The Impact of Race on Policing and Arrests

Foundation Race has long been recognized as playing a critical role in policing. In spite of this awareness, there has been little previous research that attempts to quantitatively analyze the impact of officer race on tangible outcomes. In this paper, we examine the relationship between the racial composition of a city’s police force and the racial patterns of arrests. Increases in the number of minority police are associated with significant increases in arrests of whites but have little impact on arrests of nonwhites. Similarly, more white police increase the number of arrests of nonwhites but do not systematically affect the number of white arrests. These patterns are particularly striking for minor offenses. Understanding the reasons for this empirical regularity and the consequent impact on crime is an important subject for future research. Race is a polarizing feature in American society. Nowhere is this more evident than in the criminal justice system. African Americans, who comprise 12 percent of the U.S. population, account for 47 percent of felony convictions and 54 percent of prison admissions. Studies suggest that one-third of African-American males aged 20–29 are under the supervision of the criminal justice system on any given day.1 Minority communities are often suspicious of and hostile toward the criminal justice system in general and police in particular.2 * We would like to thank Dhammika Dharmapala, Lawrence Katz, Rob Sampson, tw