Does providing military weaponry to law enforcement agencies increase officer-involved shootings?
Through a faculty-student collaborative lab, the research aims to expand existing datasets and analyze the relationship between the allocation of military-grade weapons and police use-of-force incidents involving firearms, leveraging policy shifts across presidential administrations to isolate these effects.
Abstract
Police violence and militarization is a critical issue with consequences for the instrumental use of violence by law enforcement in the United States. Rigorous knowledge about the subject, however, has lagged far behind because of the deliberate lack of transparency at all levels of government. Since the late 1990s, the federal government has given billions in military surplus to local law enforcement—including firearms designed as weapons of war. Alongside this lending program, it has also subsidized the purchase of surveillance drones, lethal robots and other hardware. Our project studies the causes and consequences of police militarization in the U.S., through an ongoing faculty-student collaborative lab at the Institute for Social Research. Our initial aim is to extend and expand an existing dataset of military surplus held by local law enforcement. We will then investigate a critical question: are distributions of these weapons associated with increased police use-of-force incidents involving firearms? By leveraging policy changes enacted by presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden, we plan to isolate the effect of military equipment distributions on gun violence by law enforcement.