Poster #3 - Addressing an American Injustice: Political and Administrative Effect on Police Reform

• In Event: Friday Poster Reception

Abstract

Since the inception of law enforcement within the United States, relations between police officers and minority communities have been a complex issue which remains today, especially when it concerns Black/ African-American citizens and residents. This may be due to the plagued legacy and challenging past of policing being used as a vehicle to surveil, oppress, and control people and groups of African descent (Alexander 2012; Balto 2019; Rothstein 2017; Work 2001). In turn, this has created the assumption and belief that there is a lack of transparency, accountability, and equitable outcomes among social groups when it concerns justice provision by law enforcement officials (Gonzalez Van Cleve 2016; Gooden 2015; Stevenson 2014).     

Police reform is a salient topic within the political environment of American society which has become more of a major concern after the death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests across the United States and the world during the summer of 2020. This has led to an increase in the extant literature on policing (Headly 2022; Li 2024; Shoub 2022), the perception of policing (Carroll and Yu 2022; Dincer and Johnston 2021; Lee and Nicholson-Crotty 2022; Wright and Headley 2021; Wright, Gaozhao, Dukes, and Templeton 2022), and even the response to police reform (Monties and Gagnon 2022). On the contrary, the public administration literature is deficient in focusing on the drivers that may have led to police reform after the George Floyd incident and during/ after the BLM protests.

This paper contributes to the literature by examining policy changes across the United States at the local level of government and testing the effect that ideology, social identity, and socialization of political and administrative officials has on police reform during and after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. The theoretical frameworks used within this study are political control of the bureaucracy, representative bureaucracy, and organizational socialization. Police reform is examined within a 1-year period (i.e., May 25, 2020 to June 30, 2021) and a 4-year period (i.e., May 25, 2020 to June 30, 2024). Data is retrieved from cities/municipalities with a population of at least 200,000 residents. An event history analysis is employed to examine the timing of an initial policy change happening after the George Floyd incident, along with examining the effect of a mayor’s and police chief’s political affiliation, race/ethnicity, and tenure on timing to an initial reform. Probit regression models are also used to examine the effect that politics, social identity, and term in the office of mayors and police chiefs has on local police departments having an initial reform or not during and after social unrest.

Author

• William T. Jackson, Florida State University
  Presenting Author