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Originally Posted by chickentribs
there is something that doesn't connect in my head with the idea that an emotional crime like murder would be influenced by the color of the police officers, or if it did it should be at a lesser rate than burglary that is more calculated and prone to be influenced by an authority figure.
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Ascertaining specific mechanisms responsible for the effect was probably beyond the scope of Lott's study, but there are other more general studies that show that there can be a significant relationship between the mean level of experience or ability of the police force and the incidence of violent crime, including murder.
And one of Lott's major points is that the mean level of ability of the police force,
for all new hires (all races, both sexes), dropped as a result of adhering to the consent decrees to increase diversity.
He found also that he couldn't eliminate the race effect by controlling for many other variables; this I agree is a curious result and followup studies need to be done to elucidate it. Perhaps the consent decrees affected the quality of black hires more than the quality of other new hires,
purely for procedural reasons?
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VII. MIGHT THE HIGHER CRIME RATES BE DUE TO CHANGING RULES LOWERING THE QUALITY OF ALL NEW EMPLOYEES? DOES AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AFFECT THE BEHAVIOR OF EXISTING OFFICERS?
The changing crime rates may be due to additional minorities being hired, but it is also possible that increasing the minority share of police forces may be correlated with a lowering of standards for all new police officers. Thus, it might not be a greater share of police officers who are minorities that are related to higher crime, but the causation may run from lowering standards for all officers to more crime. Thus, an increasing minority share is merely correlated with higher crime. Rules that base promotion less on merit may also reduce the efforts by all existing officers. This seems most plausible, if only because of the very large impacts that hiring minorities appear to have on crime.
If indeed it is the lowering of overall quality that explains the higher crime rate, the simplest way of detecting it is by examining the relationship between each group's absolute effect on a crime rate and the change in its share of the police force. If the change in a group's share of the police force was merely proxying for the overall change in the entire police force's quality, the largest coefficients would be observed for those groups with the smallest number of new police officers, while those with the largest changes would have the smallest coefficients. However, the Pearson correlation coefficient between each group's effect on murder and the change in their share of the police force is only - .17 and is not statistically significant. The corresponding correlations for the other violent crime categories are similar: rape is - .19; robbery, - 24; and aggravated assault, -.22. Although this evidence does not reject the spillover hypothesis, it also does not provide much support. Spillovers may explain a portion, but not all, of the differences in coefficients.
Another test examines quasi-reduced forms corresponding to the regressions shown in Table IV. The difference here is that in addition to the instruments (the consent decree dummy, the number of years that the consent decree has been in effect, the mayor's race) the racial composition of the police department is also included. Given that the percent share of blacks and whites in a police force is highly correlated with the presence of consent degrees and the length of time that they have been in effect, this represents a very conservative test for distinguishing whether rules might have an impact over and above the changing racial composition of police departments. When only the consent decrees are included, they produce consistent significant positive impacts on crime (analogous to the results using the smaller sample discussed near Table III).34 This test is also imperfect because cities with consent decrees were not the only ones changing their hiring and promotion rules. Other cities that have changed their rules either voluntarily or under the threat of being faced with a consent decree will also be changing their hiring practices. Thus, even evidence that only the racial composition variables matter and that consent degrees have no effect does not allow us to reject the hypothesis that higher crime rates are due to both.
The two different consent decree variables may also help us distinguish whether affirmative action changes the marginal quality of new officers or effects which officers are promoted, thereby altering the incentives of the existing police force. If the variable for the number of years that the decree has been in effect proxies for the percentage of the department that has been hired under the new hiring standards, a positive impact from the number of years provides evidence that general hiring practices are important. The consent decree dummy variable is less clear in either the county or state fixed effects specifications because it could be picking either the type of city on which consent decrees are imposed and/or the immediate impact of the new rules. If the consent decree dummy variable is measuring the immediate effect, any large changes in crime would presumably be attributed to changing the behavior of the existing police force and not simply new hires.
Table VIII reports the results for violent and property crime rates using city or county fixed effects.35 A more detailed breakdown of the county fixed effects when the gender and racial groups are simultaneously included with the consent decree information are reported in Appendix B. Despite the collinearity between the composition of the police forces and the number of years that the consent decrees have been in effect, certain patterns are evident in Table VIII. Overall, the results imply that consent decrees raise crime rates independently of the changing racial or gender composition of the police force. For both violent and property crimes, there is evidence that consent decrees matter because they alter the behavior of the existing police force. For property crimes, the quality of the new hires produced by consent decrees also appears to matter with each additional year that the decree is in effect raising property crimes by another 1.7%-1.9%. Increasing the number of black officers on a police force independently of the length of time that the consent decree has been in effect is associated with increased violent crimes, though the inclusion of Hispanics and American Indians together with blacks to examine minorities as group produces a much smaller and not statistically significant effect.36
These specifications were also used to examine whether more black police officers had a differential impact in more heavily black areas by interacting the percentage of the police force that is black with the percentage of the population that is black. The specification corresponding to the first row in Table VIII implied that hiring more black officers produces more violent crime in more heavily black areas (the coefficient is 1.864; t-statistic = 1.922). Including the interaction has little effect on the other coefficients. These interactions imply that black officers are particularly ineffective at dealing with crime in black communities.
An important question is whether the size of the police force alters the impact of the hiring programs. For example, a large department might be able to reallocate new affirmative action hires to specific jobs where their impact on the functioning of the police force might be relatively small. This effect would presumably be most noticeable if the regressions measured the number rather than the percentage share of minority officers. However, it is not clear why increasing the share of minority officers should be easier for large departments to accommodate, and the reverse could even be true if decisions in large departments are driven more by fixed rules and race-based decisions are harder to hide. To test this, I added a new variable that interacted the percentage of the police force that is black with the number of fulltime sworn police officers and included this variable in a version of the regressions shown in Table VIII that only included the percent of the police force that is black. I also tried similar specifications for white, Hispanic, and Asian. In none of these cases was the new interaction statistically significant.37
Table
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TABLE VIII
We are thus left with a mixed conclusion. The weight of the evidence indicates that at least a portion of the crime-increasing effects of hiring minorities is picking up more general changes in the way all hiring and promotions are conducted, but the evidence for this is not overwhelming and cannot explain most of the impact that hiring minorities has on crime.
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