The central hurdle in evaluating whether officers from different groups treat civilians differently has been accounting for context. Without the ability to compare officers facing common circumstances, any differences in their behavior become ambiguous. 2/
— Jonathan Mummolo (@jonmummolo) February 11, 2021
For a half century or so, police departments have assigned more black cops to black neighborhoods.
Black officers made far fewer stops & arrests & used force less often than white officers facing common circumstances: differences equal to 29%, 21% & 32% of average white officer behavior respectively. Hispanic & female officers showed reduced activity too, by smaller margins.7/
— Jonathan Mummolo (@jonmummolo) February 11, 2021
In other words, Professor Mummolo (an Italian-American with a conveniently African-sounding surname) has proven that black, Hispanic, and female cops work less hard for their salaries than do white cops [The role of officer race and gender in police-civilian interactions in Chicago, Science, February 12, 2021].
Maybe this lack of effort by black cops in black neighborhoods helps explain why black neighborhoods have such high crime rates?
For example, as FiveThirtyEight showed, Detroit has low rates of arrests and police shootings of blacks. In Detroit, blacks are only 1.8 times as likely as whites to be arrested and 1.7 times as likely to be killed by cops compared to 7.3 times as likely to be arrested and 13.4 times as likely to killed in super-liberal Washington D.C. Trump only got 5% of the vote in D.C. in 2020, but, that’s not the point, the point is that Important White People live in D.C., while nobody important lives in Detroit anymore.
This is not, of course, because Detroit is a utopia of nonviolence, but because the Detroit cops don’t bother much anymore. From Wikipedia:
Year 2013 breakdown of gender and ethnic minorities in the Detroit PD.:
Male: 75%
Female: 25%
African-American or black: 63%
White: 33%
Hispanic, any race: 4%
Asian: 0.4%The Detroit Police Department has one of the largest percentages of black officers of any major city police department, reflecting current overall city demographics. Lawsuits alleging discrimination stemming from the influence of affirmative action and allegations of race-based promotional bias for executive positions have surfaced repeatedly. As of 2008, the majority of upper command members in the Detroit PD were black.
Detroit’s murder rate per 100k in 2020 was 48.7, more than an order of magnitude higher than, say, San Diego’s murder rate. San Diego’s police officers are 6.7% black.
In defense of the Detroit PD, however, murders didn’t get all that much worse during 2020’s Racial Reckoning. Detroit’s murders only went up 20% in 2020 over 2019, versus 38% in urban America in general. Detroit’s white mayor and black police took a harder line against the Mostly Peaceful Protests than most local authorities dared.
