Citation

Mummolo J. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2018; 115(37): 9181-9186.

Affiliation

Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, National Academy of Sciences)

DOI

10.1073/pnas.1805161115

PMID

30126997

Abstract

The increasingly visible presence of heavily armed police units in American communities has stoked widespread concern over the militarization of local law enforcement. Advocates claim militarized policing protects officers and deters violent crime, while critics allege these tactics are targeted at racial minorities and erode trust in law enforcement. Using a rare geocoded census of SWAT team deployments from Maryland, I show that militarized police units are more often deployed in communities with large shares of African American residents, even after controlling for local crime rates. Further, using nationwide panel data on local police militarization, I demonstrate that militarized policing fails to enhance officer safety or reduce local crime. Finally, using survey experiments-one of which includes a large oversample of African American respondents-I show that seeing militarized police in news reports may diminish police reputation in the mass public. In the case of militarized policing, the results suggest that the often-cited trade-off between public safety and civil liberties is a false choice.

Copyright © 2018 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.

Language: en

Keywords

bureaucratic reputation; crime; police militarization; public safety; race and policing