A recent paper by Bocar Ba (Penn) and Roman Rivera (Columbia), The Effect of Police Oversight on Crime and Allegations of Misconduct: Evidence from Chicago, considers whether increased police oversight mechanisms contribute to increased crime levels as well as citizens' complaints about police conduct. In addition to what the paper finds, how the authors execute their research design also warrants note.
“[W]e do not find evidence that crime increases when [police] self-monitoring increases. We do find evidence that rates of property crime, murder, and robbery increase significantly after the scandal. Our preferred specification indicates that the OIS Scandal is associated with 18.4 additional murders in Chicago per month (p>0.01) in the year following the scandal. For comparison, self-monitoring is associated with fewer than two extra murders per month, but this is not statistically significant from zero.”
Aside from plumbing a rich source of data, this paper sets out to adjust for what it terms “simultaneity bias” that arises because “[police department] scandals induce officers to increase self-monitoring as a form of self-protection against misconduct accusations and further scandal. However, as a result of the civil unrest and civilian distrust following a scandal, civilians simultaneously become more critical of officer actions and less likely to obey laws and authorities.” To adjust for “simultaneity bias” the paper exploits events that only influence police monitoring incentives and not civilian incentives (e.g., civilian complaints about policing). Two factors are critical to the paper’s success. One involves the plausibility of such events performing as assumed. Another pertains to the generalizability of Chicago’s (admittedly enviable) granular data aggregated at the police beat-level.
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