Citation

Jacobs D. Criminology 2014; 52(1): 140-142.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, American Society of Criminology)

DOI

10.1111/1745-9125.12027

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In 2005, Stephanie L. Kent and I published an article in this journal on the relationship between racial threat and police strength in large U.S. cities (Kent and Jacobs, 2005). The results were based on two-way fixed-effects pooled time-series analysis of these cities in 1980, 1990, and 2000. When another graduate student recently reexamined this data, he found a serous coding error and a few less critical variable discrepancies that may be attributable to reporting agency data modifications, which occurred after these data originally were collected. This reanalysis shows the results when these differences and a more serious error are rectified.....

....The main theoretical implications of the prior analysis (Kent and Jacobs, 2005) persist. The new results continue to suggest that enhanced Black threat produces larger police forces. The findings again show that the effects of racial threat increased from 1980 to 2000 (as a Wald test indicates that the three coefficients on race differ significantly from one another). In addition to the many other findings with identical theoretical implications, the corrected model continues to suggest that municipalities with a city manager have fewer police officers relative to their population. This is so probably because, in contrast to mayors who face elections, these unelected officials can better resist public crime panics and the resultant pressure to hire additional police officers. The corrected results suggest that the presence of a city manager reduces sworn officer rates by approximately 9.2 percent. This point estimate is more plausible than the 21 percent estimate reported in the original study.

Language: en