48 Pages Posted: 5 Jan 2018 Last revised: 21 Aug 2020

There are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: August 1, 2019

Abstract

Growing controversy surrounds the impact of labor unions on law enforcement behavior. We provide quasi-experimental evidence on the effects of collective bargaining rights on violent incidents of misconduct. Our empirical strategy exploits a 2003 Florida Supreme Court decision (Williams), which conferred collective bargaining rights on sheriffs’ deputies, resulting in a substantial increase in unionization among these officers. Using a Florida state administrative database of “moral character” violations reported by local agencies over 1996-2015, we implement a difference-in-difference approach in which police departments (which were unaffected by Williams) serve as a control group for sheriffs’ offices. Our estimates imply that collective bargaining rights led to a substantial increase in violent incidents of misconduct among sheriffs’ offices, relative to police departments. This result is robust to including only violent incidents involving officers hired before Williams, suggesting that it is due to a deterrence mechanism rather than to compositional effects on the types of officers hired post-Williams. While there is some evidence consistent with a “bargaining in the shadow of the law” effect among sheriffs’ offices that did not unionize, unionization is associated with higher levels of violent misconduct in an event-study framework, and so appears to be a channel for the effect.