Publications

Andrew McCall (2019).  "Resident Assistance, Police Chief Learning, and the Persistence of Aggressive Policing Tactics in Black Neighborhoods.  Journal of Politics, 81(3 ), 1133-1142. 

Laura Stoker and Andrew McCall (2017). ``The Quest for Representative Survey Samples" in The Routledge Handbook of Elections, Voting Behavior and Public Opinion, Justin  Fisher, Edward Fieldhouse, Mark N. Franklin, Rachel Gibson, Marta Cantijoch, and Christopher Wlezien (eds.), Routledge. 

Police Department Design, Political Pressure, and Racial Inequality in Arrests

Abstract:  This paper theorizes a source of bias in discretionary arrests: strategic limits on police officer learning.    Within policing organizations led by chiefs with special expertise in crime control, the chief's assignments are a source of information about the most effective practices.  However, if the officers are uncertain whether their chief is independent of political pressures, the chief's assignments will be less persuasive when they align with what political advocates want.  In general, this mechanism represents a constraint on the effectiveness of professional police departments, where chiefs have limited means to force officer compliance with directives.   In the post-civil rights era, this institutional inefficiency would have constrained the set of circumstances in which police officers could learn that they should reduce the intensity of arrests on Black residents.