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Police and Policing

On this page, the Prison Policy Initiative has curated all of the research about police and policing that we know of. You can also see a selection of our best original research on this topic on our Policing page. For research on other criminal justice topics, see our Research Library homepage.

Key Statistics:

  • Racial/ethnic disparities in police recovery of stolen property: A previously unexplored facet of police/victim interaction Paywall :( Alexander J. Vanhee, October, 2024“Analyses of victim race suggested that Black, Asian, and Native American victims were all less likely to have their property recovered than white ones.”
  • (New) Stop Cop Cities; Invest in Public Health Solutions Human Impact Partners, October, 2024“As of February 17, 2024, 69 police training facility projects were documented across the US...55 had confirmed costs ranging from $999,000 to a staggering $415 million.”
  • Mortality Disparities Among Arrestees by Race, Sentencing Disposition, and Place George Zuo, Beau Kilmer, & Nancy Nicosia, July, 2024“In terms of racial disparities, all-cause mortality risk was 2.37 (95% CI, 1.95-2.88) times higher for American Indian/Alaska Native than White arrestees in the arrest-only disposition.”
  • A Large-Scale Study of the Police Retention Crisis Ben Grunwald, June, 2024“The increase in [police leaving their jobs] after the summer of 2020 was smaller, later, less sudden, and possibly less pervasive than the retention-crisis narrative suggests.”
  • Bias, Distrust, and Trauma Racial Disparities in Boston Residents' Experiences with Law Enforcement and Related Outcomes Sandra Susan Smith, May, 2024“With few exceptions, Black Bostonians experience disparate treatment by law enforcement within categories of gender, age, educational attainment, neighborhood of residence, and income status.”
  • National Burden of Injury and Deaths From Shootings by Police in the United States, 2015-2020 Julie A. Ward, Javier Cepeda, Dylan B. Jackson, et al, March, 2024“A total of 1769 people were injured annually (2015-2020) in shootings by police, 55% fatally. When a shooting injury occurred, odds of fatality were 46% higher following dispatched responses than police-initiated responses.”
  • Misdemeanor Enforcement Trends in New York City, 2016-2022 Brennan Center for Justice, March, 2024“In 2021 and 2022, approximately half of all minor offense cases were dismissed. Overall, the proportion of non-convictions increased steadily from 47% in 2016 to 70% in 2022.”
  • Evaluating the Impact of Desk Appearance Ticket Reform in New York State Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College, February, 2024“Desk Appearance Tickets (DATs) in New York State led more people charged with low-level offenses to avoid pre-arraignment detention, but varied by region. Statewide DAT issuance increased from 38% in 2019 to 58% in 2021, then declined to 50% in 2022.”
  • Homicides involving Black victims are less likely to be cleared in the United States Paywall :( Gian Maria Campedelli, February, 2024“The likelihood of a homicide clearance is 3.4 to 4.8 percent lower for homicides involving Black victims, and this race effect is slightly higher for males and that racial disparity has moderately but significantly increased over time.”
  • The deadliest local police departments kill 6.91 times more frequently than the least deadly departments... Josh Leung-Gagne, 2024“The deadliest police departments [in the U.S.] kill 6.91 times more frequently than the least deadly departments, after accounting for variation in risk to officers and trauma care access.”
  • One in Five: Disparities in Crime and Policing (Part 2) Sentencing Project, November, 2023“These racial and ethnic disparities in police contact snowball as individuals traverse the criminal legal system. They also, as discussed below, reduce the perceived legitimacy of policing.”
  • Racial Injustice Report: Disparities in Philadelphia's Criminal Courts from 2015-2022 Philadelphia District Attorney's Office, June, 2023“Black individuals account for 69% of police stops and 62% of individuals arrested; white people accounted for only 18% of police stops and 21% of arrests, despite the fact that Black and white people make up similar shares of the city's population.”
  • Lower-Level Enforcement, Racial Disparities, & Alternatives to Arrest: A Review of Research and Practice from 1970 to 2021 Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College, February, 2023(This policy review considers five key models of alternatives to arrest: citations, diversion programs, legalization, police-involved crisis response models, and non-police response models.)
  • The "Profane Margins" of the State: Florida Sheriff Walter R. Clark and the Local History of Crime, Policing, and Incarceration Paywall :( Cindy Hahamovitch, 2023“[...] we can find sheriffs with myriad responsibilities, unbridled power, and little oversight almost everywhere in the United States.”
  • Ticketing and Turnout: The Participatory Consequences of Low-Level Police Contact Jonathan Ben-Menachem and Kevin T. Morris, December, 2022“Few analyses directly investigate the causal effect of lower-level police contact on voter turnout. To do so, we leverage individual-level administrative ticketing data from Hillsborough County, Florida.”
  • High-Frequency Location Data Shows That Race Affects the Likelihood of Being Stopped and Fined for Speeding Pradhi Aggarwal et al, December, 2022“Relative to a white driver traveling the same speed, minorities are 24 to 33 percent more likely to be stopped for speeding and pay 23 to 34 percent more in fines.”
  • Justice Navigator Public Assessments Center for Policing Equity, December, 2022(This platform contains analyses of policing data from seven participating departments across the country, to identify which policing practices have patterns of racial disparities, and what factors may be contributing to those disparities.)
  • report thumbnail New data: Police use of force rising for Black, female, and older people; racial bias persists Prison Policy Initiative, December, 2022“During traffic stops, Black and Hispanic people were the most likely groups to experience a search or arrest. Meanwhile, white people were the least likely to receive a ticket and the most likely just to get off with a warning during a traffic stop.”
  • Police Diversion at Arrest: A Systematic Review of the Literature Paywall :( Caroline Harmon-Darrow et al, November, 2022“Overall, police diversion programs were associated with reducing recidivism and lowering costs, although there is little association between program participation and improved behavioral health.”
  • The Social Costs of Policing Vera Institute of Justice, November, 2022“[One study found that] people who were stopped and questioned or arrested by the police decreased their formal interactions with important social and welfare institutions such as medical, financial, civic, and educational institutions.”
  • Contacts Between Police and the Public, 2020 Bureau of Justice Statistics, November, 2022“About 21% of U.S. residents age 16 or older had contact with police in 2020. Black (6%) and Hispanic (3%) persons were more likely to experience the threat or use of nonfatal force during their most recent police contact than white persons (2%).”
  • Reducing Deaths in Law Enforcement Custody: Identifying High-Priority Needs for the Criminal Justice System Duren Banks et al, October, 2022“[Interview and virtual group] Participants concurred that there is currently insufficient data to study the effectiveness of any policies or programs designed to reduce law enforcement-related deaths.”
  • Reimagining Community Safety in California: From Deadly and Expensive Sheriffs to Equity and Care-Centered Wellbeing Catalyst California, October, 2022“For the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, 88.8% of officer time spent on stops (25,269 hours) was for officer-initiated stops rather than in response to a call for service, which accounted for only 11.2% (3,189 hours) of officer time spent on stops.”
  • Exceptionally Lethal: American Police Killings in a Comparative Perspective Paul J. Hirschfield, September, 2022“Cross-national comparative analyses can help identify stable and malleable factors that distinguish high-FPV (fatal police violence) from low-FPV countries.”
  • Traffic Safety Center for Policing Equity, September, 2022“Racially biased enforcement sets into motion a cascade of interrelated harms for millions of people: unaffordable fines and fees, mounting debt, driver's license suspensions, lost employment, unnecessary arrests, and even injury or death.”
  • Restructuring Civilian Payouts for Police Misconduct Rashawn Ray, Center for Justice Research, July, 2022“By restructuring police-civilian payouts from taxpayer funding to police department insurances, monies typically spent on civilian payouts and lawyer fees can be used for education, jobs, and infrastructure.”
  • Law Enforcement Agencies' College Education Hiring Requirements and Racial Differences in Police-Related Fatalities Paywall :( Thaddeus L. Johnson, Natasha N. Johnson, William J. Sabol and David T. Snively, July, 2022“Results show that adopting agency college degree requirements is generally associated with decreases in police-related fatalities (PRFs) over time, with significant reductions observed for PRFs of Black and unarmed citizens.”
  • Fulfilling the Promise of Public Safety: Some Lessons from Recent Research Ben Struhl and Alexander Gard-Murray, Univ. of Pennsylvania Crime and Justice Policy Lab, June, 2022“Countries with much more robust social service provision still have police forces 80-85% the size of American forces. The public safety challenge is sufficiently complex that [we] should all consider multiple kinds of responses.”
  • The Usual, Racialized, Suspects: The Consequence of Police Contacts with Black and White Youth on Adult Arrest Anne McGlynn-Wright, Robert D Crutchfield, Martie L Skinner, Kevin P Haggerty, May, 2022“Our findings indicate that police encounters in childhood increase the risk of arrest in young adulthood for Black but not White respondents.”
  • Race and Ethnicity Differences in Police Contact and Perceptions of and Attitudes Toward the Police Among Youth Paywall :( Kathryn Foster, Melissa S. Jones, and Hayley Pierce, March, 2022“When a direct stop involved more officer intrusiveness, black youth reported less respect and more negative perceptions of procedural justice.”
  • Massachusetts Uniform Citation Data Analysis Report Salem State University, Worcester State University, February, 2022“Hispanic motorists, followed by African American/Black motorists are most likely to receive a criminal citation whereas motorists in the Other race category, followed by White motorists were least likely to receive a criminal citation.”
  • Drug Arrests Stayed High Even as Imprisonment Fell From 2009 to 2019 Pew Charitable Trusts, February, 2022“[We] found divergent enforcement trends--high rates of arrest but substantially reduced incarceration--coupled with a lack of treatment options and high mortality rates among people with illicit drug dependence.”
  • Reforming the police through procedural justice training: A multicity randomized trial at crime hot spots David Weisburd et al, January, 2022“Intensive training in procedural justice (PJ) can lead to more procedurally just behavior and less disrespectful treatment of people [by police officers] at high-crime places.”
  • The consequences of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act for police arrests Jessica T. Simes and Jaquelyn L. Jahn, January, 2022“We observe the largest negative differences for drug arrests: we find a 25-41% negative difference in drug arrests in the three years following Medicaid expansion, compared to non-expansion counties.”
  • Criminalizing Homelessness: Circumstances Surrounding Criminal Trespassing and People Experiencing Homelessness Paywall :( Brie Diamond, Ronald Burns, Kendra Bowen, December, 2021“Criminal trespassing (CT) is an understudied misdemeanor offense often enforced to maintain control over contested spaces and, in practice, often disproportionately used against disenfranchised populations such as the homeless and mentally ill.”
