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Originally Posted by raveneye
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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If he didn't go into the study looking for the race correlation and it did catch him by surprise, it can be virtually impossible to go back on the same data and exclude factors with any reliablility - too many assumptions have to be made. I can feel a tone of frustration in the writing because he wasn't able to close the loop on it. It's too bad.
My interest in this particular study comes from the fact that I lived out in LA at the time of this study, and I know how difficult it was for LAPD to hire anybody - white or black. They were recruiting experienced police officers and rookies from all over the country to come work, paying $10 - $15,000 bonuses to pack up and move out to California and this would have a huge effect on the data. There was a large (several hundred?) influx of Midwestern 21-25 year-old young men into the department that were green professionally, but more important didn't know the 405 from the PCH. If you don't understand the different cultures and cities in Greater Los Angeles as a cop, you were a sitting duck.
Thinking it through, it would actually be understandable that a black rookie would be "tested" more severely by black youth in these neighborhoods because they were seen many times as traitors to the race. It would also make sense that the black officer, especially a younger black man, could create substantial tensions within a city block.
I befriended a few of the gang members in my neighborhood (Venice Beach) and they use to comment that white cops left them alone a lot more after the Rodney King fiasco, but "you never wanted to fuck with a brother cop", because they were mean and they didn't worry about going to court over a race issue.
Well, at least it makes more sense to me now. Again, I do appreciate you putting the study in front of me, Raveneye! If you haven't seen it yet, you should pick up Steven Levitt's book, Freakonomics. It is very layman so he doesn't substantiate proofs the way he would in texts, but it is a quick read and the questions he asks are interesting. I think he is getting discounted a bit for being the "Book of the Month" by some peers, but it didn't make his ideas any less valid, and I am sure his John Bates Clark Award still shines the same!
http://www.freakonomics.com/articles.php