Law Enforcement Leaders and the Racial Composition of Arrests: Evidence from Overlapping Jurisdictions∗

Racial discrimination in policing remains at the forefront of policy and research interest. This paper introduces a novel avenue of study by examining the effect of law enforcement leadership on the racial composition of arrests. The analysis is based on a new twenty-five year panel history of the race of each sheriff in the United States linked to agency-level arrest statistics. The primary empirical design exploits the fact that county residents are served by a sheriff and municipal police departments with overlapping jurisdictions, providing within-population controls for contemporaneous changes in the underlying crime rate. The estimates reveal that arrests of blacks relative to whites are higher under a white sheriff than a black sheriff, with the effects primarily driven by arrests for less serious offenses and by smaller sheriffs’ offices in rural communities. Further, there is evidence that whites are also less likely to be arrested for predominantly black crimes when there is a black sheriff, suggesting that the targeting of crime types, rather than discrimination at the incident level, is the primary causal mechanism. The analysis contributes to the literature by examining the role of management in a law enforcement context and by developing new methods to identify causal effects and mechanisms. ∗Contact: [email protected]. Department of Economics, University of California at Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064. All data sets used in this study are publicly available, including Federal Bureau of Investigations Uniform Crime Reporting, county-level Census data, and historical sheriffs directories aggregated by the author.