  • Policing the pandemic: estimating spatial and racialized inequities in New York City police enforcement of COVID-19 mandates Sandhya Kajeepeta et al, November, 2021“Findings suggest that ZIP codes with higher percentages of lower income and Black residents experienced disproportionately high rates of policing during the COVID-19 pandemic in the name of public health.”
  • Racial Disparities in Law Enforcement Stops Public Policy Institute of California, October, 2021“We analyze data for almost 4 million stops by California's 15 largest law enforcement agencies in 2019, examining the extent to which people of color experience searches, enforcement, intrusiveness, and use of force differently from white people.”
  • Fatal police violence by race and state in the USA, 1980-2019: a network meta-regression Global Burden of Diseases 2019 Police Violence US Subnational Collaborators, October, 2021“We found that more than half of all deaths due to police violence that we estimated in the USA from 1980 to 2018 were unreported in the National Vital Statistics System.”
  • Police Foundations: A Corporate-Sponsored Threat to Democracy and Black Lives Color of Change and LittleSis, October, 2021“[We] have compiled the most extensive research to date on the links between police foundations and corporations, identifying over 1,200 corporate donations or executives serving as board members for 23 of the largest police foundations in the country.”
  • Automating Banishment Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, October, 2021“Over the past decade, we have been working to build power to abolish LAPD surveillance. This report grew out of that organizing and examines the relationships of policing and surveillance to displacement, gentrification, and real estate development.”
  • Police Violence Reduces Civilian Cooperation and Engagement with Law Enforcement Desmond Ang et al., September, 2021“We find evidence that high-profile acts of police violence may severely impair civilian trust and crime-reporting...[In] eight major cities, we show a sharp drop in the ratio of 911 calls to ShotSpotter shots immediately after George Floyd's death.”
  • Police Exposures and the Health and Well-being of Black Youth in the US: A Systematic Review Paywall :( Monique Jindal et al, September, 2021“Evidence shows that police exposures are associated with adverse health outcomes for Black youth.”
  • Replacing School Police with Services that Work: Better Ways to Improve School Safety and Reduce Discipline Disparities Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, August, 2021“The ongoing presence of police in schools increases school arrests, instances of physical restraint, and suspensions and expulsions, all of which are disproportionately experienced by students with disabilities, especially students of color.”
  • Cops Don't Stop Violence: Combating Narratives Used to Defend Police Instead of Defunding Them Community Resource Hub and Interrupting Criminalization, July, 2021“Police are facing one of the greatest crises of legitimacy in a generation. So they are reaching for one of their most reliable weapons -- fear.”
  • report thumbnail Building exits off the highway to mass incarceration: Diversion programs explained Prison Policy Initiative, July, 2021“We envision the criminal justice system as a highway where people are heading toward the possibility of incarceration; depending on the state or county, this highway may have exit ramps in the form of diversion programs and alternatives to incarceration.”
  • The Thin Blue Waveform: Racial Disparities in Officer Prosody Undermine Institutional Trust in the Police Nicholas P. Camp et al, July, 2021“Officers communicate different levels of respect, warmth, and ease toward Black and White citizens....these interpersonal cues accumulate across interactions to shape citizens' perceptions of and trust in law enforcement.”
  • Policing by the Numbers Council on Criminal Justice, June, 2021“Efforts to develop responses that achieve the twin goals of crime control and justice must be grounded in hard data and research evidence, as well as personal and professional experience.”
  • Accessing justice: The impact of discretion, 'deservedness' and distributive justice on the equitable allocation of policing resources Sarah Charman, Emma Williams, May, 2021“Indeed, the often invisible and unchecked nature of police discretion challenges its neutrality and highlights the subjective nature of such practices which are influenced by judgement, interpretation and previous experience.”
  • Arrest Trends: Suburban Police Are Driving the Use of Arrests Vera Institute of Justice, May, 2021“In principal cities, racial disparities in arrests persist but have dropped by more than 50 percent. This progress has not occurred elsewhere; racial disparities in arrests have increased in suburban cities.”
  • Reducing Policing's Footprint? Racial Disparities and Arrest Trends After Misdemeanor Decriminalization and Legalization in Denver and Philadelphia Vera Institute of Justice, May, 2021“Arrests have declined by at least 40 percent for every decriminalized offense category in Philadelphia, with the steepest decreases in the years immediately following decriminalization.”
  • Policy Assessments Council on Crime and Justice Task Force on Policing, May, 2021“Task Force members weighed the relative value of each proposal based on the best available research and on their professional expertise and lived experiences.”
  • The carceral production of transgender poverty: How racialized gender policing deprives transgender women of housing and safety Dilara Yarbrough, May, 2021“Laws crafted with race-neutral language target survival and coping strategies disproportionately used by people of color and trans people in public space.”
  • Brutality in the Name of "Safety": Baton Rouge Parish Policing and Tactics The Promise of Justice Initiative, May, 2021“With a jail population rate that is 66% higher than the national average, there is statistical proof that EBR readily weaponizes over-policing and incarceration to address what are in fact social and societal problems.”
  • Defund the Police - Invest in Community Care: A Guide to Alternative Mental Health Responses Interrupting Criminalization, May, 2021“This guide highlights considerations for real, meaningful shifts away from law enforcement and towards autonomous, self-determined community-based resources and responses to unmet mental health needs.”
  • Decoupling Crisis Response from Policing -- A Step Toward Equitable Psychiatric Emergency Services New England Journal of Medicine, May, 2021“Police responses to psychiatric crises harm patients far too often, especially in minority communities, where a long history of institutional racism informs warranted distrust of law enforcement.”
  • Disability's Fourth Amendment Jamelia Morgan, April, 2021“I discuss the ways in which disability mediates interactions with law enforcement and how Fourth Amendment doctrine renders disabled people vulnerable to policing and police violence.”
  • A Better Path Forward for Criminal Justice: A Report by the Brookings-AEI Working Group on Criminal Justice Reform The Brookings Institution, American Enterprise Institute, April, 2021“The essays in this volume are intended to provide...research-grounded guidance and insight on core issues and strategies that can sustain bipartisan support for critically needed criminal justice reforms.”
  • A Neglected Problem: Understanding the Effects of Personal and Vicarious Trauma on African Americans' Attitudes Toward the Police Paywall :( Daniel K. Pryce et al., April, 2021“Even for the proportion of African Americans who had positive perceptions and interactions with the police, their views of the police seemed to be further complicated by broader concerns of discriminatory treatment.”
  • The American Racial Divide in Fear of the Police Justin Pickett, Amanda Graham, and Frank Cullen, April, 2021“Most Whites felt safe, but most Blacks feared the police even more than crime, being afraid both for themselves and for others they cared about.”
  • Contacts with the Police and the Over-Representation of Indigenous Peoples in The Canadian Criminal Justice System Jean-Denis David and Megan Mitchell, April, 2021“Indigenous peoples are more likely to encounter the police for a variety of reasons including for law enforcement reasons, for non-enforcement reasons, including being a victim or a witness to a crime, and for behavioural health-related issues.”
  • ALC Court Watch Docket Report #02 Maintaining Apartheid: Arrest and Cash Bail in Allegheny County Abolitionist Law Center, April, 2021“In a county that is less than 13% Black, 56% of all arrests between Aug 14 and Dec 31 of 2020 were of Black residents.”
  • Do Police Make Too Many Arrests? Cho, Sungwoo, Felipe Goncalves, and Emily Weisburst, April, 2021“Because the observed decline in enforcement is concentrated among arrests for low-level offenses, we argue that low-level enforcement could be reduced at the margin without likely increases in crime.”
  • Citizens, Suspects, and Enemies: Examining Police Militarization Mitt Regan, March, 2021“The conviction that police officers need [military-grade weapons] reflects a subtle cultural shift in the understanding of the nature of police work.”
  • Better for Everyone: Black Descriptive Representation and Police Traffic Stops Leah Christiani et al., March, 2021“Even though increased black representation would not eliminate racial disparities, it may be an important part of reducing the amount of negative police contact that individuals experience.”
  • Social Fabric: A New Model for Public Safety and Vital Neighborhoods The Square One Project, March, 2021“We have models available, but we've never made a sustained commitment to any institution other than the police and the prison system.”
  • Public Opinion About Police Weapons and Equipment: An Exploratory Analysis Paywall :( Kevin H. Wozniak, Kevin M. Drakulich, and Brian R. Calfano, March, 2021“We find that public opinion defies easy classification into "militarized" versus "routine" equipment categories...perceptions of police misconduct and bias predict opposition to some types of tools.”
  • Collective Bargaining Rights, Policing, and Civilian Deaths Cunningham, Jamein, Donna Feir, and Rob Gillezeau, March, 2021“Using an event-study design, we find that the introduction of duty to bargain requirements with police unions has led to a significant increase in non-white civilian deaths at the hands of police during the late twentieth century.”
  • Black and (Thin) Blue (Line): Corruption and Other Political Determinants of Police Killings in America Oguzhan C. Dincer and Michael Johnston, February, 2021“Our evidence suggests that police can kill Black Americans with impunity because of a lack of accountability - exemplified by corruption - that is largely determined by political influences.”
  • The role of officer race and gender in police-civilian interactions in Chicago Paywall :( Ba, Bocar A., Dean Knox, Jonathan Mummolo, and Roman Rivera, February, 2021“Relative to white officers, Black and Hispanic officers make far fewer stops and arrests, and they use force less often, especially against Black civilians.”
  • Safety We Can Feel Safety We Can Feel, February, 2021“Respondents wanted to see more funding going towards centers for mental health and addiction recovery (58%), housing and stability assistance (57%), and education and youth programming (53%) as approaches to addressing violence.”
  • Chasing Justice: Addressing Police Violence and Corruption in Maryland ACLU of Maryland, January, 2021“91% of officers' use of force was targeted toward Black residents.”
  • The Demand Is Still #DefundPolice: Lessons from 2020 Interrupting Criminalization, January, 2021(Over the past six months, organizers secured divestment of over $840 million dollars from police departments, investments of at least $160 million dollars in communities, and increased transparency and community control over budgets in many areas.)
  • Counterevidence of crime-reduction effects from federal grants of military equipment to local police Paywall :( Gunderson et al, December, 2020“We show that the 2014 data are flawed and that the more recent data provide no evidence that 1033 SME reduces crime.”
  • Racial prejudice predicts police militarization Tyler Jimenez, Peter J. Helm, Alexis Wilkinson, & Jamie Arndt, December, 2020“Studies 2 and 3 are the first to explicitly connect these variables, finding that racial prejudice is predictive of both support for police militarization and actual police acquisitions of military equipment.”
  • Trends in Issuance of Criminal Summonses in New York City, 2003-2019 Data Collaborative for Justice, December, 2020“Almost half of all marijuana possession summonses were issued to Black people (45.5%). Over 40% of summonses issued for disorderly conduct, public consumption of alcohol, and violations of transit authority rules were issued to Black people.”
