The Relationship between Officer Misconduct and Conviction-less Arrests

Given the use of an individual’s arrest history for many economic and social outcomes, policymakers have enacted criminal justice reform measures. This paper examines which officers are making conviction‐less arrests (arrests that result in no charges or where the defendant is found not guilty), and whether these arrests can be reduced with increased oversight. Using the Chicago Police Department’s rotational duty calendar to obtain plausibly exogenous variation in the set of officers assigned to work on a particular day, we find that high‐misconduct officers are 12% more likely than no‐misconduct officers to make arrests that result in no charges and 31% more likely to make arrests with “not guilty” outcomes, with no difference in arrests yielding “guilty” outcomes. We also analyze two events that increased the transparency of police misconduct through public disclosure of complaint records and find that increased oversight reduces conviction‐less arrests, but with nuances across misconduct profiles–low‐misconduct officers show stronger responses and high‐misconduct officers show weaker responses.