The Los Angeles Police Department (L.A.P.D.) partnered with Justice & Security Strategies, Inc. (J.S.S.) in 2011 to reduce gang and gun-related crime in Los Angeles, California. The cooperation between the two organizations laid the groundwork for a new police intervention called Operation L.A.S.E.R. (Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration). One year after implementation, the L.A.P.D. deemed the pilot program a success and sought to expand the intervention to the remaining 20 precincts by 2019 (Smith, 2019). However, many Los Angeles residents believed that Operation L.A.S.E.R. violated individuals’ civil rights and disproportionately impacted marginalized communities. Thus, the L.A.P.D. terminated the intervention in April 2019, following years of public outcry and an audit by the Office of the Inspector General (O.I.G.). This study combines housing and demographic data at the Public Use Microdata Area (P.U.M.A.) level from the 1-year American Community Survey (A.C.S.) with L.A.P.D. and P.U.M.A. boundary shapefiles to examine how neighborhood desirability (as measured by home values and renter costs) changed in Los Angeles, California throughout the duration of Operation L.A.S.E.R. A variety of fixed effects and difference-in-differences models reveal that Operation L.A.S.E.R. was statistically associated with a significant change in home values and renter costs to varying degrees in Los Angeles, California.

In order to better understand the role that race or ethnicity may play in who is stopped by their officers, the California Highway Patrol (CHP) provided the California Policy Lab (CPL) with a data set of 2,141,817 enforcement stops made by the CHP from January to December of 2019. The data was collected pursuant to California’s Racial and Identity Profiling Act of 2015 (RIPA). In order to extend the statistical analysis presented in the 2021 Annual RIPA Board Report, we evaluated enforcement stops in combination with non-enforcement stops using two generally accepted approaches to measure racially disparate policing: benchmarking and a hit rate analysis.

This work has been supported, in part, by the University of California Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives grants MRP-19-600774.

In this dissertation, I study the various ways laws and criminal justice policies impact vulnerable populations. The foundation of my research agenda is to provide insight into the channels through which the legal system affects social justice issues. The laws studied in this dissertation cover status offenses, electronic monitoring, and duty-to-report laws.

In the first chapter of my dissertation, I study the impact of exposure to a juvenile curfew as a minor on criminal justice contact in adulthood. Using a regression kink design, I find two things. First, curfews moderately reduce the number of minors who appear in the criminal justice system as adults. Second, using the criminal justice system to enforce a curfew increases criminal justice contact at a young age, which leads to a large increase in adult criminal justice involvement.

In the second chapter of my dissertation, I study the impact of the physical and online monitoring of previously convicted sex offenders on parole on subsequent re-incarceration. Using an event-study design, I find that social media monitoring appears to aid law enforcement in catching new sex offenses for child sex offenders. Complete bans on social media use appear to hinder law enforcement. Electronic monitoring and residence restrictions increase returns to prison, but this effect is primarily driven by technical violations.

In the final chapter of my dissertation, I study the impact of duty-to-report laws on the reporting of and clearance rate of rape incidents. Using a difference-in-differences design, I find little evidence that these laws increase the reporting of sex offenses to law enforcement, but they do increase the clearance rate, or arrest rate, of reported incidents. I find evidence in support of the mechanism that these laws encourage witness corroboration.

The Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA) of 2015 was enacted in order to better identify and mitigate race-based and identity-based bias in policing. The law requires California police departments to record data on stops made by police officers, including fields such as perceived identity and demographics, reasoning for stops and searches, and the outcome of each encounter. RIPA does not explicitly distinguish between vehicle or pedestrian stops.

In December of 2019, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) RIPA Board (the Board) requested that Dr. Emily Owens of the California Policy Lab (CPL) conduct an analysis of the RIPA data and provide a report to the Board, in order to better understand any patterns that the data revealed. This report provides a place-based analysis of all stops made by the LAPD from July 2018 – October 2019.

This work has been supported, in part, by the University of California Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives grant MRP-19-600774.

