Inside the Black Box: Police, Politics, and Communities

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Police are a quintessential state institution, tasked with the fundamental mission of enforcing the state’s monopoly of legitimate coercion. However, the inner workings of police agencies remain a black box, concealed even from the politicians and communities which police serve. This panel brings together scholars that lift the veil of police secrecy to convey key insights about how police work as well as how they relate to politicians and urban communities. These papers tackle the questions of how institutional fragmentation shapes trust in the police; how politics affects police oversight; how police use violence to influence politics; how policing impacts the development of human capital, and who (self)selects into being a police officer. The authors use various methodological approaches, such as statistical analysis, original surveys, experiments, and typology development, to shed light on a fundamental state agency with significant impact over citizens’ lives, particularly in the urban contexts of developing countries.

Sub Unit

• Division 30: Urban Politics

Individual Presentations

• Institutional Origins of Trust in the Police - David Andres Dow, Naval Postgraduate School; Aila M. Matanock, University of California, San Diego; Leonardo R. Arriola, University of California, Merced

• The Political Determinants of Police Oversight: Subnational Variation in Mexico - Martin Macias Medellin, University of Michigan; Kristine Eck, Uppsala University

• Voting with Their Guns: An Integrated Framework of Police Violence - Hernan Flom, Trinity College

• Community Policing and Human Capital Development: Evidence from El Salvador - Carlos Schmidt-Padilla, University of California, Berkeley; Maria Micaela Sviatschi

Chair

• Leonardo R. Arriola University of California, Merced

Discussants

• Leonardo R. Arriola University of California, Merced

• Jessica Zarkin Claremont McKenna College