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When Desmond Ang was growing up in Virginia, there were few other Asians nearby. “Nobody who looked like me,” he recalls. “As a result, I think a lot about the extent to which, when you’re a minority or any marginalized group, it affects your horizons and what it is you think you can do.”
Now an applied economist and an assistant professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, Ang has delved into the issue of police killings and their impact on young people who live close to where the killings occurred. In a new paper, Ang looks at a series of 627 fatal police incidents in Los Angeles County and the educational, social, and mental health outcomes of public high school students nearby. The results are stark: “Exploiting hyperlocal variation in how close students live to a killing, I find that exposure to police violence leads to persistent decreases in GPA, increased incidence of emotional disturbance, and lower rates of high school completion and college enrollment,” Ang writes.
As an empirical strategy, Ang’s research uses the horrific randomness of police violence in disadvantaged Los Angeles neighborhoods such as Compton and Watts, where most residents are racial minorities, from 2002 to 2016. The study looks at the outcomes of 700,000 students in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), comparing those who live in the neighborhood at large with those who live close to the site of a police killing, as well as the students’ own outcomes over time, before and after the killing. Ang examines whether the killing involved an armed or unarmed individual and compares police killings with other homicides in the neighborhood that didn’t involve the police. “These effects are driven entirely by black and Hispanic students in response to police killings of other minorities and are largest for incidents involving unarmed individuals,” he writes.
Consequences of a police killing can be seen almost immediately, Ang found. Students who live within a half-mile of the location of the killing stayed home from school in greater numbers in the days after the shooting. For several semesters afterward, nearby students had lower GPAs. The effects can persist for years; students who are in ninth grade when police kill someone nearby are about 3.5 percent less likely to graduate from high school and 2.5 percent less likely to go to college, Ang found.
Why does this happen? The effect on students could be coming from their concerns about whether they might be on the other end of police violence, Ang says. That could lead to negative feelings about authority figures as a whole, especially given the statistics on criminal charges for police who kill people. Of the 627 incidents, only one led to an officer being charged. “The perceptions of discrimination might move into how you feel about your teacher, how you feel about school, how you feel about the government,” Ang says.
The study didn’t yield a clear pattern of student outcomes based on whether the police officer who killed someone in the neighborhood was a minority, Ang notes. (A plurality of L.A. police officers are minorities, as are the majority of public school students in LAUSD.) The findings highlight the problem of increased policing in urban crime prevention, and in particular the dilemma of allowing police discretion over the use of force.
“There are going to be errors when you allow police to kill people,” Ang says. “How do you make those trade-offs?”
The paper brings up crucial issues of how society should design policing protocols—in particular, how to balance crime reduction from more policing with the problems that accompany a stronger and potentially more violent police force, says Jennifer Doleac, an associate professor of economics at Texas A&M University.
“There has been a lot of work showing that police reduce crime, and a lot of anecdotal and qualitative evidence that police officers’ actions can also have big social costs, but it has been very difficult to quantify those costs,” Doleac says. “Desmond’s study is one of the first to rigorously measure some of the social costs of policing.”
Desmond Ang, “The Effects of Police Violence on Inner-City Students,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 136, no. 1, 2021, pp. 115-168.
Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.