Publications

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

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 street-level 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.

Professional Standards are Political Strategy: A Theory of Local Bureaucratic Professionalization

Professional associations of bureaucrats coordinate members that control agencies across many state and local governments, but political scientists have not studied them as an independent political force. Using historical sources I show police professional associations crafted model policies and a collective public image in order to win greater collective independence from local governments. I then analyze a game theoretic model of how an association defines professional standards for local bureaucracies, showing the effect of association preferences on policy depends on the disagreement between local governments. When local governments agree a national association can choose the direction of policy in all jurisdictions, but when local governments polarize an association’s commitment to broad membership constraints their choices to the political middle-ground.