Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden.
Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research, Tokyo, Japan.
PLoS One. 2020 Jul 22;15(7):e0235894. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0235894. eCollection 2020.
States often seek to regulate the use of police force though citizen complaint systems. This paper examines these systems, specifically, whether patterns of bias found in other juridical contexts are mirrored in the adjudication of police assault. The analysis focuses on prosecutors as the first instance of adjudication who determine whether to move forward with investigation, effectively deciding the majority of cases. We ask whether prosecutor sex is associated with the probability that a police assault claim will be investigated. We leverage a natural experiment in Sweden where prosecutors are assigned through a modified lottery system, effectively randomizing appointment. Our findings suggest that prosecutor gender plays a role in judicial outcomes: women prosecutors are 16 percentage points more likely to investigate claims of police assault than their male counterparts. These findings have implications for scholars interested in state human rights abuses, democratic institutions, and judicial inequality.
各国通常通过公民投诉系统来规范警察的执法行为。本文研究了这些系统，具体而言，就是在警察殴打案件的裁决中是否存在其他司法背景下发现的偏见模式。该分析侧重于作为初审的检察官，他们决定是否进行调查，实际上决定了大多数案件。我们询问检察官的性别是否与警察殴打指控被调查的可能性有关。我们利用瑞典的一个自然实验，在这个实验中，检察官通过修改后的抽签系统分配，实际上是随机任命的。我们的研究结果表明，检察官的性别在司法结果中起着作用：女检察官比男检察官更有可能调查警察殴打指控，可能性高出 16 个百分点。这些发现对关注国家侵犯人权、民主制度和司法不平等的学者具有重要意义。
