Vincent Southerland

A growing portion of the American public—including policymakers, advocates, and institutional stakeholders—have generally come to accept the fact that racism endemic to the United States infects every stage of the criminal legal system. Acceptance of that fact has led to efforts to address and remedy pervasive and readily observable systemic bias. Chief among those efforts is a turn toward technology—specifically algorithmic decision-making and actuarial tools. Many have welcomed the embrace of technology, confident that technological tools can solve a problem—race-based inequity—that has bedeviled humans for generations. This article engages that embrace by probing the adoption of technological tools at various sites throughout the criminal legal system and exploring their efficacy as a remedy to racial inequality. Then, by applying a racial justice lens, this article develops and offers a set of prescriptions designed to address the design, implementation, and oversight of algorithmic tools in spaces where the promise offered by technological tools has not been met. Adherence to that lens may draw us closer to what this article terms a pragmatic abolitionist ethos regarding the use of technological tools in the criminal legal system. Such an ethos does not mean the immediate absence of a criminal legal system altogether. It instead means a criminal system that ultimately operates in ways dramatically different from the current regime by divesting from incarceration and investing in community well-being, human welfare, and rehabilitation.

Aaron Chalfin Jacob Kaplan

The notion that the unjustified use of force by police officers is concentrated amongst a few "bad apples" is a popular descriptor which has gained traction in scholarly research and achieved considerable influence among policymakers. But is removing the bad apples likely to have an appreciable effect on police misconduct? Leveraging a simple policy simulation and data from the Chicago Police Department, we estimate that removing the top 10 percent of officers identified based on ex ante risk and replacing them with officers drawn from the middle of the risk distribution would have led to only a 4-6 percent reduction in use of force incidents in Chicago over a ten-year period.

Our analysis suggests that surgically removing predictably problematic police officers is unlikely to have a large impact on citizen complaints. By assembling some of the first empirical evidence on the likely magnitude of incapacitation effects, we provide critical support for the idea that early warning systems must be designed, above all, to deter problematic behavior and promote accountability.

Kyle Rozema, Max M. Schanzenbach

Reformers are calling for greater oversight of police behavior, in part through enhanced use of civilian complaints. However, others counter that greater oversight could chill effective policing. We assess police officer response to administrative determinations of misconduct. Using Chicago data, we find strong evidence that a sustained allegation reduces that officer’s future misconduct. We find no evidence that this effect is driven by incapacitation, such as assignment to desk duty, or by officer disengagement with policing. We conclude that our findings are consistent with improved officer conduct, in part due to officer concerns over promotion, salary, and desirable assignments.

Bryan K. Stroube

Selection biases present a fundamental challenge for research on ethics and misconduct. This issue is well understood at the individual level, where lab studies are often employed to sidestep it at the potential expense of external validity. However, much archival field data on ethics and misconduct are at risk of selection bias originating from withinorganizations, because organizations are typically responsible for evaluating and ultimately documenting who commits misconduct. In this paper I explore the nature and potential scope of this particular form of selection bias, its potential impact on the interpretation of extant findings from the literature, and how studying allegations may help detect it in specific contexts. Using detailed data on formal allegations of police misconduct in Chicago, I highlight how status characteristics such as race and gender may bias the creation of archival data. For example, black officers received allegations at rates similar to white officers but were more likely to have them sustained, and allegations made by black complainants were less likely to be sustained than those made by white complainants—even when including extensive sets of control variables. These findings indicate that accounting for allegations may be a fruitful methodological approach to better understand the optimal use of archival behavioral field data for research on ethics and misconduct.

Bill McCarthy, John Hagan, Daniel Herda

Research findings show that legal cynicism—a cultural frame in which skepticism about laws, the legal system, and police is expressed—is important in understanding neighborhood variation in engagement with the police, particularly in racially isolated African American communities. We argue that legal cynicism is also useful for understanding neighborhood variation in complaints about police misconduct. Using data on complaints filed in Chicago between 2012 and 2014, we show that grievances disproportionately came from racially segregated neighborhoods and that a measure of legal cynicism from the mid‐1990s predicts complaints about abuse of police power two decades later. The association between legal cynicism and complaints is net of prior complaints, reported crime, imprisonment, and other structural factors that contribute to the frequency and nature of interactions involving police and residents. Legal cynicism also mediates the influence of racially isolated neighborhoods on complaints. The mid‐1990s is the approximate midpoint of a half‐century of police scandals in Chicago. Our research findings suggest that contemporary complaints about police misconduct in highly segregated Chicago neighborhoods are grounded in collectively shared historical memories of police malfeasance. They also suggest that persistent complaints about police misconduct may represent officially memorialized expressions of enduring racial protest against police abuse of power.

