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Cited by 299

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 31 of the 31 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Does a helping hand put others at risk?: affirmative action, police departments, and crime

Open access
Lott, J.·2000·Economic Inquiry
DOI 10.1093/ei/38.2.239
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Abstract

Will increasing the number of minority and women police officers make law enforcement more effective by drawing on abilities that have gone untapped and creating better contact with communities and victims? Or will standards have to be lowered too far before large numbers of minorities and women can be hired? Using cross-sectional time-series data for U.S. cities, I find that more black and minority police officers increase crime rates, but this apparently arises because lower hiring standards involved in recruiting more minority officers reduces the quality of both new minority and new nonminority officers. The most adverse effects of these hiring policies have occurred in the most heavily black populated areas. There is no consistent evidence that crime rates rise when more women are hired, and this raises questions about whether norming tests or altering their content to create equal pass rates is preferable. The paper examines how the changing composition of police departments affects such measures as the murder of and assaults against police officers.

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Metadata

Authors
Lott, J.
Venue
Economic Inquiry
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2000-04-01
Volume
38
Issue
2
Pages
239-277
ISSN
  • 0043-3640 (ISSN-L)
  • 0095-2583
  • 1465-7295
DOI
10.1093/ei/38.2.239
OpenAlex
W4240497998
Cited by
299
References
31
FWCI
260.55
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Does a helping hand put others at risk?: affirmative action, police departments, and crime. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1093/ei/38.2.239
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Lott, J. (2000). Does a helping hand put others at risk?: affirmative action, police departments, and crime. Economic Inquiry. https://doi.org/10.1093/ei/38.2.239

Data sources

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.