Join Criminal Justice @ SPIA for our spring lunch seminar with Steve Mello, assistant professor of economics at Dartmouth College.

Abstract: We examine racial discrimination in police use of force. A pervasive issue in studies of policing is that the available data are selected by the police. If officers discriminate when choosing whom to select into the data, disparities measured in the data will suffer from selection bias. We use a simple conceptual framework to show how a disparity of interest in the selected sample can be corrected for this bias with an estimate of the racial composition of the potentially-selected sample. We then develop a new approach for estimating this parameter which relies on variation in enforcement intensity across officers. Using administrative data on arrests and force incidents from Chicago and Seattle, we find that Black citizens comprise 56 percent of arrestees but only 50 percent of potential arrestees, indicating selection bias in conditional force disparities among arrestees. Correcting the racial disparity in force rates in the selected sample of arrestees increases the Black-White gap in the likelihood of facing force by about 75 percent.

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