IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jlstud/doi10.1086-708705.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Is Police Behavior Getting Worse? Data Selection and the Measurement of Policing Harms

Author

Listed:
  • Aurélie Ouss
  • John Rappaport

Abstract

Public concern about harmful policing is surging. Governments are paying historic amounts for law enforcement liability. Has police behavior changed? Or is society responding differently? Traditional data sources struggle with this question. Common metrics conflate the prevalence and severity of policing harms with the responses of legal actors such as lawyers, judges, and juries. We overcome this problem using a new data source: liability insurance claims. Our data set contains 23 years of claims against roughly 350 law enforcement agencies that contract with a single insurer. We find that, while lawsuits and payouts have trended upward over the past decade, insurance claims have declined. We examine multiple potential explanations. We argue that, in our sample, police behavior is not getting worse; rather, societal responses to policing harms are intensifying. Police litigation is not representative of the broader universe of claims, and adjudicated claims differ systematically from settled ones.

Suggested Citation

  • Aurélie Ouss & John Rappaport, 2020. "Is Police Behavior Getting Worse? Data Selection and the Measurement of Policing Harms," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 49(1), pages 153-198.
    • Handle: RePEc:ucp:jlstud:doi:10.1086/708705
    DOI: 10.1086/708705
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/708705
    Download Restriction: Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.
    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/708705
    Download Restriction: Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1086/708705?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Greg Goelzhauser, 2024. "Constitutional accountability for police shootings," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 21(1), pages 92-108, March.
    2. Shana M. Judge & Jenna L. Dole, 2022. "Charging sex traffickers under federal law: What dispositions should we expect when applying theories on prosecutorial decision‐making?," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 19(3), pages 677-715, September.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ucp:jlstud:doi:10.1086/708705. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Journals Division (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/JLS .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.