Dallas Police Department Research Articles

‘The bar is different as a woman’: A thematic analysis of career advice given by female police officers

Abstract In an effort to reduce gender disparities in policing and move beyond the current legitimacy crisis faced by the profession, there has been a renewed focus on increasing the recruitment and retention of female police officers. Beyond understanding why current female officers have remained in the field, it is important to understand why some have left the profession altogether. The current study employs deductive and inductive coding of a mixed-methods self-report survey from 154 current and former female officers in the Dallas Police Department (DPD). We sought to examine the advice that current and former female police officers would give to other women who might want to enter or promote within policing. Responses highlighted challenges related to the impact on family life, navigating the male-dominated culture, maintaining one’s sense of identity and integrity, and creating strong social support networks. Implications for the DPD and other agencies are discussed.

Is Police Misconduct Contagious? Non-trivial Null Findings from Dallas, Texas

ObjectivesUnderstanding if police malfeasance might be “contagious” is vital to identifying efficacious paths to police reform. Accordingly, we investigate whether an officer’s propensity to engage in misconduct is associated with her direct, routine interaction with colleagues who have themselves engaged in misbehavior in the past.MethodsRecognizing the importance of analyzing the actual social networks spanning a police force, we use data on collaborative responses to 1,165,136 “911” calls for service by 3475 Dallas Police Department (DPD) officers across 2013 and 2014 to construct daily networks of front-line interaction. And we relate these cooperative networks to reported and formally sanctioned misconduct on the part of the DPD officers during the same time period using repeated-events survival models.ResultsEstimates indicate that the risk of a DPD officer engaging in misconduct is not associated with the disciplined misbehavior of her ad hoc, on-the-scene partners. Rather, a greater risk of misconduct is associated with past misbehavior, officer-specific proneness, the neighborhood context of patrol, and, in some cases, officer race, while departmental tenure is a mitigating factor.ConclusionsOur observational findings—based on data from one large police department in the United States—ultimately suggest that actor-based and ecological explanations of police deviance should not be summarily dismissed in favor of accounts emphasizing negative socialization, where our study design also raises the possibility that results are partly driven by unobserved trait-based variation in the situations that officers find themselves in. All in all, interventions focused on individual officers, including the termination of deviant police, may be fruitful for curtailing police misconduct—where early interventions focused on new offenders may be key to avoiding the escalation of deviance.

Racial Disparities in Crime Victimization during the COVID-19 Lockdown.

The study examines racial differences in crime victimization rates among Black, Hispanic and White individuals during the stay-at-home order in Dallas city, TX. The study is based on sample of 85,958 calls for service recorded by Dallas Police Department between February 13, 2019, and April 30, 2020, where victims have been identified and their race is known. The findings suggest that Blacks were less likely to experience unintended drop in crime rates during the lockdown and also less likely to see decline in crimes against property when compared to both White and Hispanic victims. At the same time Blacks were more likely to experience increase in crimes committed at the apartments during the lockdown with Black females experiencing higher increase than Black males. There were no differences in crime victimization for incidents occurred in public places and crimes against persons.

The effect of immigration enforcement on crime reporting: Evidence from Dallas

Mistrust between immigrants and the police may undermine law enforcement’s ability to keep communities safe. This paper documents that immigration policies affect an individual’s willingness to report crime. I analyze the 2015 Priority Enforcement Program, which focused immigration enforcement on individuals convicted of serious crimes and shifted resources away from immigration-related offenses. I use data from the Dallas Police Department that include a complainant’s ethnicity to show that the number of violent and property crimes reported to the police by Hispanics increased by 4 percent after the introduction of PEP. These results suggest that reducing enforcement of individuals who do not pose a threat to public safety can potentially improve trust between immigrant communities and the police.