  • Behavioral Health Crisis Alternatives: Shifting from Police to Community Responses Vera Institute of Justice, November, 2020“Communities must pursue new approaches that minimize trauma and distress, promote dignity and autonomy, and reduce repeat encounters with police for people who experience behavioral health crises.”
  • Emergency Department visits for depression following police killings of unarmed African Americans Paywall :( Abhery Das, Parvati Singh, Anju K.Kulkarni, and Tim A. Bruckner, November, 2020“Police killings of unarmed African Americans correspond with an 11% increase in ED visits per 100,000 population related to depression among African Americans in the concurrent month and three months following the exposure (p < 0.05).”
  • Unmasked: Impacts of Pandemic Policing COVID19 Policing Project, October, 2020“Black people specifically were 4.5 times more likely to be policed and punished for violations of COVID-19 orders than white people.”
  • The Community Responder Model: How Cities Can Send the Right Responder to Every 911 Call Center for American Progress, October, 2020“Estimates for the share of calls that could be handled by [community responders] range from a low of 21 percent of calls in Detroit to a high of 38 percent in Seattle and Portland.”
  • Effects of New York City's Neighborhood Policing Policy Brenden Beck, Joseph Antonelli, and Gabriela Piñeros, October, 2020(We find [New York City's)
  • Defund Sheriffs: A Toolkit for Organizers Working Families, Sheriffs for Trusting Communities, Faith in Action Fund, & Community Resource Hub for Safety and Accountability, October, 2020“Defunding sheriffs should be an urgent priority for anyone concerned with mass incarceration and police violence.”
  • Building Safe, Thriving Communities: Research-Based Strategies for Public Safety NYU Law School Center for Race, Inequality, and the Law and the Justice Collaborative Institute, October, 2020“More and more, elected leaders and their constituents are recognizing that a path to safety and stability does not lie in a return to past, failed practices, but in an evidence-based, innovative reimagining of our law enforcement system.”
  • Mass Extraction: The Widespread Power of U.S. Law Enforcement to Search Mobile Phones Upturn Toward Justice in Technology, October, 2020“We found that state and local law enforcement agencies have performed hundreds of thousands of cellphone extractions since 2015, often without a warrant.”
  • Civic Responses to Police Violence Desmond Ang and Jonathan Tebes, October, 2020“We find that exposure to police violence leads to significant increases in registrations and votes. These effects are driven entirely by Blacks and Hispanics and are largest for killings of unarmed individuals.”
  • NYPD Officer Misconduct Analysis New York University's Public Safety Lab, September, 2020“We find that precincts with higher percentages of Black residents had higher levels of excess misconduct complaints, both all and substantiated, between 2006-2019.”
  • Government Misconduct and Convicting the Innocent: The Role of Prosecutors, Police and Other Law Enforcement National Registry of Exonerations, September, 2020“More than a third of all exonerations included misconduct by police officers, [and] nearly as many involved misconduct by prosecutors.”
  • Tracking Enforcement Trends in New York City: 2003-2018 Data Collaborative for Justice, September, 2020“There were 5.8 enforcement actions among Black people for every one enforcement action among White people in 2018.”
  • Research Memo: Police Unions and the Obstacles They Pose Community Resource Hub for Safety and Accountability, September, 2020“Police unions and the LEOBR/POBR pose major obstacles to police reform, specifically in regard to accountability, transparency, and community safety.”
  • Understanding Police Enforcement Vera Institute of Justice, September, 2020“Most calls do not relate to serious or violent crime; instead, the most frequent calls involve nuisance complaints and low-level crimes.”
  • How Many Complaints Against Police Officers Can Be Abated by Incapacitating A Few "Bad Apples?" Aaron Chalfin and Jacob Kaplan, August, 2020“Our analysis suggests that surgically removing predictably problematic police officers is unlikely to have a large impact on citizen complaints.”
  • Officer-Involved Shootings in Texas: 2016-2019 Texas Justice Initiative, August, 2020“Shootings of civilians and their subsequent deaths caused by officers have been increasing over the four years”
  • Life Years Lost to Police Encounters in the United States Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, August, 2020“This implies a loss of roughly 16,000 years of life for recent cohorts of Black men.”
  • The Other Epidemic: Fatal Police Shootings in the Time of COVID-19 ACLU, August, 2020“From January 1, 2015, to June 30, 2020, police officers shot and killed 5,442 people.”
  • Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Militancy in Law Enforcement Brennan Center for Justice, August, 2020“Alarmingly, internal FBI policy documents have also warned agents assigned to domestic terrorism cases that the white supremacist and anti-government militia groups they investigate often have "active links" to law enforcement officials.”
  • Cops, Clinicians, or Both? Collaborative Approaches to Responding to Behavioral Health Emergencies National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors, August, 2020“Individuals [in behavioral health crisis] account for a quarter of police shootings and over 2 million jail bookings per year. Explicit and implicit bias magnify these problems for people of color.”
  • "Defunding the Police" and People With Mental Illness Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, August, 2020“We should dramatically reduce the role of the police in the lives of people with mental illness. As the same time, mental health services should be expanded and racial disparities in their delivery eliminated.”
  • The Presence of School Resource Officers (SROs) in America's Schools Justice Policy Institute, July, 2020“Allowing police officers to needlessly handle minor infractions in schools often marks a student's first contact with the criminal justice system, potentially setting them up for a lifetime of collateral consequences.”
  • Reducing Racial Disparities in Crime Victimization Anna Harvey and Taylor Mattia, July, 2020“We find that successful litigation over racially discriminatory practices substantially reduced both absolute and relative Black crime victimization, without increasing white victimization.”
  • Effects of school resource officers on school crime and responses to school crime Gottfredson et al., July, 2020“The study findings suggest that increasing SROs does not improve school safety and that by increasing exclusionary responses to school discipline incidents it increases the criminalization of school discipline.”
  • Which Side Are We On: Can Labor Support #BlackLivesMatter and Police Unions? David Unger, July, 2020“An estimated 60 to 80 percent of police officers nationwide are unionized,twice the 34 percent unionization rate for the entire public sector, and at least ten times the rate of private sector unionization.”
  • America's Hidden Common Ground on Police Reform and Racism in the United States: Results from a Public Agenda/USA Today/Ipsos Hidden Common Ground survey Ipsos and Public Agenda, June, 2020“Most Americans (58%) say racial bias against Black or African Americans committed by police and law enforcement is a serious problem in their community, including 75% of Democrats and 51% of Independents as well as 40% of Republicans.”
  • Police Brutality Bonds: How Wall Street Profits from Police Violence Action Center on Race & the Economy, June, 2020“In the twelve cities and counties included here, we found a total of nearly $878 million in bond borrowing to cover police related settlements and judgments.”
  • Sending New Yorkers to Jail: Police Unions, Campaign Contributions, and the Political Fight to Rollback Bail Reform Center for Community Alternatives, Citizen Action of New York, and the Public Policy and Education Fund of New York, June, 2020(On average, Senators who voted to expose more New Yorkers to money bail received 10 times as much in law enforcement union donations as those who voted in opposition.)
  • Widespread Desire for Policing and Criminal Justice Reform The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, June, 2020“Americans, regardless of race, strongly support policies that include body cameras, holding police accountable for excessive force and racially biased policing, and creating criteria for the use of force.”
  • #DefundPolice Toolkit: Concrete Steps Toward Divestment from Policing & Investment in Community Safety Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action & Movement for Black Lives, June, 2020“#DefundPolice is a strategy that goes beyond dollars and cents--it is not just about decreasing police budgets, it is about reducing the power, scope, and size of police departments.”
  • Police Officers Rarely Charged for Excessive Use of Force in Federal Court TRAC, June, 2020“In fact, in the twenty-year period between 1990 and 2019, federal prosecutors filed SS 242 charges about 41 times per year on average.”
  • Law Enforcement Super Pacs and the Fight for Reform Democratic Policy Center, June, 2020“This report outlines an under-investigated aspect of law enforcement union power: their use of independent expenditure groups to influence elections and their ability to hire top Democratic consultants to execute their campaigns.”
  • The Case for Violence Interruption Programs as an Alternative to Policing The Justice Collaborative Institute, June, 2020“In cities and neighborhoods across the country, [violence interruption] programs have consistently proven to effectively and efficiently reduce gun violence while also helping people to build healthier, more stable lives.”
  • Police Killings in the US: Inequalities by Race/Ethnicity and Socioeconomic Position People's Policy Project, June, 2020“Whites in the poorest areas have a police killing rate of 7.9 per million, compared to 2 per million in the least-poor areas. Blacks in the poorest areas have a police killing rate of 12.3 per million, compared to 6.7 per million in the least-poor areas.”
  • Racial Disparities in NYPD's COVID-19 Policing: Unequal Enforcement of 311 Social Distancing Calls The Legal Aid Society, May, 2020“Although the official data released by the city is limited and incomplete, the data that is available demonstrates the disproportionate impacts of the NYPD's pandemic policing on Black and Latino New Yorkers.”
  • A large-scale analysis of racial disparities in police stops across the United States Emma Pierson et al, May, 2020“Our analysis provides evidence that decisions about whom to stop and, subsequently, whom to search are biased against black and Hispanic drivers.”
  • To Serve and Protect Each Other: How Police-Prosecutor Codependence Enables Police Misconduct Somil Trivedi and Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, May, 2020“The persistent, codependent relationship between police and prosecutors exacerbates police misconduct and violence and is aided by prosecutors in both legal and extralegal ways.”
  • Race and Reasonableness in Police Killings Jeffrey Fagan and Alexis Campbell, May, 2020“Black suspects are more than twice as likely to be killed by police than are persons of other racial or ethnic groups; even when there are no other obvious circumstances during the encounter that would make the use of deadly force reasonable.”
  • Catalyzing Policing Reform with Data: Policing Typology for Los Angeles Neighborhoods Urban Institute, May, 2020“However, across all groups and their varied activity levels, Black people are stopped at the highest rate.”
  • The Wandering Officer Ben Grunwald & John Rappaport, April, 2020“In any given year over the last three decades, an average of roughly 1,100 full-time law-enforcement officers in Florida walk the streets having been fired in the past, and almost 800 having been fired for misconduct.”
  • Policing in a Time of Pandemic: Recommendations for Law Enforcement Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and Georgetown Law Innovative Policing Program, April, 2020“Traditional law enforcement practices such as stops, searches, and arrests currently create a substantial risk of infection for police, suspects and community members alike.”
  • Which Police Departments Want Reform? Barriers to Evidence-Based Policymaking Samantha Goerger, Jonathan Mummolo, and Sean J. Westwood, April, 2020“Many agencies that indicate interest in transparent, evidence-based policymaking are likely engaging in cheap talk, and recoil once performance evaluations are made salient.”
