Blood Money: An Analysis of the Effect of Local Budget Policies on Police Killings

Abstract

Officer Darren Wilson’s shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 spurred the eruption of protests across the nation calling for an end to police violence. The Department of Justice’s Investigation into the Ferguson Police department revealed a pattern of profit motivated policing for municipal revenue generation. The emphasis on policing and simultaneous dearth of resource allocation to human service provisioning additionally served as the backdrop to this moment of national reevaluation of citizen-cop relationships. Motivated by these policies that came to the fore in the aftermath of Ferguson, this thesis quantitatively exams the effect of (1) local budget dependence on revenue generated through law enforcement and (2) relative allocation of funds to human services and police services on police use of lethal force. Drawing on past empirical and theoretical scholarship, I develop theoretical mechanisms through which both policies are expected to exert influence on police killings of civilians. I argue that policies promoting for-profit policing increase instances of police-citizen interaction, heighten likelihoods of encountering dangerous situations, cognitively frame citizens as “them”, and construct an image of citizen criminality, convalescing to increase propensity of police to inflict lethal force. The ability of human service investment to cost-effectively reduce crime, improve social conditions that foster police violence, and reframe implicit messaging of larger police budgets, drives the hypothesis that greater emphasis on human service resource allocation in comparison to police resource allocation will decrease police killings. Employing budget data and police killings across the nation from 2000 to 2015, I empirically test these hypothesizes using a fixed effects model to control for time invariant agency and year factors. I uncover no significant relationship between relative human services and police resource allocation. Findings reveal a negative impact of the proportion of local revenue generated through fines and forfeitures. However, these results emerge in only some variations of the model and are heavily skewed by outliers. Nonetheless, these results indicate the relationship between for-profit policing in a direction opposite the hypothesis. I explore alternative possible mechanisms and potential implications of these findings. Overall, the finding of the ability of a local police budget policy to influence police killings confirms this thesis’s supposition that policies not directly addressing police violence may still impact use of lethal force, a particularly salient finding in light of the recent conversation surrounding reform of lethal force.