Local Budget Stress and Discriminatory Policing

• In Event: Law, Courts, and the U.S. Criminal Justice System

Abstract

When local governments experience negative budgetary shocks (shortfalls), police may be given incentives to increase traffic enforcement to generate revenue. This project asks whether officers discriminate against racial and ethnic minorities when increasing their enforcement activities under these conditions. Beginning in 2001, Missouri required local law enforcement to record incident-level data for all vehicular stops, which are then aggregated for each police agency/sheriff’s department into the Missouri Attorney General's Racial Profiling database. We combine these data with local government financial data to determine whether police officers discriminate against members of racial and ethnic minority groups when they are operating under incentives to increase traffic tickets. The broad contribution of this project is the identification of some of the ways in which local governments may be supporting discrimination and inequality by connecting their policing practices with budgetary policies.

Authors

• Elliott Ash, University of Warwick

• Jeffrey Fagan, Columbia University

• Allison P. Harris, Pennsylvania State University