  • Demonstrations, demoralization, and de-policing Paywall :( Christopher J. Marier and Lorie A. Fridell, March, 2020“Post-Ferguson protests in 2014 did not appreciably worsen police morale nor lead to substantial withdrawal from most police work, suggesting that the police institution is resilient to exogenous shocks.”
  • Opioids, Race, and Drug Enforcement: Exploring Local Relationships Between Neighborhood Context and Black-White Opioid-Related Possession Arrests Paywall :( Ellen A. Donnelly, Jascha Wagner, Madeline Stenger, Hannah G. Cortina, Daniel J. O'Connell, Tammy L. Anderson, March, 2020“Calls for police service for overdoses increase White arrests in more advantaged, rural communities. Economic disadvantage and racial diversity in neighborhoods more strongly elevate possession arrest rates among Blacks relative to Whites.”
  • Reconciling Police and Communities with Apologies, Acknowledgements, or Both: A Controlled Experiment Thomas C. O'Brien, Tracey L. Meares, Tom R. Tyler, February, 2020“The evidence suggests that police leaders should combine acknowledgement of responsibility for the mistrust with an apology if they want to enlist the cooperation of people who are least likely to trust the police.”
  • Policing the American University Civilytics Consulting LLC, February, 2020“Since reporting began, campus police departments arrests of black adults have annually increased. Recent reductions in total arrests are due to a sharp decrease in arrests of white adults.”
  • Housing Not Handcuffs: Ending the Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, December, 2019“Over the past thirteen years, there has been a dramatic increase in criminalization laws, yet access to affordable housing grows ever more elusive.”
  • Gang Takedowns in the De Blasio Era: The Dangers of 'Precision Policing' The Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, December, 2019“Gang policing replicates the harms of mass incarceration strategies that have come under increased scrutiny. It is dangerous and discriminatory and will not uplift neighborhoods struggling with intra-community violence, gang-related or otherwise.”
  • Atlas of Surveillance: Southwestern Border Communities Electronic Frontier Foundation, October, 2019“We found 36 local government agencies using automated license plate readers (ALPR), 45 outfitting officers with body-worn cameras, and 20 flying drones.”
  • Crisis Response Services for People with Mental Illnesses or Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities: A Review of the Literature on Police-based and Other First Response Models Vera Institute of Justice, October, 2019“Police-based and related crisis response services for people with mental illnesses or I/DD can play a vital role in reducing justice system contact and improving health outcomes among these vulnerable populations.”
  • The Power of Observation: An Empirical Analysis of the Effects of Body Worn Cameras on Police Use of Force and Productivity Taeho Kim, October, 2019(This study finds that body worn cameras are associated with a drop of 43% in use of force, a reduction of 81% in subject injury, yet not with officer injury, or other productivity measures such as crime and clearance rates.)
  • The Price of Taxation by Citation: Case Studies of Three Georgia Cities that Rely Heavily on Fines and Fees Institute for Justice, October, 2019“Our findings also suggest taxation by citation is shortsighted. Cities may gain revenue, but they may also pay a price for it in the form of lower community trust and cooperation.”
  • The Role of Police Unions in the 21st Century Texas Public Policy Foundation, September, 2019“However, police unions have more recently become involved in policy issues beyond those bounded by typical labor relations--for instance, criminal justice public policy and training; and union involvement can become problematic.”
  • Policing, Poverty, and Racial Inequality in Tulsa, Oklahoma Human Rights Watch, September, 2019“Human Rights Watch found that, beyond the statistical disparities of treatment by police of the different races, black people nearly all had personal experiences of abusive policing, ranging from extreme violence towards themselves or family members, to m”
  • The Effect of Direct and Vicarious Police Contact on the Educational Achievement of Urban Teens Paywall :( Aaron Gottlieb and Robert Wilson, August, 2019“We find that arrest, police contact that does not result in arrest, and vicarious police contact are all associated with reductions in educational achievement.”
  • report thumbnail Arrest, Release, Repeat: How police and jails are misused to respond to social problems Prison Policy Initiative, August, 2019“Our analysis confirms that people who are repeatedly arrested and jailed are arrested for lower-level offenses, have unmet medical and mental health needs, and are economically marginalized.”
  • The 911 Call Processing System: A Review of the Literature as it Relates to Policing Vera Institute of Justice, August, 2019“Analysis of calls for service data provides a huge and largely untapped opportunity for researchers and practitioners to inform and transform policy and practice.”
  • Gatekeepers: The Role of Police in Ending Mass Incarceration Vera Institute of Justice, August, 2019“The mass enforcement of relatively minor law violations suggests that policing practices currently tend toward punitive approaches in ways that are often not necessary to achieve public safety.”
  • The National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice: Key Process and Outcome Evaluation Findings Urban Institute, August, 2019“Although community perceptions improved in the aggregate, views of police and police legitimacy remain largely negative in the neighborhoods most affected by crime and disadvantage.”
  • Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race-ethnicity, and sex Frank Edwards, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito, August, 2019“For young men of color, police use of force is among the leading causes of death.”
  • Network exposure and excessive use of force: Investigating the social transmission of police misconduct Marie Ouellet, Sadaf Hashimi, Jason Gravel, and Andrew V. Papachristos, July, 2019“Our findings indicate officers' peers may serve as social conduits through which misconduct may be learned and transmitted.”
  • When Stop and Frisk Comes Home: Policing Public and Patrolled Housing Alexis Karteron, July, 2019“Largely because of the vast array of behavior that is regulated in public and patrolled housing, law enforcement officers have broad authority to stop, arrest, and search people in and around such locations.”
  • Police-Mental Health Collaborations: A Framework for Implementing Effective Law Enforcement Responses for People Who Have Mental Health Needs Council of State Governments, July, 2019“Increasingly, officers are called on to be the first--and often the only--responders to calls involving people experiencing a mental health crisis.”
  • Changes in Enforcement of Low-Level and Felony Offenses Post-Ferguson: An Analysis of Arrests in St. Louis, Missouri Lee Ann Slocum, Claire Greene, Beth M. Huebner, and Richard Rosenfeld, July, 2019“We find that there was an initial reduction in low-level arrests of Whites and Blacks in the wake of Ferguson. Enforcement of misdemeanors and ordinance violations then increased and returned to expected levels, but only for Blacks.”
  • Confirmation Bias and Other Systemic Causes of Wrongful Convictions: A Sentinel Events Perspective Kim Rossmo and Joycelyn Pollock, July, 2019“Detectives must minimize the risk of error by accurately assessing evidence reliability and avoiding premature shifts to suspect-based investigations. Resolving issues of cognitive bias and avoiding logic/analytic mistakes are equally important.”
  • Fighting Crime or Raising Revenue? Testing Opposing Views of Forfeiture. Brian Kelly, June, 2019“These results add to a growing body of scholarly evidence supporting forfeiture's critics, suggesting that claims about forfeiture's value in crime fighting are exaggerated at best and that police do use forfeiture to raise revenue.”
  • Failing to Protect and Serve: Police Department Policies Towards Transgender People National Center for Transgender Equality, May, 2019(Only 9 of the 25 departments reviewed include gender identity and/or expression language in their non-discrimination policy, which is the best way to clarify that transgender people are protected.)
  • A randomized control trial evaluating the effects of police body-worn cameras David Yokum, Anita Ravishankar, and Alexander Coppock, May, 2019“Our results indicate that cameras did not meaningfully affect police behavior on a range of outcomes, including complaints and use of force.”
  • More Black than Blue: Politics and Power in the 2019 Black Census The Black Futures Lab, May, 2019“More than half (55 percent) of respondents have personally had a negative interaction with the police at some point, and 28 percent have had at least one negative interaction in the last 6 months.”
  • Road Runners: The Role and Impact of Law Enforcement in Transporting Individuals with Severe Mental Illness Treatment Advocacy Center, May, 2019“Approximately one-third of individuals with severe mental illness have their first contact with mental health treatment through a law enforcement encounter.”
  • Racial Disparities in D.C. Policing: Descriptive Evidence From 2013-2017 ACLU of the District of Columbia, May, 2019“From 2013 to 2017, Black individuals composed 47% of D.C.'s population but 86% of its arrestees. During this time, Black people were arrested at 10 times the rate of white people.”
  • Aggressive Policing and Academic Outcomes: Examining the Impact of Police "Surges" in NYC Students' Home Neighborhoods Joscha Legewie, Chelsea Farley, Kayla Stewart, May, 2019“Aggressive policing in communities can harm Black boys' educational performance, as measured by state tests.”
  • Good Cop, Bad Cop: Using Civilian Allegations to Predict Police Misconduct Kyle Rozema and Max Schanzenbach, May, 2019“The worst 1 percent of officers, as measured by civilian allegations, generate almost 5 times the number of payouts and over 4 times the total damage payouts in civil rights litigation.”
  • report thumbnail Policing Women: Race and gender disparities in police stops, searches, and use of force Prison Policy Initiative, May, 2019“Women make up an increasing share of arrests and report much more use of force than they did twenty years ago.”
  • Using Shifts in Deployment and Operations to Test for Racial Bias in Police Stops John M. MacDonald and Jeffrey Fagan, May, 2019“For blacks, impact-zone formation increases arrests, summons, and frisks. For Hispanics, impact-zone formation increases arrests, frisks, and street detention.”
  • The Voluntariness of Voluntary Consent: Consent Searches and the Psychology of Compliance Roseanna Sommers and Vanessa K. Bohns, April, 2019“This is problematic because it indicates that a key justification for suspicionless consent searches--that they are voluntary--relies on an assessment that is subject to bias.”
  • Dirty Data, Bad Predictions: How Civil Rights Violations Impact Police Data, Predictive Policing Systems, and Justice Rashida Richardson, Jason Schultz, Kate Crawford, March, 2019“The failure to adequately interrogate and reform police data creation and collection practices can result in skewed predictive policing systems and create lasting consequences that will permeate throughout the criminal justice system.”
  • New Era of Public Safety: A Guide to Fair, Safe, and Effective Community Policing The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, March, 2019(This report was developed to give individuals, communities, activists, advocacy organizations, law makers, and police departments the knowledge to carry out police reform.)
  • Driver's License Suspension in North Carolina Brandon L. Garrett and William Crozier, March, 2019“We found that there are 1,225,000 active driver's licenses suspensions in North Carolina for non-driving related reasons, relating to failure to pay traffic fines and court courts, and failure to appear in court for traffic offenses.”
  • A Proposal to End Regressive Taxation through Law Enforcement The Hamilton Project, March, 2019“Over the past few decades the directives handed down to the everyday agents of law enforcement have incrementally shifted focus away from public safety and toward public finance.”
