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American Law and Economics Review Advance Access published online on April 10, 2008
American Law and Economics Review, doi:10.1093/aler/ahn006
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Law and Economics Association. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Case Dismissed: Police Discretion and Racial Differences in Dismissals of Felony Charges

Aleksandar Tomic

Macon State College

Jahn K. Hakes

Albion College

Send correspondence to: Aleksandar Tomic, School of Business, Macon State College, 100 College Station Drive, Macon, GA 31206-5145, USA; E-mail: sasha.tomic{at}maconstate.edu

JEL Classification: K14, D70, D63


  Abstract

Prior research has produced conflicting evidence of racial profiling during traffic stops. We instead analyze rates of case dismissal against felony arrestees by race. Superficial bias based on "unobservables" should be reduced because of the evidentiary requirements and nonnegligible costs of filing charges. Nonetheless, using data from over 58,000 US felony cases from 1990 to 1998, our probit analysis finds higher rates of dismissals for blacks for the subset of crimes that rely on police to make snap judgments. This suggests there may be more aggressive policing of blacks in these situations. Case dismissal rates are also elevated for both whites and blacks when blacks are underrepresented on local police forces.

The authors wish to thank Scott Baier, William Dougan, Raymond Sauer, Robert Tollison, Kip Viscusi, John Donohue, an anonymous referee, and seminar participants at Kenyon College and at Georgia College and State University for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper, and Bill Hervey and Joanna Shepherd for their assistance.


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