Related papers: Sequential Sensitivity Analysis for Multiple Assum…

We discuss some causal estimands used to study racial discrimination in policing. A central challenge is that not all police-civilian encounters are recorded in administrative datasets and available to researchers. One possible solution is…

Studying racial bias in policing is a critically important problem, but one that comes with a number of inherent difficulties due to the nature of the available data. In this manuscript we tackle multiple key issues in the causal analysis…

We are interested in developing a data-driven method to evaluate race-induced biases in law enforcement systems. While the recent works have addressed this question in the context of police-civilian interactions using police stop data, they…

This study examines racial disparities in violent arrest outcomes, challenging conventional methods through a nuanced analysis of Cincinnati Police Department data. Acknowledging the intricate nature of racial disparity, the study…

In studies of discrimination, researchers often seek to estimate a causal effect of race or gender on outcomes. For example, in the criminal justice context, one might ask whether arrested individuals would have been subsequently charged or…

In observational studies of discrimination, the most common statistical approaches consider either the rate at which decisions are made (benchmark tests) or the success rate of those decisions (outcome tests). Both tests, however, have…

In many applications of causal inference, the treatment received by one unit may influence the outcome of another, a phenomenon referred to as interference. Although there are several frameworks for conducting causal inference in the…

Tests for racial bias commonly assess whether two people of different races are treated differently. A fundamental challenge is that, because two people may differ in many ways, factors besides race might explain differences in treatment.…

In this paper, we introduce the latent racial bias, a metric and method to evaluate the racial bias within specific events. For the purpose of this paper we explore the British Home Office dataset of stop-and-search incidents. We explore…

Several key actors -- police, prosecutors, judges -- can alter the course of individuals passing through the multi-staged criminal justice system. I use linked arrest-sentencing data for federal courts from 1994-2010 to examine the role…

Predictive policing systems that allocate patrol resources based solely on predicted crime risk can unintentionally amplify racial disparities through feedback driven data bias. We present FASE, a Fairness Aware Spatiotemporal Event Graph…

As virtually all aspects of our lives are increasingly impacted by algorithmic decision making systems, it is incumbent upon us as a society to ensure such systems do not become instruments of unfair discrimination on the basis of gender,…

Semiparametric inference on average causal effects from observational data is based on assumptions yielding identification of the effects. In practice, several distinct identifying assumptions may be plausible; an analyst has to make a…

The risk of re-offense is considered in decision-making at many stages of the criminal justice system, from pre-trial, to sentencing, to parole. To aid decision makers in their assessments, institutions increasingly rely on algorithmic risk…

A key objective of decomposition analysis is to identify a factor (the 'mediator') contributing to disparities in an outcome between social groups. In decomposition analysis, a scholarly interest often centers on estimating how much the…

Racial disproportionality in Stop and Search practices elicits substantial concerns about its societal and behavioral impacts. This paper aims to investigate the effect of disproportionality, particularly on the black community, on…

A person is directly racially discriminated against only if her race caused her worse treatment. This implies that race is an attribute sufficiently separable from other attributes to isolate its causal role. But race is embedded in a nexus…

Risk assessment tools are widely used around the country to inform decision making within the criminal justice system. Recently, considerable attention has been devoted to the question of whether such tools may suffer from racial bias. In…

In many domains, it is difficult to obtain the race data that is required to estimate racial disparity. To address this problem, practitioners have adopted the use of proxy methods which predict race using non-protected covariates. However,…

In this article we explore the data available through the Stanford Open Policing Project. The data consist of information on millions of traffic stops across close to 100 different cities and highway patrols. Using a variety of metrics, we…