Computational Methods for Police Oversight and Reform Under Incomplete Data

Analyses of police misconduct rely heavily on self-reported law-enforcement data that suffers from unobserved confounding, mismeasurement, and selection issues. I first show how these challenges have led to distortions in prior policing research, including a high-profile retraction. Next, I demonstrate how nonparametric sharp bounds can help researchers address these challenges without relying on implausible, often implicit assumptions.

I introduce an algorithm for obtaining such bounds for any structured discrete system and essentially any estimand, assumptions, and arbitrarily incomplete dataset(s). It flexibly accommodates the wide variety of oversight tasks and data environments across America’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies and allows analysts to fuse police administrative data with novel sources, including traffic sensors and mobile location data. The algorithm outputs a fail-to-reject region capturing both fundamental lack of identification as well as sampling uncertainty.

Finally, I propose an approach for targeting future data collection under budget constraints, such as costly manual review of body-worn camera footage, to optimally narrow the expected fail-to-reject region.