  • Cops and No Counselors: How the Lack of School Mental Health Staff is Harming Students ACLU, March, 2019“We found that schools with police reported 3.5 times as many arrests as schools without police. As a result, students with disabilities and students of color are frequently sent into the criminal system.”
  • A large-scale analysis of racial disparities in police stops across the United States Stanford Computational Policy Lab, March, 2019“Our investigation of nearly 100 million traffic stops across the United States reveals evidence of widespread discrimination in decisions to stop and search drivers.”
  • How Police Technology Aggravates Racial Inequity: A Taxonomy of Problems and a Path Forward Laura Moy, February, 2019“Police technology may (1) replicate inequity in policing, (2) mask inequity in policing, (3) transfer inequity from elsewhere to policing, (4) exacerbate inequitable policing harms, and/or (5) compromise oversight of inequity in policing.”
  • Aggressive Policing and the Educational Performance of Minority Youth Joscha Legewie and Jeffrey Fagan, February, 2019“Aggressive policing can thus lower educational performance for some minority groups, providing evidence that the consequences of policing extend into key domains of social life, with implications for the educational trajectories of minority youth.”
  • Police Contact and the Legal Socialization of Urban Teens Amanda Geller and Jeffrey Fagan, February, 2019“We find that both personal and vicarious police contact are associated with increased legal cynicism...Legal cynicism is amplified in teens reporting intrusive contact but diminished among teens reporting experiences characterized by procedural justice.”
  • The Great Decoupling: The Disconnection Between Criminal Offending and Experience of Arrest Across Two Cohorts Vesla M. Weaver, Andrew Papachristos, and Michael Zanger-Tishler, February, 2019“The criminal justice system, we argue, slipped from one in which arrest was low and strongly linked to offending to one where a substantial share of Americans experienced arrest without committing a crime.”
  • Every Three Seconds: Unlocking Police Data on Arrests Vera Institute of Justice, January, 2019“Across the United States, an arrest occurs every three seconds.”
  • Bias in Video Evidence: Implications for Police Body Cameras Ashley Kalle, Georgina Hammock, 2019“While watching the same video, diff erent conclusions were drawn about what transpired, who was culpable, the character of the individuals involved, and the level of force used based on observers' focus and their racial attitudes.”
  • Police Disciplinary Appeals Stephen Rushin, 2019“Many communities have established appeals procedures that may hamper reform efforts, contribute to officer misconduct, and limit public oversight of police departments.”
  • Cellphones, Law Enforcement, and the Right to Privacy Brennan Center for Justice, December, 2018“New technologies that extend the power and reach of law enforcement are likely to exacerbate existing biases in policing and add more surveillance to communities that are already extensively policed.”
  • The Contagiousness of Police Violence Thibaut Horel, Trevor Campbell, Lorenzo Masoero, Raj Agrawal, Andrew Papachristos and Daria Roithmayr, November, 2018“Most remarkably, within two years, exposure to a single shooting more than doubles a network neighbor's probability of a future shooting.”
  • An Analysis of State Statutes Regarding the Role of Law Enforcement Paywall :( Carly E. Cortright, Wesley McCann, Dale Willits, Craig Hemmens, Mary K. Stohr, October, 2018“Our findings indicate a counterintuitive reversal in the trend, with more states removing order maintenance and peacekeeping duties from their statutes despite the wide dominance of community-oriented policing.”
  • Contacts Between Police and the Public, 2015 Bureau of Justice Statistics, October, 2018(When police initiated the contact, black and Hispanic residents were more likely to experience the threat or use of physical force than white residents.)
  • report thumbnail Police stops are still marred by racial discrimination, new data shows. Prison Policy Initiative, October, 2018“Police threatened or used force against nearly 1 million people, who were disproportionately Black or Hispanic.”
  • Militarization fails to enhance police safety or reduce crime but may harm police reputation Jonathan Mummolo, August, 2018(This article argues that militarized police units are more often deployed in communities with large shares of African American residents, they fail to enhance officer safety or reduce local crime, and may diminish police reputation in the mass public.)
  • Risk of Police-Involved Death by Race/Ethnicity and Place, United States, 2012-2018 Paywall :( Frank Edwards, Michael H. Esposito, and Hedwig Lee, August, 2018(Police were responsible for about 8% of all homicides with adult male victims between 2012 and 2018, with Black men having the highest risk of mortality from police violence.)
  • Exploitative Revenues, Law Enforcement, and the Quality of Government Service Rebecca Goldstein, Michael W. Sances, and Hye Young You, August, 2018“We find that police departments in cities that collect a greater share of their revenue from fees solve violent and property crimes at significantly lower rates.”
  • Unequal Treatment: Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Miami-Dade Criminal Justice ACLU Florida Greater Miami, July, 2018(This report finds that from arrest to sentencing, racial disparities exist at each decision point in the Miami-Dade County's criminal justice system.)
  • Emerging Issues in American Policing Volume 4, July 2018 Vera Institute of Justice, July, 2018(This quarterly digest presents innovations in the field of policing from leading academic journals and research publications.)
  • TRENDS: Police Militarization and the Use of Lethal Force Paywall :( Edward Lawson, Jr., July, 2018(There is a positive and significant association between militarization and the number of suspects killed, controlling for several other possible explanations.)
  • Police killings and their spillover effects on the mental health of black Americans: a population-based, quasi-experimental study Jacob Bor, Atheendar S Venkataramani, David R Williams, Alexander C Tsai, June, 2018“Police killings of unarmed black Americans have adverse effects on mental health among black American adults in the general population.”
  • Officer-involved Shootings and Custodial Deaths in Texas Texas Justice Initiative, June, 2018(Overall, most deaths that occur in Texas law enforcement custody are due to natural causes, but that nearly half of all deaths of inmates housed alone in a jail cell are suicides.)
  • America Under Watch: Face Surveillance in the United States Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology, May, 2018“For the millions of Americans living in Detroit and Chicago, face surveillance may be an imminent reality.”
  • Swept Up in the Sweep: The Impact of Gang Allegations on Immigrant New Yorkers New York Immigration Coalition, May, 2018“By broadly casting immigrant Latinx youth as gang members to be targeted for incarceration and deportation, even the outward pretense of basic rights and due process is pushed to the side.”
  • Police Stops and Searches of Indigenous People in Minneapolis: The Roles of Race, Place, and Gender Marina Mileo Gorsuch and Deborah Rho, April, 2018“Our analysis shows that Minneapolis police disproportionately stopped Native Americans in Minneapolis in non-vehicle stops and suspicious vehicle stops, but not in traffic enforcement stops.”
  • A Deeper Dive into Racial Disparities in Policing in Vermont Stephanie Seguino and Nancy Brooks, March, 2018(This report substantiates earlier analyses, finding that Black and Hispanic drivers in Vermont are more likely to be stopped and arrested than White or Asian drivers.)
  • Face Off: Law Enforcement Use of Face Recognition Technology Electronic Frontier Foundation, February, 2018“Law enforcement officers can use mobile devices to capture face recognition-ready photographs of people they stop on the street; surveillance cameras boast real-time face scanning and identification capabilities.”
  • Social Media Monitoring in Boston: Free Speech in the Crosshairs ACLU Massachusetts, February, 2018(From 2014-16 the Boston Police Dept. used a social media surveillance system to gather data irrelevant to law enforcement concerns. It treated ordinary citizens as justifiable targets of surveillance, without deterring or solving serious crimes.)
  • Collective Bargaining and Police Misconduct: Evidence from Florida Dhammika Dharmapala, Richard H. McAdams, and John Rappaport, January, 2018“Collective bargaining rights lead to about a 27% increase in complaints of officer misconduct for the typical sheriff's office.”
  • Estimating the Effects of Law Enforcement and Public Health Interventions Intended to Reduce Gun Violence in Baltimore Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, January, 2018“Although surges in arrests for illegal drug distribution may have a very short-term (1-2 months) violence-reducing effect in an area, there appear to be violence-generating effects up to a year after these drug arrest surges.”
  • Civil Asset Forfeiture: Forfeiting Your Rights Southern Poverty Law Center, January, 2018(This report finds that civil asset forfeiture snares mostly low-level offenders and many individuals who are never charged with a crime in the first place into an unequal system that undercuts due process and property rights.)
  • Policing the Houseless 2.0 Million Dollar Hoods, December, 2017“This report documents that LAPD arrests of houseless persons continued to climb during the first six months of 2017 and that just five charge categories accounted for the majority of houseless arrests.”
  • Police Contact and Mental Health Amanda Geller, Jeffrey Fagan, and Tom R. Tyler, December, 2017“Recent police contact is associated with increased levels of anxiety symptoms, and both quantity and intensity of recent stop experience are significantly associated with increased PTSD symptoms.”
  • 2017 Police Violence Report Mapping Police Violence, December, 2017“Compiling information from media reports, obituaries, public records, and databases like Fatal Encounters and the WashingtonPost, this report represents the most comprehensive accounting of deadly police violence in 2017.”
  • The Price for Freedom: Bail in the City of L.A. Million Dollar Hoods, December, 2017(The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), using the Los Angeles County Superior Court's misdemeanor and felony bail schedules, levied over $19 billion in money bail on persons they arrested between 2012 and 2016.)
  • Evidence that curtailing proactive policing can reduce major crime Paywall :( Christopher M. Sullivan & Zachary P. O'Keeffe, September, 2017“Analysing several years of unique data obtained from the NYPD, we find that civilian complaints of major crimes (such as burglary, felony assault and grand larceny) decreased during and shortly after sharp reductions in proactive policing.”
  • report thumbnail What "Stop-and-Frisk" Really Means: Discrimination & Use of Force Prison Policy Initiative, August, 2017“This report analyzes the racially disparate use of force in police stops in New York City in 2011.”
  • Who Does Civil Asset Forfeiture Target Most?: A Review of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department's Forfeiture Activities for Fiscal Year 2016 Nevada Policy Research Institute, August, 2017“Forfeitures disproportionately target neighborhoods with relatively high levels of minorities and low-income residents.”
  • It Matters If You're Black or White: Racial Disparities in the Handling of Complaints against North Charleston Police Officers NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., July, 2017“Although 60 percent of the citizen complaints against NCPD officers were filed by Black residents, their complaints were much less likely to be sustained by NCPD than complaints filed by White residents.”
  • Freedom To Thrive: Reimagining safety & security in our communities The Center for Popular Democracy, Law for Black Lives, and the Black Youth Project 100, June, 2017“This report examines racial disparities, policing landscapes, and budgets in twelve jurisdictions across the country, comparing the city and county spending priorities with those of community organizations and their members.”
