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We examine how changes in the salience of workplace risk affect police behavior and public safety. Specifically, we investigate cases of police officer deaths while on duty. Officers respond to a peer death by decreasing arrest activity for one to two months, consistent with heightened fear. Reductions are largest for low-level arrests and are more pronounced in smaller cities. Crime does not increase on average during this period, nor do we observe crime spikes in cities with larger or longer arrest declines. While shocks in fatality risk generate substantial enforcement responses, officer fear is unlikely to harm public safety.

We estimate the degree to which individual police officers practice racial discrimination. Using a bunching estimation design and data from the Florida Highway Patrol, we show that minorities are less likely to receive a discount on their speeding tickets than White drivers. Disaggregating this difference to the individual police officer, we estimate that 42 percent of officers practice discrimination. We then apply our officer-level discrimination measures to various policy-relevant questions in the literature. In particular, reassigning officers across locations based on their lenience can effectively reduce the aggregate disparity in treatment.

The preferences of bureaucrats are a central determinant of how governments operate, yet little is known about how these preferences are formed and the relative importance of selection versus the treatment effect of government work. This paper studies these questions in the context of policing and asks how working as a police officer impacts political preferences. We link civil service exam records to data on voting and campaign contributions to test whether becoming a police officer affects political identity. Using difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity designs, we find that joining a police force increases Republican party affiliation, contributions to Republican campaigns, and voter turnout. The treatment effect of work can explain around 40% of the difference in party affiliation between police and the general population. We then show that political affiliation relates to on-the-job behavior: Republican officers make more arrests and use more force than comparable non-Republican officers. Finally, we revisit a canonical model of bureaucratic motivation and show that a treatment effect of work on preferences can alter the government’s optimal choice of selection into the profession. Our findings show how the experience of government work is central to bureaucratic preferences, and they highlight the constraints on worker selection and recruitment as tools to dictate the composition of the government workforce.

Increasing criminal enforcement can improve public safety by deterring or incapacitating offenders, but it may also alter community engagement with law enforcement. If victims fear interactions with police, they may be less likely to report crimes, reducing the probability of offender apprehension. This paper studies the Secure Communities program, a crime-reduction policy that involved local police in the detection of unauthorized immigrants who were arrested for criminal offenses. While the policy aimed to lower crime by deterring offenders, it also increased fear of deportation in immigrant communities. We show that the policy reduced the likelihood that Hispanic victims report crimes to the police and increased victimization of Hispanics. The number of crimes that are reported is unchanged, masking these opposing effects. We provide evidence that reduced reporting drives the increase in victimization, highlighting community engagement as a central determinant of public safety.

We study how public sector workers balance their professional motivations with private economic concerns, focusing on police arrests. Arrests made near the end of an officer’s shift typically require overtime work, and officers respond by reducing arrest frequency but increasing arrest quality. Days in which an officer works a second job after their police shift have higher opportunity cost, also reducing late-shift arrests. Combining our estimates in a dynamic model identifies officer preferences over workplace activity and overtime work. Our results indicate that officers’ private costs of arrests have a first-order impact on the quantity and quality of enforcement.

We study the implications of police discretion for public safety. Highway patrol officers exercise discretion over fines by deviating from statutory fine rules. Relying on variation across officers in this discretionary behavior, we find that harsher sanctions reduce future traffic offending and crash involvement. We then show that officer discretion over sanctions decreases public safety by comparing observed reoffending rates with those in a counterfactual without discretion, estimated using a novel approach leveraging officers who practice no discretion. About half the safety cost of discretion is due to officer decisions which result in harsh sanctions for motorists who are least deterred by them. We provide evidence that this officer behavior is attributable to a preference for allocating harsh fines to motorists with higher recidivism risk, who are also the least responsive to harsher sanctions.

I evaluate the impact of police unions on deaths by police and occupational license decertifications. My empirical strategy exploits the staggered rollout of unionization across departments nationwide and union certification elections in Florida, where I compare winning and losing elections. I find impacts that are small and statistically insignificant, and most specifications rule out more than a 10% positive impact. These results are robust to accounting for error in union status and under-reporting of outcomes. While the evidence does suggest that unions reduce civilian oversight and increase legal protection for officers, these impacts do not translate into elevated misconduct.

I study an ongoing state-subsidized program of rebuilding and renovating Ohio’s K-12 public schools and investigate the effect of improved facility quality on student and school district outcomes. The completion of a project increases public school enrollment and district property values. Test scores do not measurably improve upon completion and suffer significant reductions during construction. The implied willingness to pay for a project is lower than total costs but greater than the cost borne by district residents. While the program led to a narrowing in expenditures across district wealth, I find little evidence that it reduced disparities in student outcomes.