Police Presence, Rapid Response Rates, and Crime Prevention

AbstractThis paper estimates the impact of police presence on crime using a unique database that tracks the exact location of Dallas Police Department patrol cars throughout 2009. To address the concern that officer location is often driven by crime, my instrument exploits police responses to calls outside their allocated coverage beat. This variable provides a plausible shift in police presence within the abandoned beat that is driven by the police goal of minimizing response times. I find that a 10% decrease in police presence at that location results in a 7% increase in crime. This result sheds light on the black box of policing and crime and suggests that routine changes in police patrol can have a significant impact on criminal behavior.

Breaking the Chain: How Arrests Reduce the Probability of Near Repeat Crimes

Objectives: Near repeat patterns have been identified for a host of different crimes, but effective strategies to reduce near repeats have had more variable results. This study identifies near repeat crime patterns in Dallas, TX, and examines the effects of an arrest on reducing the probability of future crime. Method: Using open-source crime data from the Dallas Police Department from July 2014 through June 2018, we identified near repeat patterns for shootings, interpersonal robberies, residential burglaries, and thefts from motor vehicles. Logistic regression models were used to test the effect of an arrest on reducing near repeat crimes; controls for geographic, demographic, and temporal factors were included in each model. Results: Near repeat calculations suggest violent crime clustered closely in time and space, with property crime dispersed over larger spatial and temporal dimensions. Across all four crime types, findings suggest arrests resulted in 20%–40% reductions in a near repeat follow-up crime. Conclusions: In line with past research on shootings, arrests reduced the likelihood of subsequent crimes. This suggests policing strategies to increase arrests may be a fruitful way to reduce near repeat crime patterns.

Can police shootings be reduced by requiring officers to document when they point firearms at citizens?

ObjectiveTo examine the impact of a novel firearm ‘pointing’ policy that requires officers to document when they directly point their guns at citizens.MethodsSixteen years (2003–2018) of narrative officer-involved shooting (OIS)...

Redrawing Hot Spots of Crime in Dallas, Texas

In this work we evaluate the predictive capability of identifying long term, micro place hot spots in Dallas, Texas. We create hot spots using a clustering algorithm, using law enforcement cost of responding to crime estimates as weights. Relative to the much larger current hot spot areas defined by the Dallas Police Department, our identified hot spots are much smaller (under 3 square miles), and capture crime cost at a higher density. We also show that the clustering algorithm captures a wide array of hot spot types; some one or two addresses, some street segments, and others an agglomeration of larger areas. This suggests identifying hot spots based on a specific unit of aggregation (e.g. addresses, street segments), may be less efficient than using a clustering technique in practice.

The effect of suspect race on police officers’ decisions to draw their weapons

Researchers are working to identify appropriate benchmarks for exploring racial bias in the officer-involved shooting (OIS) context. Two recent studies benchmarked OIS against incidents in which officers drew weapons but did not shoot. A problem is that the decision to draw a weapon may itself be subject to bias. Using 2017 use-of-force data from the Dallas Police Department, we modeled officers’ decisions to draw their weapons as a function of suspect race and other suspect, officer, and incident characteristics. We benchmarked by limiting analyses to arrest and active aggression cases, thereby excluding interactions in which it was less likely suspects would have had weapons drawn against them. The key finding was that black suspects were no more or less likely to have weapons drawn against them than other suspects.

Race/ethnicity composition of police officers in officer-involved shootings

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to evaluate officer and civilian race/ethnicity disparities during ten years of officer-involved shootings (OIS).Design/methodology/approachInternal affairs, personnel and geospatial data were triangulated for 253 OIS at the Dallas Police Department from 2005 to 2015. Multinomial regression models were used to evaluate the relationship between civilian and officer race/ethnicity in OIS, controlling for officer, situational and neighborhood factors.FindingsIn total, 48 percent of unique OIS involved a non-Hispanic black civilian and most OIS occurred in Hispanic majority neighborhoods (48 percent). Officer age and number of shooters on scene were the only variables significantly associated with officer race/ethnicity. Most notably, officer race/ethnicity was not associated with the race/ethnicity of the civilian during OIS incidents.Originality/valueThere is limited scientific evidence on whether officers of certain races/ethnicities are disproportionately likely to engage in OIS with civilians of a particular race/ethnicity due to the relative rarity of such events.

