Do female officers improve law enforcement quality? Effects on crime reporting and domestic violence escalation

Amalia Miller and Carmit Segal

No 9, UBSCENTER - Working Papers from UBS International Center of Economics in Society - Department of Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: We study the impact of the integration of women in US policing between the late 1970s and early 1990s on violent crime reporting and domestic violence escalation. Along these two key dimensions, we find that female officers improved police quality. Using crime victimization data, we find that as female representation increases among officers in an area, violent crimes against women in that area, and especially domestic violence, are reported to the police at significantly higher rates. There are no such effects for violent crimes against men or from increases in the female share among civilian police employees. Furthermore, we find evidence that female officers help prevent the escalation of domestic violence. Increases in female officer representation are followed by significant declines in intimate partner homicide rates and in rates of repeated domestic abuse. These effects are all consistent between fixed effects models with controls for economic and policy variables and models that focus exclusively on increases in female police employment driven by externally imposed affirmative action plans resulting from employment discrimination cases.

Keywords: Women in policing; occupational sex segregation; affirmative action; crime reporting; domestic violence; intimate partner homicide (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J16 J78 K14 K31 K42 N92 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zur:uceswp:009

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