Police department design, political pressure, and racial inequality in arrests

Abstract

This paper theorizes a source of bias in discretionary arrests: strategic limits on police officer learning. Officers have a variety of tactics at their disposal besides arrest that they use for less serious offenses when they judge the underlying behavior to be less severe. In departments led by a chief with special expertise in crime control, the chief's directives to change the severity threshold at which officers make arrests are a source of information about the most effective practices. However, if officers are uncertain whether their chief is swayed by political pressures, those directives will be less persuasive, especially when they align with what influential advocates want. This mechanism represents a constraint on the effectiveness of departments where chiefs have limited means to force subordinate compliance. With increasing Black political influence in cities since World War II, this inefficiency would have generated a form of anti-Black structural racism in policing.