to their own force.  

Birmingham, UK: HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, 2022. 40p.

By Justin T. Pickett. Amanda Graham and Francis T. Cullen 

The mission of policing is “to protect and serve,” but recent events suggest that many Americans, and especially Black Americans, do not feel protected from the police. Understanding police-related fear is important because it may impact civilians’ health, daily lives, and policy attitudes. To examine the prevalence, sources, and consequences of both personal and altruistic fear of the police, we surveyed a nationwide sample (N = 1,150), which included comparable numbers of Black (N = 517) and White (N = 492) respondents. Most White respondents felt safe, but most Black respondents lived in fear of the police killing them and hurting their family members. Approximately half of Black respondents preferred to be robbed or burglarized than to have unprovoked contact with officers. The racial divide in fear was mediated by past experiences with police mistreatment. In turn, fear mediated the effects of race and past mistreatment on support for defunding the police and intentions to have “the talk” with family youths about the need to distrust and avoid officers. The deep American racial divide in police-related fear represents a racially disparate health crisis and a primary obstacle to law enforcement’s capacity to serve all communities equitably.  

Criminology, 60 (2): 291-320, 2022.    

By The Independent Office for Police Conduct

The circumstances in which police officers use Taser is an area of significant public interest. Tasers provide the police and the community with valuable protection in dangerous situations. The police are able to use Tasers as an option to resolve situations, including the threat of serious violence, when they consider the use of the Taser is reasonable and proportionate to the threat they face. Tasers are now available to more police officers than ever before with some police forces committing to providing them to all frontline officers who wish to carry one. Home Office data shows Taser was used in 17,000 incidents in 2017/18, nearly doubling to around 32,000 incidents in 2019/20. In the majority of cases Taser is not discharged – the threat alone can help to resolve an incident. However, some community groups and organisations have repeatedly expressed concerns about the risks associated with Taser use, particularly in the context of deaths and serious injuries, their use against children and vulnerable adults, and the significant racial disparities in Taser usage. As an independent body, our oversight helps to shine a light on issues we see in our investigations and through concerns being raised by community groups and organisations. This report was commissioned following a series of incidents involving Black men and people with mental health concerns in early 2020. We reviewed 101 cases involving Taser use that the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), or our predecessor organisation the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), investigated between 2015 and 2020. This report is not intended to present a fully representative picture of how Tasers are used across England and Wales, because we investigate only the most serious and sensitive cases. However, these cases often have the greatest impact on community confidence and provide invaluable opportunities for learning. It is right that Taser use is closely analysed to ensure the device is being used appropriately and not as a default when other options may be available. Police forces must be able to justify to the public the circumstances in which Taser is deployed, particularly when children and vulnerable people are involved. Forces must also respond to the disproportionate use of Tasers against Black people.  

London: The Independent Office on Police Conduct, 2021.128p.

By Beatriz Magaloni and Luis Rodriguez

How can societies restrain their coercive institutions and transition to a more humane criminal justice system? We argue that two main factors explain why torture can persist as a generalized practice even in democratic societies: weak procedural protections and the militarization of policing, which introduces strategies, equipment and mentality that treats criminal suspects as if they were enemies in wartime. Using a large survey of the Mexican prison population and leveraging the date and place of arrest, this paper provides causal evidence about how these two explanatory variables shape police brutality. Our paper offers a grim picture of the survival of authoritarian policing practices in democracies. It also provides novel evidence of the extent to which the abolition of inquisitorial criminal justice institutions – a remnant of colonial legacies and a common trend in the region – has worked to restrain police brutality.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University, Poverty, Violence and Governance Lab (PoVgov), 2020. 51p.

By Beatriz Magaloni, Vanessa Melo, Jailson de Souza Silva, Eliana Sousa Silva

The goal of this study is to explore themes related to public security using a large-scale, door-to-door survey of roughly 6,300 residents from Cidade de Deus, Providência, Rocinha, Batan, and Maré. Our aim is to generate a more informed debate about the security situation in Rio de Janeiro that gives voice to residents of the city’s favelas. In this survey, we explore favela residents’ patterns of interaction with the police and armed criminal groups, their experiences with victimization, their perceptions of changes in the security climate, as well as their evaluations of the police and the public security situation in their communities

Stanford, CA: Stanford University, Poverty, Violence and Governance Lab (PoVgov), 2017.  81p.

By Beatriz Magaloni, Vanessa Melo, and Gustavo Robles  

We present the first randomized experiment on police body-cameras in a high-violence setting: Brazil. Camera assignment -regardless of whether police turned it on -reduced stop-and-searches and other forms of potentially aggressive interactions with civilians. Cameras also produced a strong de-policing effect, where police wearing cameras were significantly less likely to engage in any form of activity, including responding to requests of help. These changes in police behavior took place even when most officers disobeyed the protocol that required them to turn their cameras on when interacting with civilians. To address this problem, we randomly assigned cameras to supervisors during part of the study. When officers’ supervisors wore a camera, policing activities and camera usage increased. Police surveys, interviews and focus groups strengthen the finding that technological advances can only have a limited impact in so far an organizational culture that perpetuates lack of compliance with internal protocols and violence persists.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University, Poverty, Violence and Governance Lab (PoVgov), Working Paper, 2020. 38p.