  • report thumbnail Data confirms that police treat Black Americans with less respect Prison Policy Initiative, June, 2017“Analyses of police body cam footage reveals racial disparities in officer respect toward civilians.”
  • Language from police body camera footage shows racial disparities in officer respect Stanford University, June, 2017“Officers speak with consistently less respect toward black versus white community members, even after controlling for the race of the officer, the severity of the infraction, the location of the stop, and the outcome of the stop.”
  • Increases in police use of force in the presence of body-worn cameras are driven by officer discretion: a protocol-based subgroup analysis of ten randomized experiments Journal of Experimental Criminology, May, 2017“The core of the analysis presented below is to understand what role police discretion plays in the emergent area of police BWCs.”
  • The Impact of Police on Criminal Justice Reform: Evidence from Cincinnati, Ohio Robin S. Engel, Nicholas Corsaro, M. Murat Ozer, May, 2017“When arrest becomes systematically viewed by police as a limited and precious commodity, to be used sparingly and for the most chronic or serious offenders, change throughout the criminal justice system will likely result.”
  • Paying More for Being Poor: Bias and Disparity in California's Traffic Court System Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, May, 2017“The available county-level data shows that African-American people in particular are four to sixteen times more likely to be booked on arrests related to failure to pay an infraction ticket.”
  • To Protect and Serve: Trends in State-Level Policing Reform, 2015-2016 Vera Institute of Justice, April, 2017“Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Utah and Washington have enacted laws that either limit the use of certain types of force, such as chokeholds, or mandate or strengthen police training on the legal boundaries of justifiable force.”
  • Consequences of Policing Prostitution: An Analysis of Individuals Arrested and Prosecuted for Commercial Sex in New York City Urban Institute, April, 2017“The history of criminalizing prostitution is long, but its modern incarnation in New York City is inextricably intertwined with "broken windows policing," which originated in the early 1990s.”
  • Bullies in Blue: Origins and Consequences of School Policing American Civil Liberties Union, April, 2017“[A]t at its origins, school policing enforced social control over Black and Latino youth who could no longer be kept out of neighborhoods and schools through explicitly discriminatory laws.”
  • Police Union Contracts Stephen Rushin, March, 2017“Across America's largest cities, many police officers receive excessive procedural protections during internal disciplinary investigations, effectively immunizing them from the consequences of misconduct.”
  • Preventing the Use of Deadly Force: Paywall :( Jay T. Jennings and Meghan E. Rubado, February, 2017“Findings show that one policy--the requirement that officers file a report when they point their guns at people but do not fire--is associated with significantly lower rates of gun deaths.”
  • How Do People in High-Crime, Low-Income Communities View the Police? Urban Institute, February, 2017“27.8% of respondents agreed/strongly agreed that police almost always behave according to the law. Approximately one-third agreed or strongly agreed that police stand up for values that are important to them and often arrest people for no good reason.”
  • Behind the Badge: How Police View Their Jobs, Key Issues, and Recent Fatal Encounters Between Blacks and Police Pew Research Center, January, 2017“27% of all white officers but 69% of their black colleagues say the protests that followed fatal encounters between police and black citizens have been motivated at least to some extent by a genuine desire to hold police accountable.”
  • Behind the Badge: How Police View Their Jobs, Key Issues, and Recent Fatal Encounters Between Blacks and Police Pew Research Center, January, 2017“27% of all white officers but 69% of their black colleagues say the protests that followed fatal encounters between police and black citizens have been motivated at least to some extent by a genuine desire to hold police accountable.”
  • report thumbnail Don't confuse respect for police with confidence in them Prison Policy Initiative, October, 2016“Americans' respect for local police is apparently much higher than their confidence in the police in general.”
  • Driving While Black: A Report on Racial Profiling in Metro Nashville Police Department Traffic Stops Gideon's Army, October, 2016“Between 2011-2015, MNPD (Metro Nashville Police Department) stopped an average of 1,122 per 1,000 black drivers: more black drivers than were living in Davidson County.”
  • Police Employment, Officers Per Capita Rates for U.S. Cities Governing, October, 2016“In 2016, police departments serving cities with populations exceeding 25,000 employed an average of 16.8 officers and 21.4 total personnel for every 10,000 residents.”
  • Every 25 Seconds: The Human Toll of Criminalizing Drug Use in the United States Human Rights Watch and the ACLU, October, 2016“More than one of every nine arrests by state law enforcement is for drug possession, amounting to more than 1.25 million arrests each year.”
  • Examining the Role of Use of Force Policies in Ending Police Violence Samuel Sinyangwe, September, 2016“These results suggest specific changes to police department use of force policies can significantly reduce police violence in America.”
  • Police Violence and Citizen Crime Reporting in the Black Community Professor Matthew Desmond, Harvard University; Professor Andrew Papachristos, Yale University; Professor David Kirk, University of Oxford, September, 2016“This study shows that publicized cases of police violence against unarmed black men have a clear and significant impact on citizen crime reporting.”
  • Investigation of the Baltimore City Police Department U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, August, 2016“[T]he Department of Justice concludes that there is reasonable cause to believe that BPD engages in a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the Constitution or federal law.”
  • Demilitarizing America's Police: A Constitutional Analysis The Constitution Project, August, 2016“The use of military equipment and tactics by law enforcement has clear--and serious--constitutional implications.”
  • The Science of Justice: Race, Arrests, and Police Use of Force Center for Policing Equity, July, 2016“[T]he analyses of 12 law enforcement departments from geographically and demographically diverse locations revealed that racial disparities in police use of force persist even when controlling for racial distribution of local arrest rates.”
  • Texas Custodial Death Report Police, jail, and prison deaths 2005-2015 Texas Justice Initiative, July, 2016(This report examines who is dying in the Texas criminal justice system and how they are dying.)
  • report thumbnail Stop and frisk dropping but still ineffective Prison Policy Initiative, May, 2016“The number of stop and frisks has gone down in recent years, but the practice is still not working.”
  • Forfeiting the American Dream: How Civil Asset Forfeiture Exacerbates Hardship for Low-income Communities and Communities of Color Center for American Progress, April, 2016“The abuse of civil asset forfeiture falls hardest on those who are least able to weather the economic shock of losing a home, car, or financial resources—namely, low-income individuals and people of color.”
  • Police Integrity Lost: A Study of Law Enforcement Officers Arrested U.S. Department of Justice, April, 2016“This study is a quantitative content analysis of archived news articles and court records reporting on the arrest(s) of law enforcement officers in the United States from 2005-2011.”
  • Stopped, Fined, Arrested: Racial Bias in Policing and Traffic Courts in California Back on the Road California, April, 2016“[T]here are dramatic racial and socioeconomic disparities in driver’s license suspensions and arrests related to unpaid traffic fines and fees.”
  • Collateral Damage: The Health Effects of Invasive Police Encounters in New York City Abigail A. Sewell and Kevin A. Jefferson, April, 2016“It shows that, holding constant crime levels, segregation measures, and known sociodemographic correlates of health, community-level Terry stop patterns associate with individual-level illness.”
  • Police Perspectives Guidebook Series Vera Institute of Justice, February, 2016“To improve relations between police and the communities they serve, this three-part guide series—written for police, by police—highlights practical, field-informed approaches to building trust with multiracial and multi-ethnic communities.”
  • Racial Disparities in Florida Safety Belt Law Enforcement ACLU, February, 2016“American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) analysis of the most recent seatbelt citation data confirms that the Florida Safety Belt Law has been applied more often to Black motorists than white motorists.”
  • Police Body-Worn Camera Policies Brennan Center for Justice, January, 2016“To help foster and inform this discussion, we have pulled together body camera policies from many police departments that have made them publicly available, as well as model policies from several organizations.”
  • Tracking Enforcement Rates in New York City 2003-2014 Misdemeanor Justice Project at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, December, 2015“This third report from the Misdemeanor Justice Project documents the changing patterns in felony arrests, misdemeanor arrests, criminal summonses, and stop, question and frisk activities in New York City from 2003-2014.”
  • Overlooked in the Undercounted: The Role of Mental Illness in Fatal Law Enforcement Encounters Treatment Advocacy Center, December, 2015“The risk of being killed while being approached or stopped by law enforcement in the community is 16 times higher for individuals with untreated serious mental illness than for other civilians.”
  • report thumbnail New report reveals civil forfeiture Prison Policy Initiative, December, 2015“Criminal forfeiture accounts for only 13% of all government seizure of property. So almost 90% of forfeiture proceeds come from situations where citizens may have done nothing wrong.”
  • Selective Policing: Racially Disparate Enforcement of Low-Level Offenses in New Jersey ACLU of New Jersey, December, 2015“Racial disparities between Black and White arrests exist in every city studied.”
  • A Multi-Level Bayesian Analysis of Racial Bias in Police Shootings at the County-Level in the United States, 2011-2014 University of California, Davis, November, 2015“The results provide evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans[.]”
  • Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture Institute for Justice, November, 2015“In 1986, the Department of Justice’s Assets Forfeiture Fund took in $93.7 million in revenue from federal forfeitures. By 2014, annual deposits had reached $4.5 billion--a 4,667 percent increase.”
  • Police Use of Nonfatal Force, 2002-11 Bureau of Justice Statistics, November, 2015“Of those who had contact, 1.6% experienced the threat or use of nonfatal force by the police during their most recent contact.”
  • Diversity on the Force: Where Police Don't Mirror Communities Governing, September, 2015“Despite efforts to improve diversity, minorities remain largely underrepresented in many local police departments.”
  • Police Body Worn Cameras: A Policy Scorecard The Leadership Conference, Upturn, August, 2015“This scorecard evaluates the body-worn camera policies currently in place in major police departments across the country.”
  • Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women African American Policy Forum, July, 2015(The failure to highlight and demand accountability for the countless Black women killed by police over the past two decades leaves Black women unnamed and thus underprotected in the face of their continued vulnerability to racialized police violence.)
  • Local Police Departments, 2013: Equipment and Technology Bureau of Justice Statistics, July, 2015“The percentage of local police departments that authorized their officers to use conducted energy weapons such as Tasers increased from 60% in 2007 to 81% in 2013.”
  • Deadly Force: Police Use of Lethal Force In The United States Amnesty International, June, 2015(No one knows how many people are killed by police in the US, but estimates range from 400 to 1000 people each year. Yet not one state in the US complies with international human rights standards on the use of lethal force by police.)
  • Guilty Property: How Law Enforcement Takes $1 Million in Cash from Innocent Philadelphians Every Year -- and Gets Away with It ACLU of Pennsylvania, June, 2015“Every year, Pennsylvania law enforcement agencies take roughly $14 million in cash, cars, and homes from property owners and never give it back.”
