The relationship between officer misconduct and convictionless arrests

This paper examines whether officers with high prior alleged misconduct are more likely to make convictionless arrests (arrests that result in no or dismissed charges or where the defendant is found not guilty). 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 make statistically significantly more arrests for nonindex crimes and in situations involving high officer discretion, compared to their no-misconduct peers. Our findings also suggest that downstream legal actors, such as prosecutors and judges, may be partially “correcting” these arrests.