Violent Crime and the Overmilitarization of US Policing

Abstract

Using new data at the police department level, I propose an identification strategy for estimating the causal effect that police militarization has on reducing violent crime. I show that previous estimates are likely to be contaminated by unobserved factors that simultaneously determine militarization and violent crime. Upon addressing this issue, I find a point estimate that is 20 times larger than those estimated previously. I then find that one-fourth of the effect of militarization is due to the displacement of violent crime to neighboring areas. Police departments overmilitarize because they do not consider this externality. These new findings have significant implications for the policy debate concerning the costs and benefits of police militarization (JEL H56, H76, K42).

Modeling the U.S. Firearms Market

“…The market came under heavy foreign competition, especially in the pistol segment, starting in the mid-1980s, and yielded considerable market share to foreign brands in the decades since, following trends in many other US manufacturing industries (Brauer 2013b). Beginning in the 1990s and 2000s, the market has relied on a combination of product design innovations (often making their products more deadly; see Diaz 2004;Smith et al 2015), market demographic expansion (Blair and Hyatt 1995;NSSF 2014NSSF , 2015, and demand stoking via vested interests, especially leveraging fear of crises and tightened legislation (see, e.g., Gopal and Greenwood 2017;Langley 1999). For instance, the impending passage of the federal Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 spurred the demand for, and production of, AR15 (assault)-style weapons that would soon be banned, creating a pre-passage price depression and a post-passage price surge (Koper and Roth 2002).…”

“…By raising perceived or actual levels of insecurity, the supply of firearms may generate its own demand, requiring instrumental variable (IV) models to account for potential endogeneity (meaning circular causation, in this case). Indeed, the availability of firearms on the nonmilitary (i.e., the civilian and law enforcement) market is a function of complex supply chains (Brauer and Muggah 2006) involving domestic manufacture; imports; exports; flows between civilian, law enforcement, and military stocks (Masera 2021); and a dynamic interplay between licit and illicit markets and retail outlets. Third, moral hazard, balloon effects, relative elasticities of supply and demand (i.e., how the quantities supplied to and demanded by the market react to variations in price), and other economic phenomena may affect the efficacy of certain types of policy interventions seeking to reduce firearms‐related harm.…”