Police professionalism and racial disparities in arrest rates : an examination of police discrimination, discretion, and diversity
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- It is highly debated in both academia and civil discourse whether U.S. police agencies are professional, performing their duties impersonally and expertly. In particular, there is much concern that U.S. police agencies discriminate against black men. This dissertation examines the prevalence and causes of such discrimination, seeking to better understand and increase police professionalism. Using data from the 2013 National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and the 2013 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS), this dissertation employs multilevel modeling to estimate black and white criminal offenders' relative arrest likelihoods across different police agencies. The use of national data on criminal offenses allows me to condition on criminal behavior and examine police treatment of black and white men net of criminal behavior. This is a novel contribution that greatly improves our understanding of police discrimination in the U.S. My analyses of 956,434 criminal offenders reported for nine common offenses do not find evidence that police agencies discriminate against black offenders. In fact, black men are often less likely than white men to face arrest after committing the same criminal offense. This is the case even in police agencies that use more discretion when investigating reported offenses and with more officers of color. These findings suggest that black men's over-representation in the criminal justice system cannot be overcome simply by reducing police discretion and increasing police diversity. Moreover, arrest rate disparities are likely to persist even in the absence of police discrimination against black men, since 35 percent of reported male offenders are black. Overcoming racial disparities in arrest rates will require multipronged interventions that account for the complexity of this issue, including racial disparities in criminal behavior reported by victims, witnesses, and police officers. It is possible that criminal reports are exceedingly biased, which would help explain these findings, as well as the large racial disparities in arrest rates observed today.
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 | Roesler, Katharina Hannah |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Sociology. |
| Primary advisor | Young, Cristobal |
| Thesis advisor | Young, Cristobal |
| Thesis advisor | Rosenfeld, Michael J, 1966- |
| Thesis advisor | Snipp, C. Matthew |
| Advisor | Rosenfeld, Michael J, 1966- |
| Advisor | Snipp, C. Matthew |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Katharina Hannah Roesler. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Sociology. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2017. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2017 by Katharina Hannah Roesler
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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