Resident Assistance, Police Chief Learning, and the Persistence of Aggressive Policing Tactics in Black Neighborhoods

Abstract

While scholars have identified ways that racial conservatives exerted outsized influence on criminal justice policies, little attention has been paid to whether police departments have incentives to learn about and adopt reforms that reduce racial disparity. I present a game of imperfect information between residents and a municipal police chief to show that a chief’s inability to prevent officer behavior that residents perceive to be abusive, coupled with resident unwillingness to assist police in the aftermath of this behavior, creates an incentive for the chief to choose and learn about new policing strategies that rely less on resident assistance. This induces a bias in favor of aggressive over collaborative tactics in the police chief’s policy selection and learning decisions. Segregation and discrimination ensured that many black Americans lived in conditions that produced this result in the later twentieth century; thus, the model shows structural racism in local police policy making.