SEMINAR: Strategic Bureaucratic Opacity: Evidence from Death Investigation Laws and Police Killings Seminar

Event details

Speaker: Stephen Kastoryano (Reading)

Abstract:  Police accountability is vital to maintain the social contract. Monitoring the monitors is, however, not without difficulty. This paper reveals how police departments exploit specific laws surrounding death investigations to facilitate the underreporting  of police killings. Our results show that US counties in which law enforcement can certify the cause of death, including counties which appoint the sheriff as the lead death investigator, display 46% more underreported police killings than their comparable adjacent counties. Our identification strategy draws from historical changes in death investigation systems and is reinforced by a novel multi-outcome stratification potential outcomes framework. This framework demonstrates, among other results, that underreported police killings are most often reclassified as ‘circumstances undetermined’ homicides. We further show that law enforcement agencies in counties with permissive death certification laws are more likely to withhold homicide reports from the public. The main underreporting results are primarily driven by underreporting of White and Hispanic deaths in our analysis sample, with the effect on Hispanic people particularly pronounced along the US-Mexico border. We additionally touch on the questions of monitoring mechanism efficacy, the role of threats such as the permissiveness of gun-laws, and the moderating effects of the Black Lives Matters movement. Our results do not indicate that other differences in death investigation systems - coroner vs. medical examiner, appointed vs. elected, or physician vs. non-physician - affect the underreporting of police killings.

Host: Tho Pham (York)