Law Commons^™

The Effect Of Police Oversight On Crime And Allegations Of Misconduct: Evidence From Chicago, Bocar A. Ba, Roman G. Rivera

All Faculty Scholarship

Does policing the police increase crime? We avoid simultaneity effects of increased public oversight during a major scandal by identifying events in Chicago that only impacted officers’ self-imposed monitoring. We estimate crime’s response to self- and public-monitoring using regression discontinuity and generalized synthetic control methods. Self-monitoring, triggered by police union memos, significantly reduced serious complaints without impacting crime or effort. However, after a scandal, both civilian complaints and crime rates rise, suggesting that higher crime rates following heightened oversight results from de-policing and civilian behavior simultaneously changing. Our research suggests that proactive internal accountability improves police-community relations without increasing crime.

Auditing Predictive Policing, Jeremiah Scanlan

Brigham Young University Prelaw Review

Predictive policing technology has been adopted by police departments in major cities throughout the US, and while its use continues to spread, the legal implications of its use have not been thoroughly examined. Predictive policing algorithms may be biased against minorities and other vulnerable groups, which may lead police departments to pursue policing strategies that harm these groups. This article proposes that legislatures should fill the current gap in legal oversight by requiring external audits of predictive policing algorithms as used by police departments. These audits would examine the algorithms for bias using up-to-date technological tools and release the results …

Interrogating Police Officers, Stephen Rushin, Atticus Deprospo

Faculty Publications & Other Works

This Article empirically evaluates the procedural protections given to police officers facing disciplinary interrogations about alleged misconduct. It demonstrates that state laws and collective bargaining agreements have insulated many police officers from the most successful interrogation techniques.

The first part of this Article builds on previous studies by analyzing a dataset of police union contracts and state laws that govern the working conditions in a substantial cross section of large and midsized American police departments. Many of these police departments provide officers with hours or even days of advanced notice before a disciplinary interrogation. An even larger percentage of these …