Social Segregation and Discriminatory Policing

• In Event: Carceral Perspectives on State Power

Abstract

The behavior of police officers on the beat has long been a focus of popular and scholarly attention. There is ample evidence that the decisions made by these rank-and-file officers generate racial disparities in, for example, searches, arrests and police shootings. In this paper, we provide a formal theory of policing that offers one explanation for these disparities. Our theory focuses on how the social lives of individual officers affects their relationships with the communities they police.

We assume that police officers form beliefs about crime across communities in a way that is affected by their experiences of crime both on the job and in their personal lives. In the model, if an officer spends less time socializing with members of a particular community, then they will come to form an exaggerated belief about the relative level of crime in that community. This causes the officer to more aggressively police members of that community, leading to discrimination. Notably, discrimination may occur in our model even if police officers harbor no animus toward any social group and crime rates are equal across communities.

The belief formation process we study, while realistic, diverges from the standard Bayesian framework used in most formal models. We thus demonstrate how research from behavioral economics and psychology can be incorporated into formal theoretic research on important political phenomena. By doing so, we also identify an under-appreciated cause of discrimination in the standard political economy framework; we call this "behavioral discrimination."

Because it focuses on the belief formation process of officers, our model provides one possible microfoundation for what has been referred to as "implicit bias." Since disparate treatment and distorted beliefs about groups' relative criminality are joint and mutually reinforcing outcomes, the model underscores how implicit bias can actually be reinforced by policing actions and should not be considered as a fixed feature of an officer's thought process.

Practically, the model suggests that social segregation of police officers, combined with faulty belief formation about crime, poses a problem for police departments seeking to reduce racial disparities. And because implicit bias is reinforced by the work of policing, the findings cast doubt on the efficacy of implicit bias training that is neither persistent nor focused on officers' current experiences of crime at work and in their social lives. The findings also point to some potential avenues for successful reforms, such as measures to diversify police departments and measures to incentivize officers to form social relationships with the members of the communities they police.

Authors

• Ryan Hubert, University of California, Davis

• Andrew Little, University of California-Berkeley