UC Berkeley

Paper 1: While scholars have identified ways that racial conservatives exerted out-sized influence on criminal justice policies, little attention has been paid to whether police departments have incentives to learn about and adopt reforms that reduce racial disparity.

I present a game of imperfect information between residents and a municipal police chief to show that a chief's inability to prevent officer behavior that residents perceive to be abusive, coupled with resident unwillingness to assist police in the aftermath of this behavior, creates an incentive for the chief to choose and learn about new policing strategies that rely less on resident assistance. This induces a bias in favor of aggressive over collaborative tactics in the police chief’s policy selection and learning decisions.

Segregation and discrimination ensured that many Black Americans lived in conditions that produced this result in the later twentieth century; thus the model shows structural racism in local police policy making.

Paper 2: Scholarship on racial inequality in policing has largely focused on factors that would cause individual officers to rely on race when deciding whether to make an arrest. Extant explanations suggest that if officers chose not to discriminate and managed to eliminate the influence of stereotypes and implicit associations on their behavior, any remaining racial disparity would be statistical discrimination. I identify an additional source of officer bias: strategic limits on information transmission. I show that when dedicated officers are uncertain whether their police chief is independent of political pressures, a chief who cares about crime control cannot credibly communicate the reason for their policy choices. Therefore if the chief is better informed than the officers about what arrest intensities would be optimal for reducing crime, chief policy choice will give officers exaggerated or understated posterior beliefs about the probability that individuals within a particular group should be arrested. Under certain conditions this would lead to the endogenous development of taste-based discrimination.

Paper 3: This paper examines the conditions under which municipal police chiefs in the latter half of the 20th century would have adopted policies that reduced the rate of arrests among Black residents. I use a two player game of incomplete information, in which the commonly valued outcome depends upon non-contractible effort from a less informed subordinate, to show that officer uncertainty about their chief's competence and skepticism of policies that reduce rates of arrest among Black people could have prevented chiefs from adopting such policies in equilibrium. This conservatism arises even when both chief and officer are not individually racist and the chief knows that the new policy would be more effective at controlling crime.