Do Officer-Involved Shootings Reduce Citizen Contact with Government?

Administrative Records Mask Racially Biased Policing

“…Our work also extends a growing literature in political science examining the political implications of law enforcement which, in recent decades, has largely studied policing indirectly, for example, as a means of explaining political participation (Burch 2013;Cohen et al 2017;Lerman and Weaver 2014;White 2019) or as an instance of bureaucracy (Brehm and Gates 1999;Lipsky 1980;Ostrom and Whitaker 1973;Wilson 1989). This work is path breaking, but with some recent exceptions (Harvey and Mungan 2019;Magaloni, Franco, and Melo 2015;Mummolo 2018a;Peyton et al 2019;Soss and Weaver 2017), has tended to conceptualize policing as a cause of politics, rather than a political act in and of itself.…”

Police Legitimacy and Citizen Coproduction: How does publicized police brutality impact calling the police?

“…Other research indicates that vicarious experiences -hearing of another's bad experiences with the police -can similarly damage police legitimacy (Browning et al 1994, Rosenbaum et al 2005. Some evidence from Latin America indicates that observers of police violence are less willing to report crime (Gingerich & Oliveros 2018), though no effect was found in a study of police shootings in Los Angeles (Cohen et al 2019). The absence of police legitimacy has been termed legal cynicism, a cultural orientation of antagonism and distrust in the law and its agents (Sampson & Bartusch 1998, Kirk & Papachristos 2011.…”

“…The cases studied are well-publicized incidents of police brutality; they are not "typical" officer-involved shootings or uses of force -of which there are thousands each year (Zimring 2017, Cohen et al 2019) -they are "high-profile cases of excessive police force" which "constitute a severe breach in the social contract that exists between citizens and the criminal justice system" (Desmond et al 2016, 871). 9 These incidents also differ in important ways, such as the demographics of the impacted city, the nature of the brutality incident, the legal and political response to the incident, and the context and history of community-police relations in the city.…”

“…Police brutality is bureaucratic sabotage: "an exceptional case of defection-defection against the public, against the law, against simple decency" (Brehm & Gates 1997, 149) and a significant political and public policy problem. Scholars have investigated the impact of well-publicized police brutality and police killings on outcomes ranging from mental health (Bor et al 2018) to political participation and public opinion (Williamson et al 2018, Enos et al 2019, police trust and legitimacy (Jefferis et al 1997, Sigelman et al 1997, Lasley 1994, Tuch & Weitzer 1997, Weitzer 2002, White et al 2018, Kochel 2019, and an important behavioral manifestation of citizen-police cooperation: citizen crime reporting (Desmond et al 2016, Cohen et al 2019, Zoorob 2020. This paper analyzes the impact of police brutality stories on citizen crime reporting -operationalized through 911 calls for common property and violent crimes -moving beyond existing studies of single cases by incorporating administrative data from 22 cities which experienced 25 prominent police brutality incidents since 2012.…”

No Justice, No Peace: Political Science Perspectives on the American Carceral State

“…Researchers leverage administrative records of interactions that result from preemptive policing and associated tactics (Laniyonu 2018; 2019), state supervision rates at the block group level (Morris 2020), and variation in local criminal legal racial disparities (Maltby 2017) to assess the political effects of living in a community with high levels of criminal legal intervention. Researchers have likewise tried to understand the civic consequences of officer-involved shootings, where responses to such incidents appear most vividly via protest, marked especially by the rise of the movement for Black lives (Cohen et al 2019; Williamson et al 2018). Research examining the civic consequences of having a relational connection to a custodial citizen finds that the policy feedback effects of contact identified by Lerman and Weaver (2014a) spill over to those who experience the system vicariously, albeit in sometimes unexpected ways (Anoll and Israel-Trummel 2019; Mondak et al 2017; Lee, Porter, and Comfort 2014; Walker 2014; 2020).…”