Militarization fails to enhance police safety or reduce crime but may harm police reputation

Abstract

SignificanceNational debates over heavy-handed police tactics, including so-called “militarized” policing, are often framed as a trade-off between civil liberties and public safety, but the costs and benefits of controversial police practices remain unclear due to data limitations. Using an array of administrative data sources and original experiments I show that militarized “special weapons and tactics” (SWAT) teams are more often deployed in communities of color, and—contrary to claims by police administrators—provide no detectable benefits in terms of officer safety or violent crime reduction, on average. However, survey experiments suggest that seeing militarized police in news reports erodes opinion toward law enforcement. Taken together, these findings suggest that curtailing militarized policing may be in the interest of both police and citizens.

Police militarization in the United States

“…Using propensity score matching to compare neighborhoods that experienced a PPU raid to those that did not, Phillips et al (2016) found that PPU raids only temporarily reduced crime rates and may have actually increased calls for police service. Recent work by Mummolo (2018) supports these findings. In addition to his experimental study, Mummolo also examined the creation and deployment of PPUs in Maryland from 2010 to 2014, finding that PPU use did not reduce crime rates or violence against police officers in LEA jurisdictions where they were used and that PPUs were more likely to be deployed in locations with more Black residents.…”

“…This includes reports on the types of military equipment sent to requesting LEAs, the dollar value of that equipment, and identifier codes that allow researchers to link the 1033 Program data on military hardware to common datasets used in ecological studies, including the Census Bureau datasets and the Uniform Crime Reports (Ramey & Steidley, ). However, there remain limitations to the 1033 data, as the data lack historical coverage of LEA acquisition of DoD supplies during the earliest years of the program and many supplies not considered “controlled” by the DoD are not tracked after 1 year post‐transfer (see Lawson, , and Mummolo, , for more information on these limitations).…”

“…However, there remain limitations to the 1033 data, as the data lack historical coverage of LEA acquisition of DoD supplies during the earliest years of the program and many supplies not considered "controlled" by the DoD are not tracked after 1 year post-transfer (see Lawson, 2018, andMummolo, 2018, for more information on these limitations).…”

“…While two ecological studies suggest that the 1033 Program participation is associated with reduced crime rates at the county level, the effect of military equipment is weak and causality remains questionable (Bove & Gavrilova, 2017;Harris et al, 2017). At the same time, ecological studies find that factors like racial demographics and militaristic department policies influence some militarizing behaviors from LEAs (Burkhardt & Baker, 2018;Jackson & Carroll, 1981;Ramey & Steidley, 2018), while studies of actual PPU use suggest militarized police operations have little effect on crime and do not improve overall officer safety (Mummolo, 2018;Phillips et al, 2016). In fact, police militarization may negatively impact the public's perceptions of the police to the point that citizens are more hostile toward the police (Bell, 1982;Mummolo, 2018).…”

“…Assessing the impact of police militarization is important beyond crime control. Some indicators of police militarization appear to be associated with racialized trends in policing as opposed to actual threats to police (Ajilore, 2015;Mummolo, 2018;Ramey & Steidley, 2018) as well as with the increased the use of lethal force by the police (Delehanty et al, 2017;Lawson, 2018). Research also suggests that the public interactions with and perceptions of police who display signs of militarism are less amiable (Bell, 1982;Mummolo, 2018).…”