Selection Bias and Racial Disparities in Police Use of Force

Felipe M. Gonçalves, Steven Mello and Emily K. Weisburst

No 34175, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study racial disparities in police use of force. A pervasive issue in studies of policing is that the available data are selected by the police. As a result, disparities computed in the observed sample may be biased if selection into the data differs by race. We develop a framework and econometric strategy for correcting this bias, using variation across officers in enforcement intensity to identify the racial composition of the unobserved population at risk of selection. Using detailed administrative data on arrests and force incidents from Chicago and Seattle, we find that Black civilians comprise 56 percent of arrestees but about 49 percent of potential arrestees. Correcting for sample selection doubles our measure of the racial disparity in force rates. Decompositions of the corrected force disparity reveal that about 70 percent is unexplained by other demographic and incident characteristics, suggesting an important role for officer discrimination. Our selection bias estimates meaningfully impact the conclusions drawn in the existing literature.

JEL-codes: C10 J15 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-law
Note: LE LS PE POL
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34175.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34175

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34175
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().