Quattrone Center

This article forthcoming in the Iowa Law Review improve incentives for prosecutors to avoid Brady violations and provide redress to victims of prosecutorial misconduct who currently lack access to justice. This works was conducted in conjunction with the UC-Berkeley Civil Justice Research Initiative. 

This study, conducted by Quattrone affiliates Bocar Ba and Dean Knox and co-authors in support of the Philadelphia Police Advisory Commission’s review of the city’s disciplinary process for police, demonstrates using comprehensive data on police complaints that complaints almost never result in disciplinary action, even when they allege serious violations of Constitutional rights

This working paper by Jonah Gelbach, supported by the Quattrone Center, develops new methods for testing for racial discrimination using real-world data. Abstract: In this paper I derive several straightforward restrictions imposed by the Becker model of discrimination in the highway search and pre-trial release contexts. I explain how these restrictions may be tested using real-world data at the decision level (e.g., whether to search or whether to release a defendant). I then apply one of these restrictions to Florida data used in Anwar& Fang’s (2006) influential study and more recent data from Harris County, Texas, provided by the Stanford Open Policing Project. The Florida data pass the restriction, but the Harris County data do not, with obvious implications for the appropriateness of the Becker model in each context. Further, data from both locations powerfully reject the prediction, from Knowles, Persico & Todd’s (2001, KPT) two-sided model, that drivers will carry contraband at identical rates. Next I apply the Becker model restrictions to published estimates from Arnold, Dobbie & Yang’s (2018) influential study of racial discrimination and pre-trial release. Their published estimates starkly violate the Becker model’s restrictions, regardless of whether these are viewed as flowing from animus or inaccurate stereotyping. It is unclear whether the culprit is econometric assumptions, a failure of the Becker model, or both. These findings suggest the importance of specification testing when we attempt to measure racial discrimination. They also suggest the need to consider alternatives to the workhorse Becker model, although doing so is beyond the scope of this paper.

In this article in Science, Quattrone Research Fellow Bocar Ba, Center affiliate Dean Knox, and Jonathan Mummolo and Roman Rivera offer a groundbreaking analysis demonstrating differences in policing behavior by the race of the officer in Chicago. Abstract: Diversification is a widely proposed policing reform, but its impact is difficult to assess. We used records of millions of daily patrol assignments, determined through fixed rules and preassigned rotations that mitigate self-selection, to compare the average behavior of officers of different demographic profiles working in comparable conditions. Relative to white officers, Black and Hispanic officers make far fewer stops and arrests, and they use force less often, especially against Black civilians. These effects are largest in majority-Black areas of Chicago and stem from reduced focus on enforcing low-level offenses, with greatest impact on Black civilians. Female officers also use less force than males, a result that holds within all racial groups. These results suggest that diversity reforms can improve police treatment of minority communities.