Factors associated with civilian and police officer injury during 10 years of officer-involved shooting incidents

BackgroundPrevious officer-involved shooting (OIS) research has focused primarily on antecedents to fatal shootings, with few studies investigating injury more broadly. Our study examined the factors associated with fatal or non-fatal...

Is It Cool to Be a Cop? Exploring the Differential Impact of Ferguson on Police Applicants

AbstractRecruitment of highly qualified applicants has been a defining characteristic of police reforms for decades. Research has explored why individuals become officers, yet it remains an empirical question whether the current US ‘legitimacy crisis’ has influenced citizen decisions to apply to policing. Many cities are reporting hiring and retention issues, yet it is unclear whether this is due to changes in citizen perceptions of police or something else entirely. As an initial test of this question, this paper explores changes in the number of applicants to one large urban police agency, the Dallas Police Department, in the months following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, using autoregressive integrated moving average time-series analysis. The paper determines if there was a differential impact in police applications across racial, ethnic, and gender groups. Findings showed stability in the number of applicants each month from each sub-group since 2010. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Hitting (or missing) the mark

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine police shooting accuracy and the factors that influence whether officers hit, or miss, their intended target.Design/methodology/approachDescriptive statistics explore both incident-level and hit rate shooting accuracy in single officer/single suspect shooting incidents in the Dallas Police Department between 2003 and 2017. Multiple regression models analyze the predictive utility of officer, suspect and situational factors on the two accuracy outcomes.FindingsConsistent with prior research, the results demonstrate that officers are often inaccurate in officer-involved shooting (OIS) incidents. Additionally, several factors emerged as significant predictors of shooting accuracy.Practical implicationsThe results are discussed in terms of the practical implications for training and accountability.Originality/valueIt has been more than a decade since the last academic study investigated this important topic using actual OIS data. Acknowledging the general dearth of this literature, this study explores what factors contribute to shooting accuracy.

The Effect of Immigration Enforcement on Crime Reporting: Evidence from the Priority Enforcement Program

Weak trust between immigrants and law enforcement may undermine law enforcement agencies' ability to keep communities safe. This paper documents that an immigrant's willingness to report crime is affected by immigration enforcement policies. I analyze the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP), which was launched by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in 2015. Under PEP, ICE focused enforcement efforts on immigrants convicted of serious crimes and shifted resources away from immigration-related offenses, thereby lowering the cost to immigrants of reporting crime to the police. I use incident-level data from the Dallas Police Department that include the name and ethnicity of all complainants to show that the number of incidents reported by Hispanic individuals increased by 10 percent after the launch of PEP. The results of this study suggest that reducing immigration enforcement of individuals who do not pose a threat to public safety can potentially be one way to enhance trust between immigrant communities and the police.

Does military veteran status and deployment history impact officer involved shootings? A case-control study.

Despite veterans' preference hiring policies by law enforcement agencies, no studies have examined the nature or effects of military service or deployments on health outcomes. This study will examine the effect of military veteran status and deployment history on law enforcement officer (LEO)-involved shootings. Ten years of data were extracted from Dallas Police Department records. LEOs who were involved in a shooting in the past 10 years were frequency matched on sex to LEOs never involved in a shooting. Military discharge records were examined to quantify veteran status and deployment(s). Multivariable logistic regression was used to estimate the effect of veteran status and deployment history on officer-involved shooting involvement. Records were abstracted for 516 officers. In the adjusted models, veteran LEOs who were not deployed were significantly more likely to be involved in a shooting than non-veteran officers. Veterans with a deployment history were 2.9 times more likely to be in a shooting than non-veteran officers. Military veteran status, regardless of deployment history, is associated with increased odds of shootings among LEOs. Future studies should identify mechanisms that explain this relationship, and whether officers who experienced firsthand combat exposure experience greater odds of shooting involvement.

