Friday, August 24, 2018

Militarized Police are More Often Deployed in Poor Communities

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Militarization fails to enhance police safety or reduce crime but may harm police reputation
Jonathan Mummoloa,b,1
aDepartment of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544; and bWoodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544
Edited by John Hagan, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, and approved July 2, 2018 (received for review March 24, 2018)

The increasingly visible presence of heavily armed police units in American communities has stoked widespread concern over the militarization of local law enforcement. Advocates claim milita- rized policing protects officers and deters violent crime, while critics allege these tactics are targeted at racial minorities and erode trust in law enforcement. Using a rare geocoded census of SWAT team deployments from Maryland, I show that militarized police units are more often deployed in communities with large shares of African American residents, even after control- ling for local crime rates. Further, using nationwide panel data on local police militarization, I demonstrate that militarized policing fails to enhance officer safety or reduce local crime. Finally, using survey experiments—one of which includes a large oversample of African American respondents—I show that seeing militarized police in news reports may diminish police reputation in the mass public. In the case of militarized policing, the results suggest that the often-cited trade-off between public safety and civil liberties is a false choice.
police militarization public safety crime race and policing |bureaucratic reputation


http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/08/14/1805161115