Explaining Racial Bias in Arrest

• In Event: 4155 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 5. Effects of Race & Place on Policing Policy and Practice

Abstract

Even as the number of arrests in the United States is decreasing, the gap between African American and white arrests continues to expand. In this paper we test 6 important sociological and police organizational hypothesis to identify mechanisms that explain this growing racial bias in arrest. By creating an innovative data merger of demographic and policing data sources we are able to use confirmatory factor analysis and fixed effects models to evaluate how each of our 6 hypotheses affect racial bias in arrest standardized by agency-year from 1999-2012. We find that economic competition and police accountability have initial bias decreasing effects, but after a certain number of lagged years, appear to actually have an increasing effect of racial bias in arrest. Research and policy implications of these findings are discussed.

Authors

• Kat Albrecht, Northwestern University

• Beth Redbird, Northwestern University