Prior to COVID-19, I was supposed to be presenting some early stage research this weekend at the @ClioSociety conference on the the impact of police bargaining rights on killings of civilians by race. I don't normally discuss early stage research, but it feels appropriate today.

We look at the roll-out of collective bargaining rights for police officers at the state level from the 1950s to the 1980s, using an event study framework and taking advantage of collective bargaining rights discontinuities for counties at state boundaries.

What are we finding so far? The introduction of access to collective bargaining drives a modest decline in policy employment and increase in compensation with no meaningful impacts on total crime, violent crime, property crime or officers killed in the line of duty.

What does change? We find a substantial increase in police killings of civilians over the medium to long run (likely after unions are established) with an additional 0.026 to 0.029 civilians killed in a county each year of whom the overwhelming majority are non-white.

If access to a union simply shifted the marginal decision for officers to shoot in "risky" situations you would expect to see increases in killings of both whites and non-whites, but that's not what we're finding at all.

Rather, and with the caveat that this is very early work, it looks like collective bargaining rights are being used to protect the ability of officers to discriminate in the disproportionate use of force against the non-white population.

This is a horrendous result, particularly as an active trade unionist myself. What's the takeaway? Police accountability matters and employers, in this case local and regional governments, have failed to bargain in a manner that protects public safety.

This would be consistent with the broad disenfranchisement of African American voters. If the African American population has minimal control over the employer, there's no reason to think that they would enter bargaining with their wellbeing in mind.

I'll leave things there for now. I'll have a formal working paper out this summer and welcome any ideas or comments going forward.