Police safety, killings by the police, and the militarization of US law enforcement

Abstract

The debate over police use of military equipment often revolves around the supposed tradeoff between increasing police safety and reducing killings by the police. In this paper, I rely on institutional features that exogenously determine the distribution of military equipment to US police departments to show that, contrary to previous evidence, there is no such tradeoff: police militarization increases killings by the police and reduces police safety. Each year police militarization results in 64 additional killings by the police, 12,440 police officer assaults, and 2653 police officer injuries.