TY  - JOUR
AU  - Donohue,John J.,III
AU  - Levitt,Steven D.
TI  - The Impact of Race on Policing, Arrest Patterns, and Crime
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 6784
PY  - 1998
Y2  - November 1998
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6784
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6784.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
John J. Donohue
Stanford Law School
Crown Quadrangle
559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Tel: 650/721-6339
E-Mail: donohue@law.stanford.edu

Steven D. Levitt
Department of Economics
University of Chicago
1126 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL  60637
Tel: 773/834-1862
Fax: 773/702-8490
E-Mail: slevitt@midway.uchicago.edu
AB  - Race has long been recognized as playing a critical role in policing.  In spite of this awareness, there has been virtually no previous research attempting to quantitatively analyze the issue.  In this paper, we examine the relationship between the racial composition of a city's police force and the racial patterns of arrests and crime.  Increases in the number of minority police are associated with significant increases in arrests of whites, but have little impact on arrests of non-whites. Similarly arrests of non-whites, but do not systematically affect the number of white arrests.  The race of police officers has a less clear-cut impact on crime rates.  It appears that own-race policing may be more effective in reducing property crime, but no systematic differences are observed for violent crime.  These results are consistent either with own-race policing leading to fewer false arrests or greater deterrence.  In either case, own-race policing appears more "efficient" in fighting property crime.
ER  -