TY - JOUR
T1 - Militarization fails to enhance police safety or reduce crime but may harm police reputation
AU - Mummolo, Jonathan
N1 - Funding Information:
for funding the department in the news article also fell. A close reading and text analysis of open-ended responses suggest that treated respondents were less supportive of police funding because militarized equipment gave the impression that the agency was already well funded (see SI Appendix, Fig. S10 and discussion in SI Appendix, section 2E).
Funding Information:
I thank Justin Grimmer, Alexandra Blackman, Courtenay Conrad, Ted Enamorado, Andrew Guess, Jens Hainmueller, Andrew Hall, Dorothy Kronick, Amy Lerman, Neil Malhotra, Steve Mello, Tali Mendelberg, Naomi Murukawa, Terry Moe, Erik Peterson, Jonathan Rodden, Gary Segura, Mike Tomz, Sean Westwood, Vesla Weaver, Lauren Wright, and Yiqing Xu for their guidance throughout this project. I thank Helene Wood, Madeleine Marr, and Grace Masback for research assistance. This work was funded by Stanford University, Princeton University, and National Science Foundation Grant 15-571.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 National Academy of Sciences. All Rights Reserved.
PY - 2018/9/11
Y1 - 2018/9/11
N2 - 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 militarized 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 controlling 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.
AB - 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 militarized 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 controlling 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.
KW - Bureaucratic reputation
KW - Crime
KW - Police militarization
KW - Public safety
KW - Race and policing
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85052984294&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85052984294&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1073/pnas.1805161115
DO - 10.1073/pnas.1805161115
M3 - Article
C2 - 30126997
AN - SCOPUS:85052984294
SN - 0027-8424
VL - 115
SP - 9181
EP - 9186
JO - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
IS - 37
ER -