While agreement on a common set of metrics facilitates longitudinal studies as well as comparisons across studies, these benefits should not deter fresh new thinking about new sources of data that inform lingering research questions. A new paper by Aurelie Ouss (Penn--criminology) and John Rappaport (Chicago), Is Police Behavior Getting Worse? The Importance of Data Selection in Evaluating the Police, illustrates this point nicely. In it, the authors' analysis of police conduct draws from traditional data sources, including litigation levels and municipal settlement payouts, as well as a relatively new data source: liability insurance claims.
Exploiting 23 years worth of liability insurance data, involving 350 law enforcement agencies and a single insurance carrier, the paper finds that "while lawsuits and [settlement] payouts have trended upwards over the past decade, insurance claims have declined." What the authors conclude is that: "... police behavior is not getting worse; rather, public responses to policing harms are intensifying."
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