Abstract:, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare. 762 NAGIN AND TELEP in se crimes against person and property, does not, however, mean that procedural justice should be relegated to a secondary status in policy discussion about effective policing. To the contrary, as we have argued and continue to argue, procedurally just treatment of citizens has social value independent of its impact on crime. Yet those benefits are still to be demonstrated. Police exe… Show more
“…While pitting these two policy solutions against each other, in principle, presents a false choice, in practice, constraints on political capital may require policy makers to invest in a limited set of actions. With respect to the efficacy of broad-based police reform efforts, while there continues to be a dearth of high-quality evidence in this domain (Engel et al, 2020;Sherman, 2018), there is, at least, some evidence to support the efficacy of de-escalation training (Engel et al, 2020) and procedural justice training (Nagin & Telep, 2020;Owens et al, 2018;Wood et al, 2020), federal oversight of police agencies (Powell et al, 2017;Goh, 2020) as well as the use of and training in nonlethal weapons (J. M. MacDonald et al, 2009;Sousa et al, 2010). There is likewise support for the idea that reforms involving police unions may be effective (Dharmapala et al, 2019), especially if unions can be incentivized to "self-regulate" that might potentially be encouraged by transferring the burden of liability insurance from municipalities to unions (Ramirez et al, 2018).…”
The notion that the unjustified use of force by police officers is concentrated among a few "bad apples" is a popular descriptor that has gained traction in scholarly research and achieved considerable influence among policy makers. But is removing the bad apples likely to have an appreciable effect on police misconduct? Leveraging a simple policy simulation and data from the Chicago Police Department, we estimate that removing the top 10% of officers identified based on ex ante risk and replacing them with officers drawn from the middle of the risk distribution would have led to only a 4-6% reduction in the use of force incidents in Chicago over a 10-year period. Policy Implications: Our analysis suggests that surgically removing predictably problematic police officers is unlikely to have a large impact on citizen complaints.By assembling some of the first empirical evidence on the likely magnitude of incapacitation effects, we provide critical support for the idea that early warning systems must be designed, above all, to deter problematic behavior and promote accountability.
“…While pitting these two policy solutions against each other, in principle, presents a false choice, in practice, constraints on political capital may require policy makers to invest in a limited set of actions. With respect to the efficacy of broad-based police reform efforts, while there continues to be a dearth of high-quality evidence in this domain (Engel et al, 2020;Sherman, 2018), there is, at least, some evidence to support the efficacy of de-escalation training (Engel et al, 2020) and procedural justice training (Nagin & Telep, 2020;Owens et al, 2018;Wood et al, 2020), federal oversight of police agencies (Powell et al, 2017;Goh, 2020) as well as the use of and training in nonlethal weapons (J. M. MacDonald et al, 2009;Sousa et al, 2010). There is likewise support for the idea that reforms involving police unions may be effective (Dharmapala et al, 2019), especially if unions can be incentivized to "self-regulate" that might potentially be encouraged by transferring the burden of liability insurance from municipalities to unions (Ramirez et al, 2018).…”
The notion that the unjustified use of force by police officers is concentrated among a few "bad apples" is a popular descriptor that has gained traction in scholarly research and achieved considerable influence among policy makers. But is removing the bad apples likely to have an appreciable effect on police misconduct? Leveraging a simple policy simulation and data from the Chicago Police Department, we estimate that removing the top 10% of officers identified based on ex ante risk and replacing them with officers drawn from the middle of the risk distribution would have led to only a 4-6% reduction in the use of force incidents in Chicago over a 10-year period. Policy Implications: Our analysis suggests that surgically removing predictably problematic police officers is unlikely to have a large impact on citizen complaints.By assembling some of the first empirical evidence on the likely magnitude of incapacitation effects, we provide critical support for the idea that early warning systems must be designed, above all, to deter problematic behavior and promote accountability.
“…Instead, we argue that the removal of "bad apples" can and should be pursued as a normative good. Nagin and Telep (2020) advance a similar argument in favor of procedural justice, pushing back on research that equates the value of procedural justice solely on its effects on compliance and/or crime. They write, "procedurally just treatment of citizens is a normatively and socially important end in its own right independent of impacts on crime" (p. 774).…”
Research summary: Chalfin and Kaplan attend to the problem of police misconduct with a series of simulation analyses that leverage data on complaints and uses of force in the Chicago Police Department. They conclude that incapacitating officers has minimal effects on misconduct and that, given political constraints, policy makers may prefer broader reforms around accountability and management to removing "bad apples". In this comment, we argue that this conclusion and its policy implications are characterized by "incredible certitude" driven by a selective focus on a subset of their full simulation results and inadequate incorporation of network spillovers into their analysis.Policy implications: Contrary to CK's conclusions, their preferred estimates of the effect of incapacitating "bad apples" on misconduct are squarely within the range of other interventions aimed at reducing police complaints and use of force. Once network spillovers are accounted for, estimates are up to five times as large. We conclude with a discussion of how even small reductions in misconduct can have outsized benefits as measured in both dollars and human suffering, and argue that the removal of problem officers is a normative good that should be pursued on moral grounds.
Objective: Drawing on work into the dynamics of authority-subordinate relationships, we examined whether police procedural justice, legitimacy and deterrence predict compliance with the law among people experiencing homelessness. Hypotheses: We hypothesized that people living on the streets of London will be less attuned to the relational and value-relevant aspects of police activity, i.e. that the well-established procedural justice–legitimacy–compliance pathway will not work for this highly marginalized group. We also predicted that motivations to engage in criminal behavior will vary significantly according to the nature of the behavior concerned (minor, street population specific, and serious crime).Method: A survey that included measures of procedural justice, police legitimacy, deterrence, risk of sanction, morality and compliance was completed by 200 people experiencing homelessness on the streets of an inner London borough (87% male, 49% aged between 45-64, 37% white British). Results: Procedural fairness and perceptions of police legitimacy did not explain variation in any of the three types of compliance (i.e. statistically significant effects were not detected). Police effectiveness positively predicted compliance via perceived risk of sanction, but only for offences that can be occasionally be important for survival on the streets, e.g. begging. Morality was associated with all three types of compliance behaviors, with the more wrong behaviors were perceived to be, the greater the compliance with those behaviors. Conclusions: The lack of relevance of relational connections to legal authority may be down to marginalization, alienation and the need to survive. More research is needed into the sorts of marginalized communities for whom structural factors may reduce normative group connections.
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