Seminar: Luca Rizzotti (Brown University)

Luca is a PhD candidate in Economics at Brown University. His interests are in Economics of Crime, Political Economy and Labor Economics. His research focuses on the determinants and consequences of police behavior in the US. He also investigates the role of police culture and media scrutiny on police violent behavior.

Paper: "Racial Discrimination Against Crime Victims: Evidence from Investigations of Violent Crime"

Abstract: I develop and apply a new test for a consequential but overlooked form of racial discrimination: that against victims of crime, by police detectives. I test whether detectives display racial bias using a marginal outcome test derived from a model of police investigations. By performing the test on novel data on all the investigations of violent crime conducted by the Chicago Police Department over the last two decades, I find evidence of racial bias against Black victims: cases that are classified as solved in the same amount of time are more likely to be rejected by the prosecution for insufficient evidence if the victim is Black rather than White. This is true for both homicides (-9.2%) and non-fatal violent crime (-2.5%). These differences are consistent with the police being more tolerant of a case failing to enter the court process when the victim is Black. Heterogeneity analysis leveraging the experience and race of the primary detective indicates that the results are driven by racial animus and not by inaccurate beliefs. These results suggest that efforts to increase oversight and transparency in policing should also extend to police investigations and the broader differential treatment of crime victims.