Reforming the Provision of Public Safety

Cornell Population Center Innovations in Population Science Speaker Series presents "Reforming the Provision of Public Safety" with Bocar A. Ba, Kathleen Kaylor and G. Richard Wagoner, Jr. Assistant Professor of Economics, Duke University. This seminar is co-sponsored with CSI.

This talk is based on how the protests of Summer 2020 changed the provision of public safety in the United States. Linking county-level protest exposure to a decade of voter surveys and to a panel of local police departments, Dr. Ba compares protest-exposed and unexposed areas before and after the summer of 2020. We find that the protests reduced stated support for police funding by three to four percentage points, with the decline concentrated entirely among Democratic respondents. This shift, however, was modest against near-universal baseline support, had fully reversed by 2024, and was too small to translate into changes in police staffing or workforce composition. Instead, institutional change occurred along less contested margins: protest-exposed departments became significantly more likely to be served by civilian crisis-response programs and to adopt surveillance technology, while violent crime was unchanged. These results run counter to the increasingly widespread view that the protests of Summer 2020 failed to change American policing: rather than shrinking police departments, the protests durably changed the composition of public-safety provision.