Modern police tactics, police-citizen interactions and the prospects for reform
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This thesis examines the intersection of bureaucratic politics and political behavior, and demonstrates the causes and wide-ranging consequences of government action on public perceptions of institutions and the social world. I devote particular focus to law enforcement agencies which, despite their normative importance as one of the most visible and powerful public bureaucracies, have received relatively scant attention from political scientists to date. This dissertation consists of three papers. In the first paper, I develop and test a theory of how citizens infer the status of social problems by taking cues from the actions of government agents. Using an original data set on SWAT team deployments by local law enforcement agencies alongside a series of survey experiments, I show that when bureaucrats publicly display new tactics, they can unintentionally skew perceptions of the social problems they are tasked with addressing, and undermine their agency's political goals (e.g. securing increased funding), findings with far-reaching implications for the study of bureaucracy, representation and policy development. The second paper, coauthored with Jane Esberg, demonstrates the prevalence, causes and consequences of public misperceptions of social conditions, including crime and unemployment rates. This study first uses over a decade of polling data to show that existing techniques for measuring public misperceptions produce results that are vulnerable to researcher discretion during analysis. After developing an improved technique, we show in a series of survey experiments that providing corrective information on social conditions can lead to massive improvements in the accuracy of public perceptions. We further show that elites who attempt to undermine these corrective facts have only a limited ability to do so. In the third paper, I test the effectiveness of a procedural reform to a highly controversial police tactic, ``Stop, Question and Frisk." Using millions of records of police-citizen interactions alongside officer interviews, I evaluate the impact of a change to the protocol for stopping criminal suspects on police performance in New York City. An interrupted time series analysis shows the directive produced an immediate increase in the rate of stops producing evidence of the suspected crime which motivated these stops. Interviewed officers said the order signaled increased managerial scrutiny, leading them to adopt more conservative tactics. Procedural changes can quickly and dramatically alter officer behavior, suggesting a reform strategy sometimes forestalled by psychological and personality-driven accounts of police behavior.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2017 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Mummolo, Jonathan |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Political Science. |
| Primary advisor | Grimmer, Justin |
| Thesis advisor | Grimmer, Justin |
| Thesis advisor | Moe, Terry M |
| Thesis advisor | Segura, Gary M, 1963- |
| Advisor | Moe, Terry M |
| Advisor | Segura, Gary M, 1963- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Jonathan Mummolo. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Political Science. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2017. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2017 by Jonathan Frank Mummolo
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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