De-policing and fatal traffic crashes

Abstract

Traffic stops by the police have declined significantly in recent years in the United States, especially after 2020. It has been hypothesized that this trend could either be a lingering effect of the pandemic or a response to the increased levels of public attention to police abuse determined by several recent highly publicized killings of African Americans. Over the same period, the country experienced a significant increase in fatal traffic crashes. This paper aims to establish a direct link between de-policing and the increase in fatal traffic crashes over the past decade. To this aim, we employ an identification strategy used in the earlier literature to establish a causal relationship between highly publicized police killings and de-policing. Our analysis elicits an impact of de-policing on fatal traffic crashes around the time of the first instances of such high-profile police killings from 2014, and then a much larger effect after 2020.