A growing body of evidence shows that minorities are disproportionately the targets of police brutality, but important theoretical questions about the causes of that inequity remain unanswered. One promising line of research involves structural‐level analyses of the incidence of police brutality complaints; however, existing studies do not incorporate variables from alternative theoretical explanations. Drawing on the community accountability hypothesis and the threat hypothesis, we tested the predictions of two prominent structural‐level explanations of police brutality in a study of civil rights criminal complaints. The study included cities of 150,000+ population (n = 114). The findings reveal that two community accountability variables—ratio percent Hispanic citizens to percent Hispanic police officers and the presence of citizen review—were related positively to police brutality complaints, partially supporting that perspective. Two threat hypothesis measures of threatening people—percent black and percent Hispanic (in the Southwest)—were related positively to complaints, as predicted. The relative degree of support for the two hypotheses is assessed.

The conflict theory of law stipulates that strategies of crime control regulate threats to the interests of dominant groups. Aggregate‐level research on policing has generally supported this proposition, showing that measures of minority threat are related to legal mechanisms of crime control. Police brutality (i.e., use of excessive physical force) constitutes an extra‐legal mechanism of control that has yet to be examined in this theoretical framework. This study extends research in the area theoretically and substantively by testing the hypothesis that the greater the number of threatening acts and people, the greater the number of police brutality civil rights criminal complaints filed with the U.S. Department of Justice. The findings show that measures of the presence of threatening people (percent black, percent Hispanic [in the Southwest], and majority/minority income inequality) were related positively to average annual civil rights criminal complaints.

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Numerous studies have examined political influences on communities' allocations of fiscal and personnel resources to policing. Rational choice theory maintains that these resources are distributed in accordance with the need for crime control, whereas conflict theory argues that they are allocated with the aim of controlling racial and ethnic minorities. Existing research more consistently supports the conflict argument, but important issues remain unaddressed. The authors tested that approach by examining allocations of police resources in large cities in the Southwest, the yet-to-be-studied region in which the majority of Hispanics reside. The analyses included the key variables from the rational choice and conflict perspectives, as well as proximity to the border between the United States and Mexico. Minimal effects existed for percent Hispanic, an important conflict theory variable. However, Anglo-Hispanic income inequality and proximity to the border had effects consistent with that perspective. Class divisions within the Hispanic community may explain this pattern of findings.