Brenden Beck

Research Summary Following high‐profile police killings, many U.S. cities banned officers from using chokeholds and other neck restraints. The evidence for such bans, however, is limited. To test whether use‐of‐force policies prohibiting neck restraints are related to fewer police killings, we use three modeling approaches to analyze 2183 U.S. cities between 2009 and 2021. Police killings were lower in places that adopted neck‐restraint bans and the bans were associated with less crime and fewer assaults on officers, net of controls. Because officer labor unions can affect use‐of‐force policies and the frequency of police killings, we also analyzed them, finding unionization increased the likelihood a city had a neck‐restraint ban and had a null or negative association with police killings. Policy Implications Adopting a neck‐restraint ban is likely an effective way to reduce deaths due to police use of force with minimal collateral consequences. The bans operate through a diffuse discouragement of many types of lethal force or as a part of an array of use‐of‐force policies. Their direct relationship to asphyxiation deaths remains unclear. Officer unionization is unlikely to change the frequency of police killings, except through its association with stricter use‐of‐force policies.

What makes police departments change their practices? Do they transform in isolation, or do they mimic their neighbors? Combining insights from organizational theory and urban sociology, the authors argue that organizational change diffuses, in part, through physically proximate institutions. They apply this theory to an underexamined trend: the decline of misdemeanor arrests in the United States between 1990 and 2018. The study first explores the spatial dynamics of low-level law enforcement by graphing and mapping trends across a range of metropolitan types, finding that suburbs made the fewest low-level arrests and central cities reduced their arrests the most during these years. A spatial autoregressive panel data model reveals that police departments decreased their misdemeanor arrests more when nearby departments did so, net of crime rates and other controls, evincing spatial mimicry. Police reform efforts need not target only state and federal governments but can diffuse outward from city-level changes.