Much of late has been made of: 1) "problematic" policing in general and 2) police activity that appears to be "budget-driven." A recent paper by Elliot Ash (Warwick) et al., Local Public Finance and Discriminatory Policing: Evidence from Traffic Stops in Missouri, takes an interesting step at trying to connect some of these dots.
As to "problematic" policing practices, the paper references a "large literature has documented that traffic police disproportionately target black and Hispanic drivers when making stops." Another seemingly unrelated literature explores the "public-finance motivations underlying aggressive policing. It is well-documented that local governments rely on revenue from traffic tickets, and officials often look to this source of revenue to help overcome budget shortfalls."
This paper sets out to empirically explore 'the intersection of race, policing, and this form of latent taxation, to determine whether the burden to close budget gaps falls disproportionately on non-white motorists and pedestrians." Specifically, the authors assess whether "police officers’ ticketing behaviors are discriminatory, and in particular, whether the disparity in ticketing changes when a municipality is faced with governmental pressures to increase ticketing revenue."
To do so the paper exploits two main sources of data. One source involves Missouri government finance data. A second source involves "agency-level traffic stops data, used to construct measures of traffic enforcement effort across races. There are 769 agencies in the sample, for which we have 13 years of annual panel data from 2000 through 2012."
While part of the paper's findings will unlikely surprise many, another part likely will. First, as it relates to "public-finance [or budget] motivated police conduct," the authors find that a "decrease in government revenue growth the previous year is associated with a higher citation rate." Second, as it relates to discriminatory policing, the authors find that this budget-stress-motivated increased enforcement activity (tickets and arrests) fell disproportionately on white drivers and not on non-white drivers. The paper's abstract follows.
"This paper provides evidence of racial variation in local governments’ traffic enforcement responses to budget stress using data from policing agencies in the state of Missouri for the years 2001 through 2014. Like previous studies, we find that local budget stress is associated with higher citation rates. In addition, we find that there is an increase in traffic-stop arrests. However, we find that these effects are concentrated among white (rather than black or Hispanic) drivers. This statistical difference is robust to the inclusion of a range of covariates for traffic stops and to the inclusion of local population features interacted with year. These results are consistent with a model where traffic police selectively target higher-income drivers to compensate for budget stress. Also consistent with this view, we find that the racial difference in citation and arrest rates is highest where the white-to-black income ratio is highest."
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