Personnel Economics in Policing

Abstract

This dissertation explores the institutional incentives that drive police behavior. By applying insights from personnel economics and causal inference, I show that police officers are highly responsive to their organizational environment, and these motivations can help explain inequality within the criminal justice system. Broadly, my findings suggest that changing incentives can be a powerful tool for effective institutional change in law enforcement.In the first chapter, I study the role of first-line police supervisors — sergeants — in the enforcement decisions of their officers. I leverage a unique institutional setting where officers switch sergeants frequently to estimate sergeant arrest effects, and document substantial variation in these effects between sergeants. Moving an officer from a sergeant in the 10th percentile of arrest effects to one in the 90th percentile would increase monthly arrests by 42% relative to the mean. I provide evidence that sergeants induce arrests for serious and low-level crimes through distinct policing strategies. Sergeants increase serious arrests by incentivizing their officers to respond to more 911 calls, while they increase low-level arrests through discretionary drug enforcement. Sergeant-induced low-level arrests disproportionately affect Black civilians and increase officer use of force. My findings suggest that sergeant-focused policies may be particularly effective at reducing aggressive policing tactics without harming the enforcement of serious crimes. In the second chapter, I explore the role of asymmetric information in generating excessive enforcement. I examine a common information source for police officers throughout the United States: risk assessments conducted by 911 call takers. Exploiting random variation in the call takers assigned to 911 calls, I show that police are 37.7% more likely to make arrests at calls that the call taker deems risky. I demonstrate that officer perceptions are a primary channel through which the effects operate. This results in lower quality police decisions: misdemeanor arrests made at calls that are on the margin of being classified as risky are 14.9 percentage points less likely to result in a conviction. In cases where the race of the involved civilian is the same as the responding officer or the responding officer has more job experience, call taker information has a negligible effect on arrests. The results suggest that the strength of an officer’s priors determines the extent to which officers rely on information transmitted by call takers. In the final chapter, I estimate the effects of allocating more officers to 911 calls. In order to circumvent the endogenous assignment of more officers to calls with greater unobserved severity, I leverage exogenous variation in the amount of double-crewed patrol vehicles across shifts. I find that police are more likely to use their enforcement powers when additional officers are dispatched: an additional officer being dispatched to a call increases the likelihood of an arrest being made by 24% relative to the mean. I provide suggestive evidence that officers are more effective at incapacitating criminals when response sizes are larger. My results highlight an understudied feature of patrol allocation that police departments ought to consider when making deployment decisions.