Date of Award

5-2019

Author's School

Olin Business School

Author's Program

OTHER (include in Notes to Administrator)

Restricted/Unrestricted

Unrestricted

Abstract

has brought the pervasiveness of biases to the forefront of the public’s attention. In the last decade alone, countless studies have sought to expand our understanding of the presence of discrimination in police behavior through detailed analyses of profiling, traffic stops, jury systems, and other key policies. The continued confirmation of these discrepancies in behavior and their resulting outcomes inspired a further analysis of their effects on the distribution of parking tickets. We sought to examine whether this discrimination is a result of peripheral racial biases in which police officers rely on their heuristics of racial minorities to inform their actions. Since officers do not interact face-to-face with offenders when issuing parking tickets, is this behavior indicative of implicit bias? To better answer this question, we performed a difference-in-differences analysis of parking ticket distribution in the city of Chicago spanning the last decade between minority and White police officers based on the districts they patrol. Using a fixed effects linear model, we isolated police bias in ticketing behavior and concluded that there was no clear trend of racial discrimination across the police force. However, trends did exist highlighting lenient ticketing behavior in majority white areas and clear distinctions about how White officers issue tickets along racial lines.

Mentor

Tat Chan

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