  • Local Police Departments, 2013: Personnel, Policies, And Practices Bureau of Justice Statistics, May, 2015“About 27% of local police officers were members of a racial or ethnic minority, compared to 15% in 1987. „„”
  • San Francisco's Disproportionate Arrest of African American Women Persists Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, April, 2015“African American women, 5.8 percent of San Francisco's total female population, constituted 45.5 percent of all female arrests in 2013.”
  • NC Traffic Stops The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, April, 2015(Since 2000, the North Carolina Highway Patrol has been collecting data whenever a police officer stops a motorist, and since 2002, all sizable police departments in the state have done so.)
  • No Right to Rest: Criminalizing Homelessness in Colorado The Denver Homeless Out Loud Report Team, April, 2015“In addition to formal citation and arrest, this survey finds evidence of extrajudicial harassment of homeless people. Both police and private security forces commonly harass and enforce punishments on homeless people, even without legal authority to do so”
  • Above the Law: An Investigation of Civil Asset Forfeiture in California Drug Policy Alliance, April, 2015(Asset forfeiture abuses in California reveal the troubling extent to which law enforcement agencies have violated state and federal law.)
  • Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, March, 2015“This investigation has revealed a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct within the Ferguson Police Department that violates the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and federal statutory law.”
  • Arrest-Related Deaths Program Assessment: Technical Report Bureau of Justice Statistics, March, 2015“Provides a technical assessment of the coverage of the Arrest-Related Deaths (ARD) component of the Deaths in Custody Reporting Program (DCRP).”
  • 2014 Annual Report Denver Office of the Independent Monitor, March, 2015“In particular, the police uses of force within District 6 during the pilot project were frequently not recorded by body worn cameras.”
  • Arrest-Related Deaths Program: Data Quality Profile Bureau of Justice Statistics, March, 2015“Data from the ARD represent a national accounting of persons who have died during the process of arrest, including homicides by law enforcement personnel and deaths attributed to suicide, intoxication, accidental injury, and natural causes.”
  • Stop and Frisk in Chicago ACLU of Illinois, March, 2015“Black Chicagoans were subjected to 72% of all stops, yet constitute just 32% of the city’s population.”
  • Campus Law Enforcement, 2011-12 Bureau of Justice Statistics, January, 2015“About 75% of the campuses were using armed officers, compared to 68% during the 2004-05 school year.”
  • Citizens Police Data Project Invisible Institute, 2015“28,567 allegations of misconduct were filed against Chicago Police Department officers between March 2011 and September 2015.”
  • Hot Spots Policing George Mason University Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy, 2015“Hot spots policing covers a range of police responses that all share in common a focus of resources on the locations where crime is highly concentrated.”
  • The criminogenic and psychological effects of police stops on adolescent black and Latino boys Del Toro et al., 2015“Our findings suggest that the single most common proactive policing strategy--directing officers to make contact with individual boys and young men in "high-crime" areas--may impose a terrible cost.”
  • Sheriffs Addressing the Mental Health Crisis in the Community and in the Jails Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice, 2015“This report identifies successful practices that local law enforcement can employ to reduce the arrest and incarceration of people living with mental illness in their jurisdictions.”
  • Decriminalization and Depenalization of Marijuana Possession: A Case Study of Enforcement Outcomes in Prince George's County Meghan Kozlowski, Emily Glazener, James A. Mitchell, James P. Lynch, Jinney Smith, 2015“The results suggest that changing arrest policies for low-quantity marijuana possession led to increases in enforcement for other low-level misdemeanor offenses. Additionally, our findings shed light on net-widening as a potential unintended consequence.”
  • Born Suspect: Stop-and-Frisk Abuses & the Continued Fight to End Racial Profiling in America NAACP, 2015“This report is an analysis of the fight to end racial profiling in New York and the potential for nationwide implementation these efforts in every jurisdiction across the country.”
  • Survey of law enforcement access to sealed non-conviction records Collateral Consequences Resource Center, 2015“25 states, plus two territories, the District of Columbia and the Federal system, exempt law enforcement agencies generally from sealing or expungement laws, or in a few cases have no law authorizing sealing of non-conviction records.”
  • Militarization and police violence: The case of the 1033 program Casey Delehanty, Gardner-Webb University, 2015“We find a positive and statistically significant relationship between 1033 transfers and fatalities from officer-involved shootings across all models.”
  • Aggressive Policing and the Mental Health of Young Urban Men Geller et al., December, 2014“Participants who reported more police contact also reported more trauma and anxiety symptoms, associations tied to how many stops they reported, the intrusiveness of the encounters, and their perceptions of police fairness.”
  • CPD Traffic Stops and Resulting Searches in 2013 ACLU of Illinois, December, 2014“City-wide. The rate of black drivers in the stops (46%) is far higher than the rate of black residents in the city population (32%).”
  • Over A Million Dollars A Day: The Daily Waste of the NYPD's Misdemeanor Arrest Practices Police Reform Organizing Project, December, 2014“Figures for the first nine months of 2014 show that the NYPD makes: ­an average of 648 misdemeanor arrests per day at the daily cost to the city of $1,134,000.”
  • Law enforcement duties and sudden cardiac death among police officers in the United States: case distribution study British Medical Journal, November, 2014“Stressful law enforcement duties are associated with a risk of sudden cardiac death that is markedly higher than the risk during routine/non-emergency duties.”
  • Black, Brown and Targeted: A report on Boston Police Department Street Encounters from 2007-2010 ACLU of Massachusetts, October, 2014(Most alarmingly, the analysis found that Blacks were subjected to 63% of these encounters, even though they made up just 24% of Boston's population. The analysis also showed that crime does not explain this racial disparity.)
  • On the Streets of America: Human Rights Abuses in Ferguson Amnesty International, October, 2014(This briefing outlines some of the human rights concerns witnessed by Amnesty International and recommendations that need to be implemented with regards to the use of lethal force by law enforcement and the policing of protests.)
  • Criminal, Victim, or Worker?: The Effects of New York's Human Trafficking Intervention Courts on Adults Charged with Prostitution-Related Offenses Red Umbrella Project, October, 2014(Decreasing the incarceration of people charged with prostitution is a good step forward, but as long as people who are in the sex trades are "rescued" through arrest, they will continue to be re-victimized by the police and the courts.)
  • Police Officer Body-Worn Cameras Office of Justice Programs, September, 2014“The evaluations in Mesa and Rialto documented substantial drops in citizen complaints following deployment of the technology. The UK studies documented a similar effect.”
  • Investigation of the Newark Police Department United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, July, 2014“Approximately 75% of reports of pedestrian stops by NPD officers failed to articulate sufficient legal basis for the stop, despite the NPD policy requiring such justification.”
  • War Comes Home The Excessive Militarization of American Policing American Civil Liberties Union, June, 2014“Using... federal funds, state and local law enforcement agencies have amassed military arsenals purportedly to wage the failed War on Drugs, the battlegrounds of which have disproportionately been in communities of color.”
  • Stop-and-Frisk: A First Look Six Months of Data on Stop-and-Frisk Practices in Newark American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, February, 2014“Although black Newarkers represent 52 percent of the city's population, they make up 75 percent of all stops.”
  • Evaluation of the Shreveport Predictive Policing Experiment RAND Corporation, 2014“The program did not generate a statistically significant reduction in property crime.”
  • Officer Involved Shooting Information Philadelphia Police Department, 2014“An officer involved shooting is the discharge of a firearm, whether accidental or intentional, by a police officer, whether on or off duty.”
  • Standing with LGBT Prisoners: An Advocate's Guide to Ending Abuse and Combating Imprisonment National Center for Transgender Equality, 2014“According to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, 16% of transgender adults have been in a prison or jail for any reason.”
  • Justice in Washing State Survey, 2012 Revised and Updated 2014 The Washington State Minority Health Commission, The Washington State Center for Court Research, 2014“When we asked about their personal encounters with police officers and the courts, we found substantial differences between Whites and African Americans in terms of the frequency of negative encounters.”
  • Requests for Police Assistance, 2011 Bureau of Justice Statistics, September, 2013“An estimated 1 in 8 U.S. residents age 16 or older, or 31.4 million persons, requested assistance from police at least once, most commonly to report a crime, suspicious activity, or neighborhood disturbance.”
  • Coming of Age with Stop and Frisk: Experiences, Perceptions, and Public Safety Implications Vera Institute of Justice, September, 2013“Young people who have been stopped more often are less willing to report crimes, even when they are the victims. Each additional stop in the span of a year is associated with an 8% drop in the person's likelihood of reporting a violent crime.”
  • Police Behavior during Traffic and Street Stops, 2011 Bureau of Justice Statistics, September, 2013“Of those involved in traffic and street stops, a smaller percentage of blacks than whites believed the police behaved properly during the stop.”
  • Justifiable Homicides by Law Enforcement Officers: What is the Role of Mental Illness? Treatment Advocacy Center, National Sheriff's Association, September, 2013“The transfer of responsibility for persons with mental illness from mental health professionals to law enforcement officers has brought with it major problems for the latter.”
  • Racial Disparities in Arrests in the District of Columbia, 2009-2011 Washington Lawyers' Committee, July, 2013“While there are about as many African Americans aged 18 or older (47.6%) as there are adult whites (42%) living in this city, eight out of 10 adults arrested for a crime in Washington are African American.”
  • Collecting DNA at Arrest: Policies, Practices, and Implications Urban Institute, May, 2013“Arrestee DNA laws led to more profiles in CODIS, contributed to additional hits, imposed significant administrative and analytic burdens on many state crime laboratories and collecting agencies, and raised important legal and policy issues.”
  • Operation Ghetto Storm Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, April, 2013“There is no centralized database that keeps track of extrajudicial killings by police... With no numbers, there can be no studies, no analysis of trends and no accountability.”
  • Mapping Muslims: NYPD Spying and its Impact on American Muslims The Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition (MACLC), The Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR), The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF)., March, 2013“Interviewees noted deep apprehension of the NYPD's intentions and practices towards them, including day-to-day interactions with beat-police officers such as filing stolen phone complaints, asking an officer for directions, or reporting hate crimes.”
  • The Crisis Continues Inside Police Internal Affairs American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, February, 2013“164 of the local police departments we spoke to unlawfully denied complaints by telephone. Only 207 of the 371 New Jersey police departments that our volunteers spoke to indicated that they would allow complaints to be filed by telephone.”
  • Policing and the Economic Downturn Striving for Efficiency Is the New Norm Police Executive Research Forum, February, 2013“In 2010, 58% of responding agencies said that police services in their community had already declined or would decline with the implementation of recent or planned budget cuts. In 2012 that figure dropped to 44%.”
  • The Health Effects of Conducted Energy Weapons The Expert Panel on the Medical and Physiological Impacts of Conducted Energy Weapons Council of Canadian Academies, 2013“Since 1998, at least 33 deaths have followed the deployment of a CEW in Canada.”
