Police demilitarization and violent crime
| Autor: | Kenneth Lowande |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
0303 health sciences
Leverage (finance) Social Psychology Law enforcement Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Criminology Violence Violent crime Police United States Officer 03 medical and health sciences Behavioral Neuroscience Intervention (law) 0302 clinical medicine Political science Scale (social sciences) Humans Weapons Administration (government) 030217 neurology & neurosurgery 030304 developmental biology Militarization |
| Zdroj: | Nature human behaviour. 5(2) |
| ISSN: | 2397-3374 |
| Popis: | Policymakers and advocates make contradictory claims about the effects of providing military equipment to local law enforcement, but this intervention is not well understood because of severe data limitations and inferential challenges. I use 3.8 million archived inventory records to estimate the magnitude of sources of bias in existing studies of the 1033 Program. I show that most variation in militarization comes from previously unobserved sources, which implies that studies that show crime-reduction benefits are unreliable. I then leverage recent policy changes to evaluate the effect of military equipment: the Obama Administration recalled property under Executive Order 13688, which resulted in a forced demilitarization of several hundred departments. Difference-in-difference estimates of agencies that retained similar equipment show negligible or undetectable impacts on violent crime or officer safety. These findings do not suggest that similar scale federal reforms designed to demilitarize police would have the downside risks proposed by proponents of military transfers. Lowande shows that existing estimates of the effect of police militarization in the United States are based on incomplete data. When military surplus was recalled from local police, there were negligible or undetectable impacts on violent crime and officer safety. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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