Police

Our Correction for "When Police Pull Back"

BOTTOM LINE: Yes, there was a merge error in our research note, “When Police Pull Back”. However, correcting it did not render all our key findings nonsignificant as Jacob Kang-Brown claimed. In his replication, Jacob calculated our spatial lag variable differently, thereby reintroducing the endogeneity problem we designed our analysis to avoid. We are correcting, not retracting, the research note. What happened? We made an honest mistake. We own that.

Celebrating 10 Years of NIJ's LEADS Scholars Program

Two chiefs, an acting deputy commissioner, an analyst, and an academic discuss their experiences in the NIJ LEADS Scholars program.

A Modified Definition of Police Violence

The other day I got a Google Scholar alert about this new article in Injury Epidemiology. It’s a descriptive study showing that 60% of police killings involve municipal departments, 29% county departments, 8% state departments, 3% federal agencies, and <1% tribal or other departments. It looked interesting (and it was!) so I downloaded the full text, and the following passage in the methods section immediately caught my eye: MPV defines fatal police violence as “any incident where a law enforcement officer (off-duty or on-duty) applies, on a civilian, lethal force resulting in the civilian being killed whether it is considered ‘justified’ or ‘unjustified’ by the U.

When police pull back: Neighborhood-level effects of de-policing on violent and property crime

Many U.S. cities witnessed both de-policing and increased crime in 2020, yet it remains unclear whether the former contributed to the latter. Indeed, much of what is known about the effects of proactive policing on crime comes from studies that …

Reconsidering a prominent finding on the spillover effects of police killings of unarmed Black Americans

This analysis reproduces Bor et al.’s (2018) [seminal study](https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31130-9) of the effect of police killings of unarmed Black Americans on the mental health of Black communities. Using BRFSS data, a national repeated …

Officer Diversity May Reduce Black Americans' Fear of the Police

Would police racial and gender diversification reduce Black Americans' fear of the police? The theory of representative bureaucracy indicates that it might. We tested the effects of officer diversity in two experiments embedded in a national survey …

How Generalizable are Findings from Police Surveys? A Review of Multi-Agency Studies

Policing scholars frequently use surveys to understand officer attitudes and behavioral intentions. Yet, it is difficult to gain access to one - let alone multiple - agencies. Thus, officer surveys often reflect views in a single department, making …

An experimental look at reasonable suspicion and police discretion

**Purpose:** Demonstrate the need for further examination of legal judgments and the exercise of discretion in policing. **Design:** A factorial vignette survey with traffic stop scenarios based on US Court of Appeals decisions was administered to …

Are fatal police shootings increasing?

Much is being made about an apparent increase in the use of deadly force by U.S. police officers. In January, The Guardian ran a story titled “It never stops: killings by US police reach record high in 2022”.1 And last week, The Washington Post (WAPO) ran a story titled “Fatal police shootings are still going up, and nobody knows why”. In this story, one of us (Justin) was quoted as saying “It’s hard to know if the increase is meaningful or random.

The Criminology Academy Podcast - Episode 68

We discuss police killings, legitimacy, and the "war on cops."