Megan Travers

This paper aims to examine use of force allegation patterns within the Chicago Police Department following the 2015 Department of Justice investigation. The DOJ investigation serves as a point of reference to allow the researcher to determine if the promise of increased scrutiny brought on by the investigation may have preemptively changed the behavior of officers, which could result in a change in allegation patterns. Using publicly available data from the Invisible Institute’s Citizens’ Police Data Project, a Poisson regression is employed to determine if the number of allegations changed significantly following the onset of the DOJ investigation. Additionally, a historical perspective allows the various factors that influence police use of force and reform to be broken down and applied to possible future research and policies.

George Wood, Tom R. Tyler, and Andrew V. Papachristos

Existing research shows that distrust of the police is widespread and consequential for public safety. However, there is a shortage of interventions that demonstrably reduce negative police interactions with the communities they serve. A training program in Chicago attempted to encourage 8,480 officers to adopt procedural justice policing strategies. These strategies emphasize respect, neutrality, and transparency in the exercise of authority, while providing opportunities for civilians to explain their side of events. We find that training reduced complaints against the police by 10.0% and reduced the use of force against civilians by 6.4% over 2 y. These findings affirm the feasibility of changing the command and control style of policing which has been associated with popular distrust and the use of force, through a broad training program built around the concept of procedurally just policing.

Somil Trivedi, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve

Most Americans are rightly enraged when police shoot unarmed civilians, use excessive force, or engage in unethical practices like planting evidence. However, there is little popular understanding and scholarly attention as to why prosecutors fail to charge or otherwise hold officers accountable. This Article offers a novel contribution to the study of police misconduct by examining how prosecutors nationwide enable police misconduct on an institutional level. Through both social-scientific and legal analysis, we consider the codependent relationship between prosecutors and police that prevents accountability for police violence and misconduct against the public. Specifically, we analyze (1) the cultural norms created between police and prosecutors that allow police to influence prosecutorial discretion over police accountability and (2) the legal and extralegal tools that prosecutors wield to protect their police benefactors— and themselves in the process. In contrast to other scholarship on police misconduct, we show how adjacent criminal justice institutions—police and prosecutors—enable persistent patterns of practice that operate within the boundaries of legality, but often to deadly and unethical ends. We end with potential solutions to better equip conscientious prosecutors, lawmakers, and the public to combat this codependent dynamic that has left so many communities—particularly those on the margins—afraid of the very law enforcement actors that are supposed to protect them.

Chloe Nichele Robinson

There is limited empirical research related to lawsuits involving the police due in part to limited accessibility to relevant data sources. This study aims to examine the relationship between citizen, situational, and lawsuit factors and police misconduct litigation in the city of Chicago. Data were collected from two separate databases: The Chicago Reporter and The Invisible Institute. The analyses in this study demonstrate that there is a relationship between lawsuit payout amounts, lawsuit misconduct type and various situational factors. Policy implications are discussed.

Deborah Anthony

Supreme Court jurisprudence has established that some established constitutional provisions do not apply at the U.S. border, and protections against governmental privacy incursions are significantly reduced. As such, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the U.S. Border Patrol as an arm of CBP have more authority to search, seize, and detain individuals and property at border crossings than law enforcement agencies would have in other contexts. Justified by reference to the national interest in monitoring and controlling entrants to the country, the doctrine is known as the“border search exception.”

However, Border Patrol does not restrict its operations to the U.S. border. Originating in a decades-old federal statute, CBP has the authority to conduct stops and searches within a “reasonable distance” of a border, defined by regulation as 100 miles. This “100-mile zone” has been used for permanent and temporary internal checkpoints and roving stops. The extent to which the agency’s assumed expansive authority within this zone squares with constitutional principles is open to question. This Article will analyze how Fourth Amendment principles should apply to CBP authority inside national borders, including its authority to stop, question, search, and detain individuals. It will analyze the legal problems and risks attendant to an expansion of Border Patrol authority into an area encompassing the residence of about two-thirds of the U.S. population, suggesting an alternative approach that provides both clearer guidelines and more robust protections for civil liberties. Ultimately, Border Patrol activity that occurs beyond the nation’s border should be bound by ordinary constitutional restrictions applicable to all other law enforcement.

