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Using Shifts In Deployment And Operations To Test For Racial Bias In Police Stops, John M. Macdonald, Jeffrey A. Fagan
Using Shifts In Deployment And Operations To Test For Racial Bias In Police Stops, John M. Macdonald, Jeffrey A. Fagan
Faculty Scholarship
In this paper, we exploit a policy experiment in the New York Police Department (NYPD) to test for bias in police stops. The NYPD launched Operation Impact in 2003 to change the scale of officer deployments. High crime areas were designated as “impact zones” and saturated with recent police academy graduates. These officers were encouraged to stop, question, and frisk (SQF) crime suspects as part of the NYPD’s overall crime-reduction strategy (MacDonald, Fagan, and Geller 2016). We focus on the expansion of impact zones in Brooklyn and Queens in July 2007. We use geographic data on the boundaries of the …