Abstract
Objectives
We assess the effects of police use of lethal force on subsequent murders by victim race and armed status before and after the August 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO.
Methods
We regress monthly murder levels on instances of police use of lethal force by race and armed status controlling for fixed effects, population, unemployment, and murders in the prior month using city-level data for 93 cities from 2013 to 2015.
Results
For 2013–2015, we find that a police lethal force incident predicts a 1.8% increase in murders 2 months following the incident. However, prior to Ferguson, a police lethal force incident increases murders by 4.5% (after 2 months) and we are unable to find any evidence of differential responses to police use of lethal force based on victim race. However, we find evidence of differential responses to police use of lethal force based on victim armed status. Post-Ferguson, police use of lethal force is associated with significant differential responses based on victim race. In addition, we see a shift in the aggregate-level response to police use of lethal force. Post-Ferguson, a police lethal force incident decreases the murder level by 3.8% 3 months following the incident. In addition, lethal force incident involving a non-black victim decreases the number of murders by 4.3% while an incident involving a black victim increases the number of murders by 2.1% (after a 2-month lag).
Conclusions
Changes in policing following the events of Ferguson had a generally positive but uneven effect.
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Notes
Recent analyses of the determinants of police use of force and racial disparities in the police use of force include: Crow and Adrion (2011), Engel and Calnon (2004), Fryer (2019), Gau et al. (2010), Lawton (2007), Lersch et al. (2008), McCluskey and Terrill (2005), McCluskey et al. (2005), MacDonald et al. (2009), Terrill and Mastrofski (2002), Terrill and Reisig (2003), and Terrill et al. (2008).
Data definitions are available at: https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/aboutthedata.
Each death includes a circumstance code. For instance, there are codes for rape, robbery, burglary, etc. We drop all deaths coded as “felon killed by police.” The set of circumstance codes for the UCR data is available at: https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/studies/36393.
For a discussion of finite distributed lags see Wooldridge (2016).
Adding a four-month lag to the model caused collinearity problems.
We use the regional classifications for U.S. states from the U.S. Census Bureau. These classifications are available at: https://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/maps-data/maps/reference/us_regdiv.pdf.
We include the period from January 2013 to July 2014 as the pre-Ferguson months (52.7% of the total months) and the period from August 2014 to December 2015 as post-Ferguson.
The same basic results hold for the Poisson QMLE estimates when we use population as an offset so that the murder becomes a rate per 100,000 in population. We attach these results in an “Appendix” (Table 6). We change only the dependent variable, the lagged dependent variable, and drop population as a control. All other aspects of the econometric specification remain the same. For the full data set, the estimates show the murder rate rises about 2.0% following an instance of police use of lethal force rather than 1.8% using count data. Pre-Ferguson, the murder rate rises about 6.2% following an instance of police use of lethal force rather than 4.5%. Post-Ferguson, the t − 2 estimate for use of lethal force is − 2.5% rather than − 1.0% and the t − 3 estimate is − 3.0% rather than −3.8%. However, in the murder rate estimates the goodness-of-fit measures fall and the standard errors on the estimates rise relative to the murder level estimates. We see a similar pattern and similar magnitudes in the estimates if we use OLS on the murder rate with the same controls; the standard errors rise again and only the pre-Ferguson t − 2 estimate is significant.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank (without implicating) David Pyrooz, Richard Baker, and Trevor O’Grady for helpful comments.
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Appendix
Appendix
See Table 6.
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Vandegrift, D., Connor, B.J. The Effect of Police Use of Lethal Force on Murder Levels in American Cities Before and After Ferguson. J Quant Criminol 36, 235–261 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-019-09429-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-019-09429-6