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KDI 경제교육·정보센터

ENG
  • 경제배움
  • Economic

    Information

    and Education

    Center

국제무역
Learning About Police Bias: Prosecutors and Police Before and After Body-Worn Cameras
CATO
2026.05.13
Decision-makers often rely on earlier actors but fail to correct for their biases. We model and measure two mechanisms: underestimating upstream bias and treating subjective information as ground truth. We link an original survey of 203 North Carolina prosecutors to their 505,787 cases. Exploiting the rollout of police body-worn cameras (BWC), we show monitoring reduces incarceration disparities by 14 percent, little of which is driven by arrests. About one quarter of this effect reflects learning: prosecutors with greater BWC exposure view police as more biased and unreliable. Monitoring reduces disparities most for prosecutors who treat police reports as ground truth.