This dissertation evaluates the relationship between fear of victimization and school enrollment outcomes of females in rural Pakistan, impact of economic insecurity in exacerbating hate crimes, and the impact of in-prison exposure to gang affiliated offenders on recidivism of non-affiliated offenders. The data sets used for this dissertation include publicly available data from the government agencies of Pakistan and the U.S., and administrative records from a large state department of corrections of U.S. The empirical methods comprise of instrument variable approach, regression discontinuity design, and a fixed effects model. In the first chapter of dissertation, I show that father’s fear related to his children's security when they commute to school negatively effects the school enrollment outcomes of the daughter. In the second chapter, I show that following the September 11 attacks, the discontinuity in average daily hate crimes is higher in counties with higher unemployment compared to those with lower unemployment levels. These findings emphasize that economic insecurity, measured as unemployment, exacerbates hate crimes. In the third chapter, I find that exposure to gang-affiliated peers increases the probability of getting re-incarcerated. I propose that exposure to gang members increases the probability of reincarceration because gang members are generally more violent, are criminally more skillful, and expand their outreach in prison.

This dissertation employs quasi-experimental methods and recent advances in econometrics to uncover the causal links and policy levers that are relevant to gendered criminal justice and racial bias in policing.

Chapter 1 evaluates the consequences of a policy that deputizes landlords to internalize public safety externalities; nuisance property ordinances. These ordinances label a property as a nuisance when police respond to a home a set number of times within a certain period. After having a property declared a nuisance, property owners who do not abate the nuisance can face fines and criminal charges. Therefore the concern is that this policy may incentive landlords to retaliate against tenants who report crimes, thus raising the cost of crime reporting which is especially worrisome for domestic violence where the cost of reporting is already high. I collect data on implementation of these ordinances across major cities in the U.S. and consider what happens to domestic assaults when these ordinances are passed. I exploit the variation in timing of the implementation of these ordinances and find that this policy reduces the rate at which domestic assault is reported to police.

Another wing of my work examines variation across a variety of criminal justice contexts local to Nashville, TN. The first of these papers, Chapter 2 (joint with Emily Owens and Kerri Raissian) provides one of the first credibly causal evaluations of specialty courts in the criminal justice context, and there are two key innovations. Relative to the small amount of existing research, which explores how cases change after the introduction of a court, we are able to identify how decision making and case outcomes change in cases set before a well-established fully operational specialty court. Second, we are able to examine not only the impact of these courts on offenders, but also on victims. We find that examining both reoffending and revictimization provides a substantially different picture of the impact of these courts than reoffending alone; what initially appears to be a “null” impact on recidivism is revealed to be the result of both an increase in victim safety and willingness to involve the court when future violence does occur.

In Chapter 3, joint with Yoonjung Kim and Jaclyn Rosenquist, we utilize a unique data set and exploit the variation of arrestees’ location to study the causal effect of being charged with the drug-free school zone enhancement. we find that enhancement charges against eligible offenders are more likely to be applied to Black arrestees than White arrestees, leading to lasting impacts across races in sentencing outcomes. We present preliminary evidence of White defendantsbeing offered better plea deals as the mechanism driving these results.

This dissertation delves into the role of evidence-based policing (EBP) strategies in three law enforcement agencies in California: the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), California Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST), and the Anaheim Police Department. The three-project dissertation explores how EBP is operationalized in different contexts through randomized controlled trials (RCT) and evaluations. Project one with the LAPD analyzes a RCT of officer threat perceptions of citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic; project two with California POST evaluates a state-mandated supervisor training for newly promoted sergeants; and project three presents preliminary results from a RCT on procedural justice training for patrol officers in the Anaheim Police Department. Drawing upon a synthesis of academic literature and empirical research, this collection of projects investigates diverse implementation strategies employed in different policing contexts, shedding light on the challenges and successes encountered. By summarizing theoretical insights with practical applications, this dissertation contributes to the ongoing discourse on EBP implementation strategies.