Bosses in Blue: Assessing the Role of Management Quality in Global City Crime Rates

In recent years, discourse surrounding police reform has been globalized by the Black Lives Matter movement and those carrying its torch. Previous police literature tends to focus on analysis of police resources and analysis of policing strategies, a limited focus that limits further the potential for reform responses. Recently, a third branch of analysis that centers police management quality, identified within the leaders themselves, has demonstrated statistical significance in the USA. My contribution is to expand this lens by looking at whether this management quality tracks alongside crime rates internationally. To do so, I collect data on city homicide rates from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and overlap it with hand-collected data regarding who the police chief was in that city. The dataset demonstrates a proportionally large effect, showing a 0.74 change in homicides per 100,000 people, a statistic with a mean of 2.13 in this sample. Though the dataset's limited size hinders the ability to confidently and statistically rule out that there is no effect, the large initial proportion warrants more research into this field.