Poster #89 - Police Officer Interactions in Arrests, Stops, and Violence

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

Policing often involves interactions between officers, yet much of the existing economics literature focuses on individual officer attributes and decision-making. To the extent that police misconduct is generated or magnified by social interactions, focusing solely on individuals may overlook a key channel for policy intervention.

In this paper, I leverage models of team production to study how police patrol assignments influence officers’ decisions to make investigatory stops, issue arrests, use force, and engage in misconduct. I decompose police patrol outcomes into three channels—officer heterogeneity, interactions, and sorting—by adapting models of team production from labor and personnel economics. While this study focuses on police officers, the insights generated from my model and estimation may be useful in other settings that involve teamwork.

This project draws on large administrative datasets from the Chicago Police Department spanning 2008 to 2018, including daily police shift assignments, investigatory stops, arrests, use-of-force reports, and complaints. Importantly, the panel structure of the data and variation in assignments over time allow for identification of how officer heterogeneity, interactions, and sorting impact joint outcomes. Additionally, institutional features of shift scheduling introduce quasi-randomness in the set of officers available for patrol assignment.

Preliminary findings from model estimation suggest that interactions between pairs of officers on patrol account for a small but meaningful share of variation in the overall number of arrests. Using a random effects model with discrete officer types, I find evidence of nonlinearities in arrest outcomes when the highest-arrest-type officers are paired with officers of other types. These findings suggest that accounting for officer interactions may be consequential when policymakers consider alternative methods for assigning officers to patrol.

Author

• Katherine Kwok, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Presenting Author