Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
Nat Hum Behav. 2021 Feb;5(2):205-211. doi: 10.1038/s41562-020-00986-6. Epub 2020 Dec 7.
Policymakers and advocates make contradictory claims about the effects of providing military equipment to local law enforcement, but this intervention is not well understood because of severe data limitations and inferential challenges. I use 3.8 million archived inventory records to estimate the magnitude of sources of bias in existing studies of the 1033 Program. I show that most variation in militarization comes from previously unobserved sources, which implies that studies that show crime-reduction benefits are unreliable. I then leverage recent policy changes to evaluate the effect of military equipment: the Obama Administration recalled property under Executive Order 13688, which resulted in a forced demilitarization of several hundred departments. Difference-in-difference estimates of agencies that retained similar equipment show negligible or undetectable impacts on violent crime or officer safety. These findings do not suggest that similar scale federal reforms designed to demilitarize police would have the downside risks proposed by proponents of military transfers.
政策制定者和倡导者对向地方执法机构提供军事装备的影响提出了相互矛盾的说法，但由于数据严重限制和推理挑战，人们对此干预措施了解甚少。我使用 380 万份存档库存记录来估计 1033 计划现有研究中存在的偏差来源的大小。我表明，军事化的大部分变化来自以前未被观察到的来源，这意味着表明减少犯罪益处的研究是不可靠的。然后，我利用最近的政策变化来评估军事装备的效果：奥巴马政府根据第 13688 号行政命令召回了财产，这导致数百个部门被迫非军事化。保留类似装备的机构的差异-差异估计显示，对暴力犯罪或警察安全几乎没有或无法检测到影响。这些发现并不表明旨在使警察非军事化的类似规模的联邦改革会带来军事转移支持者提出的负面风险。
