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Seminar: Toshio Ferrazares (University of California Santa Barbara)
Jan 30, 2025 | 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm
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Toshio Ferrazares is a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses broadly on Labor and Public Economics with a primary interest in the economics of policing and public safety. He explores why police officers use force and what factors influence their behavior.
Toshio’s solo-authored research has been published in top field journals, such as the Journal of Urban Economics, and has been honored with the "Best Second Year Paper" by UCSB Economics and the "Best Paper Award" at the SOCAE conference. Prior to his doctoral studies, he earned both a B.A. and M.A. in Economics from San Diego State University.
Paper: Shift Structure and Cognitive Depletion: Evidence from Police Officers (Link)
Abstract: Decision-making, risk-taking, and situational awareness are all important factors for effective and equitable policing. However, these factors can also be affected by fatigue, overwork, and cognitive stress, which can accumulate as police officers continue to work. This paper studies the evolution of police officer outcomes and activity over consecutive working days using rich data from the Chicago Police Department. To overcome the endogenous selection of working days, I take advantage of a unique shift structure where working days are predetermined and based on fixed groupings. This is combined with a two-way fixed effects design that leverages within-officer variation across different working days. I find that as officers work more consecutive days, they use more force, make more judgement-based discretionary arrests, and are more likely to be injured. These increases occur despite a decline in proactive policing activities. Officers make fewer arrests, conduct fewer stops, issue fewer citations and tickets, and spend less time actively patrolling as their workdays accumulate. The divergence between use-of-force and policing activity is not driven by changes in arrest types, shift assignments, or officer roles, instead, officers are changing their behavior as they work more days.
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