Complaining While Black: Racial Disparities in the Adjudication of Complaints against the Police

Abstract

Reports of citizen complaints of police misconduct often note that officers are rarely disciplined for alleged misconduct. The perception of little officer accountability contributes to widespread distrust of law enforcement in communities of color. This project investigates how race and segregation shape the outcomes of allegations made against the Chicago Police Department (CPD) between 2011 and 2014. We find that complaints by black and Latino citizens and against white officers are less likely to be sustained. We show neighborhood context interacts with complainant characteristics: Incidents alleged by white citizens in high‐crime and predominantly black neighborhoods are more likely to be sustained. These findings provide context for understanding tensions between communities of color and the CPD. These results are consistent with theories that individual and institutional actors prioritize white victimhood and reflect the neighborhood effects literature stressing the interaction between individual and contextual factors in shaping outcomes.

The Network Structure of Police Misconduct

“…In particular, nonwhite officers are more likely to be assigned to high-crime communities, where they might encounter situations that place them in direct conflict with civilians more often (Kane 2006). High-crime communities tend to display more legal cynicism and mistrust in the police, and accordingly, residents in such areas may avoid the police or file complaints against the police at higher rates (Sampson and Bartusch 1998;Kirk and Papachristos 2011;Desmond, Papachristos, and Kirk 2016;Ba 2017;Faber and Kalbfeld forthcoming). In some situations, then, what may be perceived as a racial effect might, in fact, be a larger set of institutional, historical, and political factors that generate massive inequalities in police contact across neighborhood, racial, and class dimensions (Kohler-Hausmann 2013).…”

How many complaints against police officers can be abated by incapacitating a few “bad apples?”

“…A. Ba and Rivera (2019), Holz et al (2019), Faber and Kalbfeld (2019), Rozema and Schanzenbach (2019), Ouellet et al (2019), Wood et al (2019, , , Zhao and Papachristos (2020), among others. 7 This dataset is ideal for our purposes as it includes information on all complaints as well as a full roster of Chicago police officers including, critically, those who have never been named in a complaint.…”

“…In order to answer this question, we construct a simple but informative policy simulation in which "bad apples" identified ex ante are replaced with officers who have a lower likelihood of generating complaints. Recognizing that there is considerable uncertainty in how "bad apples" might be replaced and by whom, we employ a wide range of heuristics each of which is informed by a large and rapidly proliferating literature on police organization (Faber & Kalbfeld, 2019;Ouellet et al, 2019;Wood et al, 2019;Zhao & Papachristos, 2020). We begin with a baseline assumption that "bad apples" are replaced by the median officer which we conceptualize by replacing removed officers with officers who are randomly drawn from the middle 20% of the distribution of officers when ranked according to complaints in the 1.5-year probationary period.…”

The Slow Violence of Contemporary Policing

“…Most officers' actions are found to be justified in misconduct complaint investigations (Dewan & Kovaleski 2020) and given disproportionate rates of contact with police, that knowledge might contribute to people of color underreporting. Furthermore, complaints made by Black and Latinx civilians are less likely to be sustained than those made by Whites in Chicago (Faber & Kalbfeld 2019, Headley et al 2020. Taken together, police use of force appears not to be concentrated among a small portion of officers.…”