Do Female Officers Improve Law Enforcement Quality? Effects on Crime Reporting and Domestic Violence Escalation

University of Zurich, UBS International Center of Economics in Society, Working Paper No. 9

42 Pages Posted: 6 Nov 2014

See all articles by Amalia R. Miller

Amalia R. Miller

University of Virginia - Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Carmit Segal

University of Zurich - Department of Economics

Multiple version iconThere are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: August 2014

Abstract

We study the impact of the integration of women in US policing between the late 1970s and early 1990s on violent crime reporting and domestic violence escalation. Along these two key dimensions, we find that female officers improved police quality. Using crime victimization data, we find that as female representation increases among officers in an area, violent crimes against women in that area, and especially domestic violence, are reported to the police at significantly higher rates. There are no such effects for violent crimes against men or from increases in the female share among civilian police employees. Furthermore, we find evidence that female officers help prevent the escalation of domestic violence. Increases in female officer representation are followed by significant declines in intimate partner homicide rates and in rates of repeated domestic abuse. These effects are all consistent between fixed effects models with controls for economic and policy variables and models that focus exclusively on increases in female police employment driven by externally imposed affirmative action plans resulting from employment discrimination cases.

Keywords: Women in policing, occupational sex segregation, affirmative action, crime reporting, domestic violence, intimate partner homicide

JEL Classification: J16, J78, K14, K31, K42, N92, I12

Suggested Citation

Miller, Amalia R. and Segal, Carmit, Do Female Officers Improve Law Enforcement Quality? Effects on Crime Reporting and Domestic Violence Escalation (August 2014). University of Zurich, UBS International Center of Economics in Society, Working Paper No. 9, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2519470 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2519470

Amalia R. Miller (Contact Author)

University of Virginia - Department of Economics ( email )

P.O. Box 400182
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4182
United States

HOME PAGE: http://people.virginia.edu/~am5by/

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

Carmit Segal

University of Zurich - Department of Economics ( email )

Winterthurerstrasse 30
Zürich, CH-8006
Switzerland

HOME PAGE: http://sites.google.com/site/carmitsegal/

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