Research

Job Market Paper

The Role of Officers' Gender on Responses to Domestic Violence [Draft coming soon]

AbstractThe vast majority of domestic violence victims are female. Yet, 87.5% of police officers are male. This raises the question: do female officers respond to domestic violence calls for service differently? I study this question empirically using novel data from Seattle. Patrol officers are assigned to incidents quasi-randomly, which allows me to identify that causal effect of officer gender on policing outcomes. Teams with at least one female officer are more likely to find the initial report credible: incidents described as domestic violence by the call taker are more likely to retain that designation and also more likely to be recorded as a crime. In less severe cases, where officers have more discretion, the presence of a female officer also increases the probability of an arrest being made. These differences leads to lower rates of future victimization in the short run when at least one of the responding officers is female. I also find evidence that teams with female officers put in more effort at the scene when responding to these incidents than their all male counterparts. Taken together, my findings highlight the importance of gender diversity in law enforcement and suggest that the strategic dispatch of female officers could enhance the effectiveness of police responses to domestic violence.


Publications

Crime and Gender Segregation: Evidence from the Bogota “Pico y Genero” Lockdown

With Brian Knight and Ana Maria Tribin, The World Bank Economic Review, Volume 38, Issue 3 (2024)

Working Papers

With Luca Rizzotti

Abstract:  We revisit the importance of policing management practices as a determinant of crime and officers’ behavior, a relevant issue that has been under-studied so far. To do so, we leverage the staggered introduction by over 100 large US police departments of Compstat, a management system based on regular, data-driven, performance reviews of middle managers. Using a dynamic difference-in-differences approach, we show that Compstat has helped bring down crime rates by around 10%, with both violent and property offenses significantly decreasing. The main identified mechanism is deterrence, achieved through improvements in crime mapping and incentivized by regular performance reviews. However, the reliance of departments adopting Compstat on quantifiable statistical indicators seems to incentivize officers to increase arrests of civilians for minor offenses. We provide suggestive evidence that these additional arrests do not play a significant role in the crime decline and therefore constitute a welfare loss. This is especially true for Black residents, as they experience a dispro- portionate increase in such arrests. Our results suggest that Compstat is an effective strategy to fight crime, but its adoption should be accompanied by regulation and/or oversight to avoid over-policing.


The Voting and Re-distributive Consequences of Felon Enfranchisement

[Draft available upon request]

Abstract: This paper studies how state-level relaxations of voting restrictions faced by felons affect voting outcomes and the distribution of State transfers, particularly in places with disproportionately more people affected by mass incarceration. Results show that, in States that relax their restrictions, turnout increases in counties with a higher historic black population share, while per capita state transfers to those counties decrease. The latter appears to be driven by reductions in Red states. Using survey data I also find evidence of backlash by which uneducated whites in states that relax felon disenfranchisement laws become more opposed to the government giving aid to blacks as well as more likely to self-identify as a Republican. 


Selected Work in Progress

The Impact of School Start and End Times on Juvenile Delinquency