Sheryl L. Walter, Erik Gonzalez-Mulé, Cristiano L. Guarana, Ernest H. O'Boyle Jr., Christopher M. Berry, Timothy T. Baldwin

Research on employee misconduct has increasingly adopted behavioral measures in field settings, such as archival organizational records, to circumvent potential issues of external validity and social desirability associated with laboratory experiments and self-reported surveys. However, similar to the issues facing the criminal justice and education systems, where racial disparities in punishment are well-documented, organizations face a difficult challenge in detecting and enforcing misconduct. Even when organizations adopt seemingly objective policies for addressing misconduct, it is still possible for certain groups to be disproportionately accused of misconduct and/or disciplined. Drawing from social psychological theories of social identity and aversive racism, we examined the extent to which Black employees (incontrast to White employees) are more likely to have formal incidences of misconduct documented in their employment records, even when there are no racial differences in the number of allegations of misconduct. Across three datasets collected from the police departments of three major metropolitan areas (Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia), we identified the presence of a race discipline gap in archival organizational records of behavioral misconduct. We discuss the implications of these findings and highlight the need for caution when researchers and practitioners use archival measures of behavioral misconduct.

Elizabeth Luh

Using a plausibly exogenous increase in the fine for failing to purchase annual vehicle registration in 2012, colloquially known as the sticker tax, I test if Chicago police disparately enforced parking compliance across black and non-black neighborhoods from 2007 to 2017. I find that police behavior is responsive to the penalty structure of the fine and are 20 to 50 percent more likely to apply the sticker fine to black neighborhoods after the increase. This disparate enforcement is robust to employment controls and is not driven by changing compliance rates across neighborhoods. In contrast, I find that parking enforcement agents do not disparately enforce the tickets across black and non-black neighborhoods. I attribute this difference in behavior between parking enforcement agents and police officers to the lack of work evaluations based on ticketing productivity for police officers. Since police officers are not evaluated by their parking citation productivity, they do not behave as revenue-maximizing agents in the context of parking enforcement.

Bocar Ba, Dean Knox, Jonathan Mummolo, and Roman G. Rivera

Racial and ethnic diversification is among the oldest proposed police reforms, but severe data constraints have forced scholars to rely almost exclusively on problematic cross-agency comparisons to evaluate its effects. We assess the impact of diversification using millions of observations of Chicago police officers’ behavior, merged with data on their socio-demographic traits. Compared with white officers facing the same working conditions, we show that black officers make substantially fewer discretionary stops (e.g. for “suspicious behavior”), fewer arrests for petty crimes, and use force less often. These reductions stem primarily from a reduced focus on black civilians, a pattern concordant with efforts to end abusive policing and mass incarceration in African American communities. However, we also find evidence that coarse identity groupings mask large variation in police behavior. Most notably, we find Hispanic officers who cannot speak Spanish—the native language of many co-ethnic communities—stop Hispanic residents at the highest rates. Taken together, these results show the substantial impact of diversity on police treatment of minority communities, and emphasize the need to consider multiple facets of police officers when crafting personnel-driven reforms.

Harold A. Pollack, Keith Humphreys

This article describes evidence-based strategies designed to reduce the prevalence of police encounters with people in behavioral crisis (PBCs) and to make such encounters less dangerous for all parties when they do occur. Some of these strategies are implemented by law enforcement, including gun violence restraining orders and the training of officers to provide time, distance, and cover during encounters with PBCs. Other strategies involve broader systems of community care, including assertive community treatment for people with serious psychiatric disorders, and critical time interventions for individuals leaving incarceration or inpatient psychiatric care. Broader adoption of such strategies should both reduce the risk of police shootings of PBCs as well as improve the effectiveness and well-being of police officers.

Andrea Marie Headley, Stewart J. D’Alessio, Lisa Stolzenberg

This study examines whether the race and ethnicity of the individual filing a police misconduct allegation in Chicago predicts whether the allegation was (1) sustained, (2) not sustained, (3) determined to be unfounded (not factual), or (4)whether the accused police officer was exonerated of any wrongdoing. Multinomial logistic regression results show that Black and Hispanic complainants are much less likely to have their allegations of police misconduct sustained. When compared to a sustained outcome, Black complainants are 4.7 times more likely to receive a not sustained outcome, 3.6 times more apt to receive an unfounded outcome, and 4.2 times more likely that their misconduct allegation will culminate in the exoneration of the police officer. Results also show that a Hispanic complainant is 1.6 times less apt to achieve a favorable outcome in his or her case alleging misconduct by a police officer. These findings suggest that more work still needs to be done to reduce racial disparity in the resolution of allegations of police misconduct in Chicago.

