Going Local: Do Consent Decrees and Other Forms of Federal Intervention in Municipal Police Departments Reduce Police Killings?

Abstract

Despite calls for police reform to address lethal use of force, there has been little empirical evaluation of consent decrees—settlement agreements that address police departments’ use of force policies and practice. This study considers the effect of Department of Justice intervention on law enforcement agencies’ levels of use of force. Data on the number of people killed by police between the years 2000 and 2016 were drawn from Fatal Encounters, a crowd-sourced dataset. These data were combined with information on the date of consent decree implementation to create a department-by-year panel dataset. The findings suggested that while there is little evidence that consent decrees targeting use of force decrease police killings, there was some evidence that other forms of intervention did affect levels of lethal use of force.

Keywords:

• Police use of force
• consent decrees
• policing
• police reform

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 A note on terminology used throughout: police killings are distinct from officer-involved shootings, which are commonly employed as a use-of-force measure and can be both fatal and non-fatal. Police killings most frequently occur as a result of gunshots. However, fatalities can result from other means, such as police pursuits, bodily force, or the use of less than lethal devices. Given that the data employed in this study included deaths caused by means other than gunshots, police killings is the most appropriate term to use.