An Empirical Analysis of the Socioeconomic Status of Blacks on Police Treatment and Arrests: A Granger Causality Approach

Germinal Van ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the fundamental causes that help us understand why the Black community is the racial and ethnic group that is the least well-treated among all minority groups by the police. Many studies have argued that the racial bias of the police towards Blacks is the reason why Blacks are condescendingly treated by the police, which implies that the police in America are racist. This paper argues, however, that the condescending treatment that Blacks receive from the police is not fundamentally based on race but rather on their socioeconomic status. The empirical results of our analysis suggest that the relationship between the socioeconomic status of Blacks and police arrests of Blacks is statistically significant. We, therefore, concluded that the socioeconomic status of Blacks Granger-caused their number of police arrests. Therefore, the primary motivation of the police to treat Blacks and arrest them is based on the assumption of their low-income status rather than the mere fact that they are Black.

Keywords: Econometrics; Time-series; Granger Causality; Autoregressive model; Economic Theory; Empirical Analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C10 C12 C32 C4 C5 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-03-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:112214

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