Noah Caldwell-Gatsos, Rhett D’Souza, Vamsi Banda

Our project seeks to create a tool to model standard settlement values given a variety of secondary factors, using machine learning to predict potential settlement amounts per complaint submitted to the system using the standard features outlined in the Citizens Police Data Project database and the Settlement database given in class. In our project, we utilized four distinct datasets from the two mentioned above, namely the IPRA_Case, Cops_cop, and cases_case_N sets from the CPDP, and the Settlement_table from the Settlement database. In our project, our group aimed to solve four main questions before creating our model. Namely, what influence does an incident occurring at a particular location have on settlement value? Are particular officers assigned to particular areas experiencing higher or lower settlement values. What kinds of cases involving the officers result in a particular settlement value? Do settlements resulting from the cases involve a particular type of individual? After solving these issues, we decided on two machine learning strategies to determine which features would grant us the most information gain. At this stage, we applied a deep learning model to analyze a corpus of text to finalize our tool. We are pleased by the current accuracy rate of our system applied on a dataset like the CPDP database, and our group sees our system as a potential tool to allow groups such as the Chicago police force to use to identify high-risk groups among the police force and the citizens they serve and take our data to assist management personnel within the police force in determining the optimal use of resources to train and prevent issues like the ones identified in the complaints database from reoccurring. As the citizens of Chicago and Cook County foot the bill for any and all settlements reached by the Chicago Police Department and their constituents, our overarching goal is to use this tool to reduce the amount that said constituents must pay in the event of a complaint.

Bocar Ba, Roman Rivera

Does policing the police increase crime? We avoid simultaneity effects of increased public oversight during a major scandal by identifying events in Chicago that only impacted officers’ self-imposed monitoring. We estimate crime’s response to self- and public-monitoring using regression discontinuity and generalized synthetic control methods. Self-monitoring, triggered by police union memos, significantly reduced serious complaints without impacting crime or effort. However, after a scandal, both civilian complaints and crime rates rise, suggesting that higher crime rates following heightened oversight results from depolicing and civilian behavior simultaneously changing. Our research suggests that proactive internal accountability improves police-community relations without increasing crime.

Barry Scheck

What follows is a discussion about a series of related initiatives that have emerged organically from the trenches to hold different criminal justice stakeholders accountable to ethical rules and constitutional norms. I will discuss (1) Brady orders; (2) the need for the public, prosecution, and defense to each maintain databases of police misconduct; (3) the importance of Police Standards and Training (POST) Decertification Statutes; (4) New York’s newly established Prosecutorial Conduct Commission; (5) the need to establish ethical rules for prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges to help forensic science service providers correct errors and protect the integrity of forensic science testimony; and (6) three new developments in the work of Conviction Integrity Units. Each of these initiatives requires transparency, ongoing collection of data, and cooperative action by multiple stake- holders. If expanded and undertaken together, they would be synergistic, help stakeholders do their jobs, and promote public confidence in the integrity of our system.

Rachel Moran

Police officers around the country are accused of misconduct every day. Their misconduct is alleged and documented in the form of civilian complaints, internal affairs reports, performance reviews, disciplinary board findings, and other records. These misconduct records contain information that is arguably both relevant to the public’s interest in holding police officers accountable, and personal to the officer. But jurisdictions provide vastly different answers to the question of who should have access to these records. Some states prevent the public from accessing any police misconduct records. Many grant public access to a limited category of misconduct records, and deny access to most others. A small minority of jurisdictions make all such records publicly available to anyone who requests them.

These varied approaches to disclosure of misconduct records stem from widely divergent understandings (or misunderstandings) of privacy rights. When states deny public access to police misconduct records, they do so on the theory that police officers have a privacy interest in the content of the records. While the notion of police officers’ right to privacy is frequently invoked, it is rarely examined. Many scholars have identified controversies surrounding a variety of other legal protections for police officers that insulate the officers from public accountability. But there is a notable dearth of legal scholarship analyzing what police officers’ right to privacy means and when it applies.

This article provides a unique contribution to the scholarly literature by examining the commonly proffered privacy justification for refusing to disclose police misconduct records through the lens of privacy law and theory. The article scrutinizes what advocates on both sides of the spectrum, arguing for privacy or transparency in police misconduct records, do not: whether and to what extent privacy law supports the non-disclosure of police misconduct records.

