EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Is There a 1033 Effect? Police Militarization and Aggressive Policing

Gbenga Ajilore

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Events in Ferguson and Baltimore in the United States in the past 3 years have brought to light issues related to the militarization of police and adverse police–citizen interactions. Through federal programs and grants, local law enforcement agencies have been able to acquire surplus military items to combat terrorism and drug activity. The acquisition of these items has accelerated over the past 10 years. These agencies acquired nearly $1 billion worth of property in 2014 alone through the Pentagon’s 1033 Program, a program that distributes excess military surplus to law enforcement agencies. This study seeks to determine whether the increased acquisition of these items has led to more police use-of-force incidents. We create a dataset merging administrative data from the Pentagon’s 1033 Program database and survey data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Using a binary treatment effects estimator, we show that there is little evidence of a causal link between general military surplus acquisition and documented use-of-force incidents. In fact, the acquisition of military vehicles leads to fewer use-of-force incidents. The results also show that more diverse departments have fewer incidents, while agencies with SWAT team have more incidents.

Keywords: Police Militarization; Excessive Force; Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS); 1033 Program; Treatment Effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H70 H76 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-10-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/82543/1/MPRA_paper_82543.pdf original version (application/pdf)

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:pra:mprapa:82543

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter (winter@lmu.de).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:82543