Defunding the Police to Improve Minority School Performance? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from California

Emanuele Murgolo , Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Gerard Torrats-Espinosa, Columbia University

Are policies to ‘defund the police’ effective? The slogan became famous after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests demanded policies to reallocate funds, across U.S. cities, from law enforcement departments to social services and resources for communities. After months of pressure, in 2021 the Los Angeles Unified School District cut 33% of its police force to re-invest in Black students’ achievement, becoming one of the very few urban areas to enact such a policy. Los Angeles also dedicates about 23% of its budget to policing, has oftentimes been under the spotlight due to the department’s treatment of racial minorities, and has higher dropout rates compared to the rest of the country. Hence, we plan to use administrative records of police stops from California’s main cities, as well as school-level and student-level data, from 2018 to 2025, to explore whether the program managed to deliver on its promises: reduce racial disparities in policing and improve minorities’ (particularly Black students) test scores and dropout rates. To answer our research question, we plan to use a difference-in-differences for our identification strategy, to properly isolate the causal effect of the policy and find out whether it successfully curbed racial disparities in policing, test scores, and graduation rates, when we compare Los Angeles to other similar jurisdictions in the State.

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 Presented in Session P7. Education, Labor Market, and Economic Issues