Bocar Ba, Haosen Ge, Jacob Kaplan, et al., Political diversity in U.S. police agencies, American Journal of Political Science, 14 february 2025, https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12945.
Abstract: Partisans are divided on policing policy, which may affect officer behavior. We merge rosters from 99 of the 100 largest local U.S. agencies—over one third of local law enforcement agents nationwide—with voter files to study police partisanship. Police skew more Republican than their jurisdictions, with notable exceptions. Using fine-grained data in Chicago and Houston, we compare behavior of Democratic and Republican officers facing common circumstances. We find minimal partisan differences after correcting for multiple comparisons. But consistent with prior work, we find Black and Hispanic officers make fewer stops and arrests in Chicago, and Black officers use force less often in both cities. Comparing same-race partisans, we find White Democrats make more violent crime arrests than White Republicans in Chicago. Our results suggest that despite Republicans' preference for more punitive law enforcement policy and their overrepresentation in policing, partisan divisions often do not translate into detectable differences in on-the-ground enforcement.
I wonder why that is. My guess, and that is all that it is, is that the reason that “partisan divisions often do not translate into detectable differences in on-the-ground enforcement” is to be found in the training the police receive. I social worker I know once told me that she was trained to treat all clients equally regardless of her personal preferences. I can imagine that police officers receive the same kind of training.
H/t Tyler Cowen.
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