Recognition in the US: Addressing Racial Bias in Policing
A theme that commonly arises in conversations about our book has to do with its applicability to contexts beyond the ethnically-charged civil wars upon which we focus. We write briefly in the conclusion about how the lens of our theory may help to uncover important dimensions of political conflicts over ethnic and racial inequality in North America and Europe and offer some strategies to address them. We are especially eager to learn from scholars who study these issues to see if and how this may be the case. We are delighted to present thoughts from Anna Harvey and Taylor Mattia, who recently circulated a fascinating study entitled Reducing Racial Disparities in Crime Victimization. We are thrilled that they agreed to further discuss their work and ours, here.
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Recognition in the US: Addressing Racial Bias in Policing
Guest post by Anna Harvey, Professor of Politics, Affiliated Professor of Data Science, Affiliated Professor of Law, and Director of the Public Safety Lab at New York University, and Taylor Mattia, a PhD candidate in the NYU Politics Department and an incoming post-doctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration at the University of Pennsylvania.
Elisabeth King and Cyrus Samii’s important new book, Diversity, Violence and Recognition: How Recognizing Ethnic Identity Promotes Peace (Oxford 2020), makes the well-grounded empirical case that majority-group governments that formally recognize minority groups in their institutional designs experience less minority-group exclusion, less violence, more economic growth, and more democratic politics.
One question is the generalizability of King and Samii’s findings with respect to recognition-based policies such as affirmative action. We have studied law enforcement agencies in the United States that systematically discriminated against Black applicants in hiring and promotion decisions, and that were subjected to affirmative action plans in hiring and promotion as remedies to address this prior discrimination (United States v. Paradise, 480 U.S. 149, 1987). Our findings are consistent with those of King and Samii (Harvey and Mattia 2021, Probable Causation episode).
Our work was motivated by the existence of widespread civil unrest in the U.S. over persistent racial disparities in policing, including racial disparities in the use of enforcement actions and in crime victimization. Several recent studies have reported compelling evidence that racial disparities in the use of police enforcement actions, including the issuance of citations, the use of force, and the size of fines, are due at least in part to racially discriminatory actions by police officers (West 2018, Hoekstra and Sloan 2020, Goncalves and Mello 2021). Persistent racial disparities in crime victimization may also be due to racially discriminatory police responses to reported crime. Police officers may exert less effort to respond to crime experienced by Black victims, leading to lower clearance rates (through arrests or prosecutions) and potentially less deterrence for crimes experienced by Black victims, relative to crimes experienced by white victims.
We hypothesized that police departments that tolerate racially discriminatory responses to crime victimization may also tolerate racially discriminatory practices throughout their organizations, including in the hiring and promotion of Black officers. Interventions (or the threat of interventions) that compel agencies to reduce racially discriminatory employment practices, including through affirmative steps to hire and promote more Black officers, may also reduce racially discriminatory responses to crime victimization.
We leveraged idiosyncratic variation in the litigation of law enforcement agencies for racially discriminatory employment practices between 1979 and 1986 to identify changes in the nature of the police response to crime victimization. These cases were generally brought by Black applicants and officers who sought to remove barriers to their employment and promotion in law enforcement agencies; some cases were brought and/or joined by the Department of Justice. During litigation, plaintiffs in these cases could (and did) introduce evidence about discriminatory police responses to crime victimization to support their claims that agencies tolerated discriminatory practices more generally, and to make the case for affirmative steps to hire more Black officers.
In the case brought against the Chicago Police Department (CPD) in 1973, for example, the plaintiffs introduced testimony about the disparate CPD response to calls for service from Black neighborhoods, including not responding to calls, responding too slowly, refusing to take reports or to investigate crime complaints, and using force against those reporting crime victimization. The plaintiffs argued for the recruitment and employment of more Black officers “to serve and protect the [B]lack citizenry which is so desperately in need of that service and protection” (United States v. City of Chicago, 411 F. Supp. 218, N.D. Ill. 1976). Within two months of litigation onset, the CPD Superintendent had resigned; his replacement had promised “elimination of police misconduct, a reduction in street crime, police respect for citizens and the public’s respect for policemen;” and Mayor Richard Daley had promised to diversify the department.
Using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey between 1979 and 2004, and a series of estimators informed by recent developments in the econometrics literature, we found more generally that litigation over racially discriminatory employment practices in law enforcement agencies substantially reduced both absolute and relative Black crime victimization. We explored possible causal mechanisms, finding that litigation over racially discriminatory employment practices a) increased the reporting of victimization to law enforcement by Black victims, but not by white victims, b) increased trust in the expected police response to victimization by both Black and white victims, but more so for Black victims (along the lines of what King and Samii refer to as the “assuring effects” of recognition based policies like affirmative action), and c) consistent with the existing literature, increased Black officer shares and decreased white officer shares.
To date, protests over racial disparities in policing in the U.S. have largely focused on calls to defund police departments. But if we want better and more equitable policing, our findings suggest that we need police departments to act aggressively to root out discriminatory employment practices in their departments, and to proactively recruit, hire, and promote more Black officers. This may actually require more rather than less funding allocated to policing. We know from other contexts that job applicants actively avoid workplaces in which they are likely to face discriminatory and harassing behavior, and that these applicants may require compensatory pay or amenities as inducement to apply for jobs in these workplaces (Folke and Rickne 2020). Recruiting more Black officers may also require investment in targeted and evidence-based outreach and marketing campaigns (Linos et al 2017). Increasing resources devoted to the enforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 against police departments may also be necessary.
The primary function of police departments is to provide public safety. Our findings indicate that departments will perform that function more effectively and more equitably if they invest in creating inclusive and non-discriminatory workplace environments, including taking affirmative steps to recruit, hire, and promote more Black police officers.