  • Predictive Policing: The Role of Crime Forecasting in Law Enforcement Operations RAND Corporation, 2013“Predictive policing is the application of analytical techniques--particularly quantitative techniques--to identify likely targets for police intervention and prevent crime or solve past crimes by making statistical predictions.”
  • Policing Immigration New York University School of Law; University of Chicago Law School, 2013“The data undermine the government's claim that Secure Communities is principally about making communities more secure from crime.”
  • Engaging Police in Immigrant Communities Promising Practices from the Field Vera Institute of Justice, October, 2012“This report describes a variety of approaches to building and maintaining effective police-immigrant relations developed by a diverse group of law enforcement agencies.”
  • Arrest in the United States, 1990-2010 Bureau of Justice Statistics, October, 2012“The number of murder arrests in the U.S. fell by half between 1990 and 2010. The adult and juvenile arrest rates dropped substantially in the 1990s, while both continued to fall about 20% between 2000 and 2010, reaching their lowest levels since at least”
  • Federal Law Enforcement Officers, 2008 Bureau of Justice Statistics, June, 2012“From 2004 to 2008, the number of officers employed by Customs and Border Protection increased by more than 9,000 (or 33%), the largest increase at any federal agency.”
  • Rethinking the Blues How We Police in the U.S. and at What Cost Justice Policy Institute, May, 2012“Crime is at the lowest levels it has been in over 30 years, but funding for police increased 445 percent between 1982 and 2007, with federal funding increasing the most at 729 percent.”
  • Contacts between Police and the Public, 2008 Bureau of Justice Statistics, October, 2011“Black drivers were about three times as likely as white drivers and about two times as likely as Hispanic drivers to be searched during a traffic stop.”
  • Arrests Effected by SSA or Officers assigned to School Safety Division New York City Police Department, October, 2011
  • Census Of State And Local Law Enforcement Agencies, 2008 Bureau of Justice Statistics, July, 2011“From 2004 to 2008, state and local law enforcement agencies added about 9,500 more full-time sworn personnel than during the previous 4-year period.”
  • Tribal Law Enforcement, 2008 Bureau of Justice Statistics, June, 2011“Eleven of the 25 largest tribal law enforcement agencies served jurisdictions covering more than 1,000 square miles.”
  • The Early Release of Prisoners And its Impact on Police Agencies and Communities in California Police Executive Research Forum, May, 2011“...there is research indicating that enforcement alone is ineffective in lowering recidivism rates, and in any case, prisons are far too expensive to be used as a default sanction for many criminal offenders.”
  • Missouri Vehicle Stops 2009 Annual Report Missouri Attorney General's Office, 2011
  • Local Police Departments, 2007 Bureau of Justice Statistics, December, 2010“In 2007, 75% of local police officers were employed by departments that authorized the use of conducted energy devices such as Tasers, compared to 47% in 2003”
  • Stop, Question & Frisk Policing Practices In New York City A Primer Center on Race, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, March, 2010“In 2009 alone, Blacks and Hispanics combined were stopped 9 times more than Whites.”
  • Aviation Units in Large Law Enforcement Agencies, 2007 Bureau of Justice Statistics, July, 2009“In 2007, 92% of aviation units engaged in vehicle pursuits. Almost 90% of units performed counternarcotics missions, and about 80% conducted counterterrorism missions. Nearly 70% of units engaged in firefighting activities”
  • State and Local Law Enforcement Training Academies, 2006 Bureau of Justice Statistics, February, 2009“Of an estimated 57,000 recruits who entered basic training programs during 2005, 86% or 49,000, successfully completed their program and graduated from the academy.”
  • Campus Law Enforcement, 2004-05 Bureau of Justice Statistics, February, 2008“Three-quarters of campus law enforcement agencies used sworn officers with full arrest powers.”
  • Arrest-Related Deaths in the United States, 2003-2005 Bureau of Justice Statistics, October, 2007“Three-quarters of the law enforcement homicides reported to DCRP involved arrests for a violent crime. Public-order offenders accounted for 8% of homicides, followed by property (4%) and drug offenders (2%).”
  • Analysis of the NYCPD's in the Context of Claims of Racial Bias Andrew Gelman, Jeffrey Fagan, and Alex Kiss, September, 2007“[F]or violent crimes and weapons offenses blacks and Hispanics are stopped about twice as often as whites.”
  • Contacts between Police and the Public, 2005 Bureau of Justice Statistics, April, 2007“In 2005 police searched 9.5 percent of stopped blacks and 8.8 percent of stopped Hispanics, compared to 3.6 percent of white motorists.”
  • Federal Law Enforcement Officers, 2004 Bureau of Justice Statistics, August, 2006“Women accounted for 16% of Federal officers in 2004. A third of Federal officers were members of a racial or ethnic minority in 2004. This included 17.7% who were Hispanic and Latino, and 11.4% who were black or African American.”
  • Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies, 2004 Bureau of Justice Statistics, June, 2006“Although local police employment was up slightly nationwide from 2000 to 2004, 20 of the nation's 50 largest local police departments saw a decline in sworn personnel during this period, including 6 of the 7 largest.”
  • Citizen Complaints about Police Use of Force Bureau of Justice Statistics, June, 2006“Large State and local law enforcement agencies... received more than 26,000 citizen complaints about officer use of force during 2002. This total figure resulted in [an] overall rate[] 6.6 complaints per 100 full-time sworn officers.”
  • Characteristics of Drivers Stopped by Police, 2002 Bureau of Justice Statistics, June, 2006“Among traffic stops of young male drivers in 2002, 11% were physically searched or had their vehicle searched by police. Among these young male drivers who were stopped, blacks (22%) and Hispanics (17%) were searched at higher rates than whites (8%).”
  • Local Police Departments, 2003 Bureau of Justice Statistics, May, 2006
  • Sheriffs' Offices, 2003 Bureau of Justice Statistics, May, 2006
  • Traffic Stop Audit Project An Institutional Ethnography of Traffic Stop Policy and Practice in the Minneapolis Police Department Council on Crime and Justice, April, 2006“The distinction between traffic law enforcement stops (e.g. speeding) and investigative stops is often blurred. Law enforcement stops are often made for investigative purposes rather than expressed criminal intent.”
  • Report to the Legislature of the State of Illinois: The Illinois Pilot Program on Sequential Double-Blind Identification Procedures Illinois State Police, March, 2006“The data collected shows that the sequential double-blind method led to a lower rate of suspect identifications as well as a higher rate of known false errors.”
  • Stress Among Probation and Parole Officers and What Can Be Done About It National Institute of Justice, June, 2005
  • Traffic Stop Data Collection Policies for State Police, 2004 Bureau of Justice Statistics, June, 2005
  • Contacts between Police and the Public: Findings from the 2002 National Survey Bureau of Justice Statistics, April, 2005
  • Low Level Offenses in Minneapolis: An Analysis of Arrests and their Outcomes Council on Crime and Justice, October, 2004(The diperate treatment of Black and White people is greater at the hand of the police than in the courts.)
  • Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics, 2000: Data for Individual State and Local Agencies with 100 or More Officers Bureau of Justice Statistics, April, 2004
  • Minnesota Statewide Racial Profiling Study Council on Crime and Justice, September, 2003“Results show that law enforcement officers stopped and searched Black, Latino, and American Indian drivers at greater rates than White drivers, yet found contraband on Blacks, Latinos, and American Indians at lower rates than in searches of White drivers.”
  • Federal Law Enforcement Officers, 2002 Bureau of Justice Statistics, August, 2003
  • Reporting Crime to the Police, 1992-2000 Bureau of Justice Statistics, March, 2003
  • Tribal Law Enforcement, 2000 Bureau of Justice Statistics, January, 2003
  • Sheriffs' Offices 2000 Bureau of Justice Statistics, January, 2003
  • Local Police Departments 2000 Bureau of Justice Statistics, January, 2003
  • Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, 2001 Federal Bureau of Investigation, December, 2002
  • Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies, 2000 Bureau of Justice Statistics, October, 2002
  • Police Departments in Large Cities, 1990-2000 Bureau of Justice Statistics, May, 2002(Police per capita up 7% over the decade)
  • Characteristics of Drivers Stopped by Police, 1999 Bureau of Justice Statistics, March, 2002“Approximately 422,000 persons age 16 or older said the police used or threatened to use force against them at least once during 1999.”
  • Traffic Stop Data Collection Policies for State Police, 2001 Bureau of Justice Statistics, December, 2001
  • Violence in the Workplace, 1993-99 Bureau of Justice Statistics, December, 2001“Law enforcement officers most at risk for workplace violence”(This report presents data for 1993 through 1999 from the National Crime Victimization Survey estimating the extent of workplace crime in the United States.)
  • Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, 2000 Federal Bureau of Investigation, November, 2001
  • Federal Law Enforcement Officers, 2000 Bureau of Justice Statistics, July, 2001
  • Sheriffs' Offices 1999 Bureau of Justice Statistics, May, 2001
  • Local Police Departments, 1999 Bureau of Justice Statistics, May, 2001
  • Contacts between Police and the Public: Findings from the 1999 National Survey Bureau of Justice Statistics, March, 2001(In 1999 an estimated 43.8 million persons age 16 or older had least one face-to-face contact with a police officer.)
  • Policing and Homicide, 1976-98: Justifiable Homicide of Felons by Police and Murder of Police by Felons Bureau of Justice Statistics, March, 2001
  • Community Policing in Local Police Departments, 1997 and 1999 Bureau of Justice Statistics, February, 2001(changes in the prevalence of community oriented policing policies)
  • Federal Law Enforcement Officers, 1998 Bureau of Justice Statistics, March, 2000“Number of Federal law enforcement officers grew 11 percent in two years”
  • Sheriffs' Departments, 1997 Bureau of Justice Statistics, October, 1999“personnel increases in local sheriff's departments”
  • Local Police Departments, 1997 Bureau of Justice Statistics, October, 1999(personnel increases in local police departments)
  • Use of Force By Police: Overview of National and Local Data Bureau of Justice Statistics, October, 1999
  • Driving While Black: Racial Profiling On Our Nation's Highways American Civil Liberties Union, June, 1999“All the evidence to date suggests that using traffic laws for non-traffic purposes has been a disaster for people of color and has deeply eroded public confidence in law enforcement.”
  • Shielded from Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States Human Rights Watch, July, 1998
  • Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies, 1996 Bureau of Justice Statistics, June, 1998
  • Police Use of Force Bureau of Justice Statistics, November, 1997
  • Campus Law Enforcement Agencies, 1995 Bureau of Justice Statistics, December, 1996(600 agencies at 4-year schools with 2,500+ students)

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