Police demilitarization and violent crime

Lowande, Kenneth

doi:10.1038/s41562-020-00986-6

Cited by 13 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…In 2015, President Obama signed Executive Order 13688, which recalled tracked armored vehicles, certain kinds of camouflage clothing, bayonets, and grenade launcherswhile also prohibiting the distribution of .50 caliber weapons (Working Group, 2015). This recall effort, though small in scope, was largely effectiveall agencies who had the impacted equipment had removed them from their inventory within 6 months (Lowande, 2021). When the Trump administration took over the program in 2017, they revoked E.O.…”

Section: Military Surplusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Executive action that lasts

Lowande,

Poznansky

2024

J. Pub. Pol.

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Unilateral presidential action is thought to be limited by the ability of successors to easily reverse past decisions. Yet, most executive actions are never formally revoked. We argue that because of presidents’ unique position as chief executive, some actions create outcomes that make policy reversal more difficult or even infeasible. We develop a novel measure of policies with more immutable consequences and analyze the revocation of executive orders issued between 1937 and 2021. We find the degree of outcome immutability reduces the influence of political conditions on policy revocation. We further examine these dynamics in three cases in which presidents have substantial discretion – diplomacy, non-combatant detention, and police militarization. Scholarship has long highlighted the president’s first-mover status relative to other institutional actors as a key source of their power. Collectively, our argument and evidence demonstrate this applies to their relationship with successors.

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Section: Military Surplusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Executive action that lasts

Lowande,

Poznansky

2024

J. Pub. Pol.

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“…While related to our work, we differ by turning our lens to the police and what happens when they become more like the military, rather than incorporating members of the military into the policing institution. 5 Much of the existing work on police militarization focuses on specific countries or regions—the U.S. (Delehanty et al 2017; Lawson 2019; Lowande 2021), Iraq (Revkin 2022), Latin America (Flores-Macías and Zarkin 2021; Magaloni and Rodriguez 2020)—but we uncover more general patterns of militarization’s effects on repression across more than 100 countries over nearly 20 years. 6…”

mentioning

confidence: 95%

Does Police Militarization Increase Repression?

Stavro,

Welch

2023

Journal of Conflict Resolution

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Does police militarization influence government use of repression? While comparative work examines police militarization, violence, human rights abuses, and torture, it does not integrate militarized police within existing theories of repression. Connecting police militarization and repression, this article argues that police militarization increases the police’s perception of threat as well as their coercive capacity, thereby increasing their willingness to repress. As such, we hypothesize police militarization increases repression. To evaluate the theory, we conduct an international analysis using existing datasets covering 102 countries from 1994 to 2010. Employing several statistical models, the data supports the conclusion that police militarization increases the likelihood of government repression, specifically through extrajudicial killing and torture. Aside from highlighting a consequence of police militarization policy, the findings point to police militarization as an important omitted variable in cross-national models of repression and human rights.

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“…Further, there is no clear evidence that police militarization reduces crime. Although some have found a negative relationship between police militarization and crime (Bove & Gavrilova, 2017; Harris et al, 2017), this was not observed when more appropriate analyses were conducted (Gunderson et al, 2021), nor did crime increase following militarized equipment recalls (Lowande, 2021).…”

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confidence: 98%

Racial Prejudice Predicts Police Militarization

2022

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In the United States, police are becoming increasingly militarized. Whereas the racialized nature of police militarization has been documented, the relationship between racial prejudice and police militarization is less understood. We assessed the link between racial prejudice against Black and Native Americans and police militarization at individual and regional levels. Study 1 ( N = 765) recruited a nationally representative sample of White Americans and found a positive association between racial prejudice and support for police militarization. Study 2 ( N = 3,129,343) sourced regional aggregates of prejudice among White Americans from Project Implicit and policing data from the Defense Logistics Agency and found that police departments in states higher in prejudice acquired greater amounts of militarized equipment. Together, these studies demonstrate that, in terms of attitudes and policies, racial prejudice predicts police militarization.

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Police demilitarization and violent crime

Cited by 13 publications

References 24 publications

Executive action that lasts

Executive action that lasts

Does Police Militarization Increase Repression?

Racial Prejudice Predicts Police Militarization

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