In 2017, the Trump Administration restored the access of local law enforcement agencies to military weapons and some other types of surplus military equipment (SME) that had been prohibited by the Obama Administration. Using new, more detailed audit data on 1033 SME, we show that the 2014 data is flawed and that there is no evidence that 1033 SME reduces crime.

Determining racial bias as the cause of such disparities is difficult due to a lack of systematic use of force data and inferential challenges to discovering and estimating racial bias by police officers. We empirically evaluate the use of force with original data for all officer-involved shootings of civilians from 2005-2017 in nine local police jurisdictions in the U.S. We estimate that 1 in 3 Black civilians shot would not have been were they White.

With generous support from the National Science Foundation, we are collecting data on shootings of civilians by police in the U.S. for the period 2000-2019. The primary sources of data will be the police departments of the 285 largest cities (i.e., cities of at least 100,000 residents as of the 2010 Census). We will use the data they collect to build a public repository for aggregating, hosting, and disseminating data about police shootings.

Collaborating with the Policing Project at NYU Law and the National Police Foundation, we evaluate the “1033 Program”, which gives local law enforcement agencies access to surplus military equipment. Our analysis combines statistical analyses of military surplus transfers with extensive field work in police departments throughout the country. The results of these analyses will soon be released in a public report.

Scholarship in a variety of disciplines has examined the extent to which the death of an officer or of a citizen provokes reactions from one group or the other. We study police behavior in New York City between 2004 and 2015.