UC Santa Barbara

Decision-making, risk-taking, and situational awareness are all important factors for effective and equitable policing. However, these factors can also be affected by fatigue, overwork, and cognitive stress, which can accumulate as police officers continue to work. In the first chapter, I study the evolution of police officer outcomes and activity over consecutive working days using rich data from the Chicago Police Department. To overcome the endogenous selection of working days, I take advantage of a unique shift structure where working days are predetermined and based on fixed groupings. This is combined with a two-way fixed effects design that leverages within-officer variation across different working days. I find that as officers work more consecutive days, they use more force, make more judgement-based discretionary arrests, and are more likely to be injured. These increases occur despite a decline in proactive policing activities. Officers make fewer arrests, conduct fewer stops, issue fewer citations and tickets, and spend less time actively patrolling as their workdays accumulate. The divergence between use-of-force and policing activity is not driven by changes in arrest types, shift assignments, or officer roles, instead, officers are changing their behavior as they work more days.Using data from the Chicago Police Department on complaints filed by civilians and reports of force filed by officers, the second chapter estimates the effect of body-worn cameras (BWCs) of officer and civilian behavior. Using a two-way fixed effects design, I find BWCs are associated with a 29% reduction in use-of-force complaints, driven by white officer-black civilian complaints. Additionally, I find a 34% reduction in officers reporting striking civilians and a large though less significant reduction in officer firearm usage, potential mechanisms for the reduction in complaints. Importantly, I find no change in officer injury or force from civilians. However, I find evidence of de-policing as officers make fewer drug-related arrests following BWC adoption.Technology is integral to police departments, automating officer tasks, but inherently changing their time allocation. In the third chapter we investigate this by studying ShotSpotter, a technology that automates gunfire detection. Following a detection, officers are dispatched to the scene, thereby reallocating their time. We leverage this shock to officers’ time allocation using the rollout of ShotSpotter across Chicago police districts to study the effects on 911 call response. We find substantial consequences—officers are dispatched to calls slower (22%), arrive on-scene later (13%), and the probability of arrest is decreased 9%. Consequently, police departments must evaluate their resource capacities prior to implementing technologies.