The article begins by placing this issue in its real-world context: an increasingly heated dispute over a once rarely critiqued assumption, that police misconduct records are a private matter and should not be subject to public scrutiny. It then transitions into a historical discussion of privacy law from both judicial and scholarly perspectives, with a focus on developing understandings of the right to informational privacy. The article applies the discussion of privacy law to current controversies over police misconduct records, addressing whether police officers have a legally cognizable right to privacy in their misconduct records and how lawmakers should balance police privacy rights against the interests of other parties seeking access to misconduct records. Finally, the article closes by acknowledging the concerns that privacy proponents have voiced regarding the practical effects of disclosure on both police officers and policing reform.

In March 2010, the Chicago Police Department changed its Taser policy, issuing the weapons to patrol officers instead of largely restricting their use to sergeants. We used that policy change to obtain difference-in-difference estimates of how the availability of Tasers affected the types of force employed by police, the total number of use-of-force incidents, injury rates per incident, the total number of injuries, and the race distribution of civilians involved in use-of-force incidents. The policy change initially led to a large increase in the use of Tasers, with limited substitution from other types of force. After a period of re-training, substitution between Tasers and other types of force, both greater and lesser, increased. Police injuries fell, but neither injury rates nor the number of injuries to civilians were affected. There is no evidence that Tasers led to a reduction in police use of firearms.

Bocar A. Ba

While much of the economic literature has centered on the impact of policing on crime, there is little empirical evidence evaluating the effect of oversight on police misconduct and use of force. I use novel data from the Chicago Police Department and a policy change that generates exogenous variation in the cost of filing a complaint. I find that civilians facing higher travel costs are less likely to complete the complaint filing process and more likely to experience police use of force. These effects are largerfor residents of non-white areas. I estimate civilians’ complaint valuation and construct counterfactual scenarios. I find that the individuals who benefit most from oversight are those with the lowest valuation of their complaints. Simulated counterfactual scenarios show that reducing the cost of filing a complaint increases the number of completed complaints, and thus the number of investigations. Under a policy that reduces the cost of complaining, the number of sustained complaints about failure to provide service increases by 8.1%; the rate of sustained allegations of police brutality, however, falls by 9.8%. Complainants who would benefit the most from this policy are the ones seeking help from the police, and who live in the most violent neighborhood of the city. This research sheds light on the complex relationship between public safety andthe cost of reporting police misconduct.

Rob Voigt, Nicholas P. Camp, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, William L. Hamilton, Rebecca C. Hetey, Camilla M. Griffiths, David Jurgens, Dan Jurafsky, and Jennifer L. Eberhardt

Using footage from body-worn cameras, we analyze the respectfulness of police officer language toward white and black community members during routine traffic stops. We develop computational linguistic methods that extract levels of respect automatically from transcripts, informed by a thin-slicing study of participant ratings of officer utterances. We find that officers speak with consistently less respect toward black versus white community members, even after controlling for the race of the officer, the severity of the infraction, the location of the stop, and the outcome of the stop. Such disparities in common, everyday interactions between police and the communities they serve have important implications for procedural justice and the building of police–community trust.

Olugbenga Ajilore, Shane Shirey

There is anecdotal evidence showing that African-Americans are more likely to be subjected to excessive use of force by police than are people of other races. The counterargument is that these issues are not related to race and there are other factors at work. There have been several high-profile cases, such as those in Ferguson, Cleveland, and Baton Rouge. In this study, we estimate the effect of race on excessive use of force incidents using a new dataset comprising citizen complaints against the Chicago Police Department. Our findings show that not only does race play a role in excessive use of force complaints, but also that race plays a role in which complaints are sustained. Our study also highlights the importance of having data on which to perform rigorous empirical analysis in order to inform policymakers.

Kyle Rozema, Max M. Schanzenbach

In response to high-profile cases of police misconduct, reformers are calling for greater use of civilian allegations in identifying potential problem officers. This paper applies an Empirical Bayes framework to data on civilian allegations and civil rights litigation in Chicago to assess the predictive value of civilian allegations for serious future misconduct. We find a strong relationship between allegations and future civil rights litigation, especially for the very worst officers. The worst one percent of officers, as measured by civilian allegations, generate almost five times the number of payouts and over four times the total damage payouts in civil rights litigation. These findings suggest that intervention efforts could be fruitfully concentrated among a relatively small group.