The Pro-Social Motivations of Police Officers (draft)
with Felipe Goncalves
Does Proactive Policing Really Increase Major Crime? Accounting for an Ecological Fallacy (draft)
with David Mitre Becerril and Morgan Williams Jr.
The COVID-19 Pandemic, Domestic Violence and the Riskiness of Alcohol Consumption (draft) (NBER working paper #28523) with Shooshan Danagoulian and Monica Deza
with Felipe Goncalves
- How do public sector workers balance their pro-social motivations with private interests? In this study of police officers, we exploit two institutional features that change the implicit cost of making an arrest: arrests near the end of an officer's shift are more likely to require overtime work, and arrests made on days when an officer "moonlights'' at an off-duty job after their shift have a higher opportunity cost. We document two consequences for officer behavior. First, contrary to popular wisdom, officers reduce arrests near the end of their shift, and the quality of arrests increases. We argue that these patterns are driven by officer preferences rather than departmental policy, fatigue, or incapacitation from earlier arrests. Second, officers further reduce late-shift arrests on days in which they moonlight after work, suggesting that they are, in fact, modestly responsive to financial incentives. Using these results, we estimate a dynamic model that identifies officers' implied tradeoff between private and pro-social motivations. We find that police officers exhibit high pro-social motivation towards their arrest activity. In contrast to prior research showing that law enforcement outcomes are sensitive to financial incentives at an institutional level, incentives created by overtime pay are insufficiently large to appreciably change police decision-making at the margin.
Does Proactive Policing Really Increase Major Crime? Accounting for an Ecological Fallacy (draft)
with David Mitre Becerril and Morgan Williams Jr.
- In December 2014 and January 2015, police officers in New York City engaged in an organized slowdown of police work to protest the murder of two police officers who were targeted by a gunman while sitting in their patrol car and in response to a perceived lack of political support from NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio. An influential 2017 article in Nature Human Behaviour studies the effect of the NYPD’s work slowdown on major crimes and concludes that the slowdown led to a significant improvement in public safety. We re-evaluate this claim and point out several fatal weaknesses in the authors’ analysis that call this finding into question. In particular, we note that there was considerable variation in the intensity of the slowdown across NYC communities and that the communities which experienced a more pronounced reduction in police proactivity did not experience the largest reductions in major crime. The authors’ analysis constitutes a quintessential example of an ecological fallacy in statistical reasoning, a logical miscalculation in which inferences from aggregated data are mistakenly applied to a more granular phenomenon. We raise several additional and equally compelling concerns regarding the tests presented in the paper and conclude that there is little evidence that the slowdown led to short-term changes in major crimes in either direction.
The COVID-19 Pandemic, Domestic Violence and the Riskiness of Alcohol Consumption (draft) (NBER working paper #28523) with Shooshan Danagoulian and Monica Deza
- A large body of evidence documents a link between alcohol consumption and family violence. Recent scholarship suggests that since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent stay-at-home orders, there has been a marked increase in domestic violence. This research considers an important mechanism behind the increase in domestic violence: an increase in the riskiness of alcohol consumption. We combine 911 call data with newly-available high-resolution microdata on visits to bars and liquor stores in Detroit, MI. We regress the daily number of violent incidents in a community on the number of visits to two different types of alcohol outlets -- bars and liquor stores -- net of a set of granular interacted fixed effects. The strength of the relationship between visits to alcohol outlets and domestic violence more than doubles starting in March 2020. On the other hand, we find considerably more limited evidence with respect to non-domestic assaults. Beyond providing novel evidence for the transmission of family violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, these results support a more enduring conclusion -- that it is not alcohol consumption per se but alcohol consumption at home that is a principal driver of domestic violence. An implication of this research is that while regulations that raise the cost of outdoor drinking may lead to net declines in violence, they may yield unintended consequences for family violence to the extent that they push drinking indoors.
