Accountability and police use of force: Interactive effects between minority representation and civilian review boards

ABSTRACT

I assess a contingency model of representative bureaucracy, suggesting the effect of minority representation, if any, on police use of force is likely to be stronger with external oversight of police. I use OLS regression to examine main and interactive effects of minority representation and the presence of civilian review boards on police use of force in the U.S. I find that representation on the police force is negatively associated with police use of force. However, there is a stronger effect of minority representation on use of force when the department also has a civilian review board, supporting contingency effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Police use of force
• civilian review boards
• representative bureaucracy
• citizen–state interactions

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Russell Hassan for providing guidance and feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript as well as Drs. N. Emel Ganapati, Tim Goddard, Alex Kroll, Mohamad Alkadry, and Robert Guerette for their instrumental input throughout the entire research process. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor for all of the constructive feedback and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. These departments have the bureaucratic structures appropriate for the hypotheses of interest and have more organizational variation when compared to departments with fewer than 100 sworn officers (Cao, Deng, and Barton 2000; Chappell, MacDonald, and Manz 2006).

2. This interpretation applies because the dependent variable is logged, and the independent variables is an interval variable, thus the log-level regression interpretation applies. Thus, the coefficient must be exponentiated and the following equation would apply: $\mathrm{\%}\mathrm{\Delta }\gamma =100\times (e^{\beta 1}-1)$. This is interpreted as a one-unit change in the independent variable, X, is expected to change the dependent variable, Y, by that percent.

3. Only 13 police departments included in the sample have representation ratios over 1.0, which is a small sample size.

Additional information

Funding

This work was originally supported by Award No. 2015-R2-CX-K030 from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, conclusions and recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Notes on contributors

Andrea M. Headley

Andrea M. Headley is an assistant professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. She is a public management, social equity, and criminal justice policy scholar.