Abstract
How does racial representation in law enforcement affect policing outcomes? After all, while passive representation may be intuitively desirable for normative reasons, it should matter most if it leads to changes in the nature and quality of police service provision. This chapter explores the effects of representation on police use of force , both proper and improper. We argue that when the police are more representative of the populations they serve, they should be less likely to behave in ways that harm members of the community. We draw on a number of data sources and outcomes to test this argument. First, we demonstrate that representation is associated with administrative procedures viewed as community-friendly, including formal department policies on how to handle citizen complaints and the presence of a civilian review board to oversee police activities. We then find that increasing representation of Blacks in the police leads to fewer complaints of excessive force . Finally, we look at a more extreme outcome, civilian fatalities caused by the actions of a law enforcement officer. Counterintuitively, we find that representation is associated with a greater number of fatalities. This chapter concludes by suggesting possible explanations for this surprising result.
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Kennedy, B.A., Butz, A.M., Lajevardi, N., Nanes, M.J. (2017). Active Representation in American Policing. In: Race and Representative Bureaucracy in American Policing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53991-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53991-1_5
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