Hegel, the Struggle for Recognition, and Robots

While the mediational theories of Don Ihde and Peter-Paul Verbeek have helped to uncover the role that technologies play in ethical life, the role that technologies play in political life has received far less attention. In order to fill in this gap, I turn to the mediational theory of Hegel. Hegel shows how understanding the mediated nature of experience is vital to understanding the development of political life. Through examples found in the military, in particular concerning the relationship between explosive ordnance detonation (EOD) soldiers and robots, I illustrate how Hegel’s analysis of the “struggle for recognition” can be used to understand human-technology relations from a political perspective. This political perspective can consequently help us to appreciate how technologies come to have a role in political life through our ability to experience solidarity with technology. Solidarity is experienced by users due to the recognition of technologies as serving roles in society that I describe as functionally equivalent to the social roles of the user. The realization of this functional equivalence allows users to learn how they are perceived and respected by society through the experience of how functionally equivalent technologies are perceived and respected. I conclude by focusing on the importance of understanding functional equivalence in design, as well as in the case of the Dallas Police Department having turned an EOD robot from a life-saving to a life-taking device. These examples show why Hegel is necessary for helping us to understand the political significance of recognizing and of misrecognizing technologies.

What Factors Influence an Officer’s Decision to Shoot? The Promise and Limitations of Using Public Data

We analyze a set of 207 Dallas Police Department officer-involved shooting incidents in reference to 1,702 instances in which officers from the same agency drew their firearms but did not shoot at the suspect. We find that situational factors of whether the suspect was armed and whether an officer was injured were the best predictors of the decision to shoot. We also find that African Americans are less likely than Whites to be shot. It is important to collect data on encounters in which weapons are and are not discharged. Analyses examining only shootings is fundamentally limited in assessing racial bias.

Dissecting the Complexities of the Relationship Between Police Officer-Civilian Race/Ethnicity Dyads and Less-Than-Lethal Use of Force.

To examine how sublethal use-of-force patterns vary across officer-civilian race/ethnicity while accounting for officer-, civilian-, and situational-level factors. We extracted cross-sectional data from 5630 use-of-force reports from the Dallas Police Department in 2014 and 2015. We categorized each officer-civilian interaction into race/ethnicity dyads. We used multilevel, mixed logistic regression models to evaluate the relationship between race/ethnicity dyads and the types of use of force. Forty-eight percent of use-of-force interactions occurred between a White officer and a non-White civilian (White-non-White). In bivariate models, the odds of hard-empty hand control and intermediate weapon use were significantly higher among White-Black dyads compared with White-White dyads. The bivariate odds of intermediate weapon use were also significantly higher among Black-Black, Hispanic-White, Black-Hispanic, and Hispanic-Black dyads compared with White-White dyads. However, after we controlled for individual and situational factors, the relationship between race/ethnicity dyad and hard-empty hand control was no longer significant. Although we observed significant bivariate relationships between race/ethnicity dyads and use of force, these relationships largely dissipated after we controlled for other factors.

Gradual escalation of use-of-force reduces police officer injury

ObjectiveTo examine how escalation through the force continuum predicts officer injury in the presence of citizen aggression, while controlling for extraneous factors, like citizen and officer characteristics.MethodsCross-sectional data were extracted...

Do Changes in TASER Use Policy Affect Police Officer Injury Rates?

The addition of TASERs as a less lethal use-of-force option for police officers has facilitated much discussion in recent scholarship. Many police agencies have responded with force policy changes specific to appropriate applications for these weapons. While the goal of these changes is often to minimize concern about injury to citizens, debate rests on whether injury rates for officers are influenced by such transitions in policy. The present study used officer injury panel data from the City of Dallas (Texas) Human Resources Department to assess the impact of a 2005 modification to the Dallas Police Department’s TASER policy. The goal of the study was to assess change in the rate of officer injury after the implementation of a more restrictive policy. We observed a modest increase in the monthly rate of police officer injuries following the policy restricting use. These results were found net of other effects, with some noteworthy between-patrol-division variation. Implications for TASER use policy and future research are discussed within.