Is It Cool to Be a Cop? Exploring the Differential Impact of Ferguson on Police Applicants

Abstract Recruitment of highly qualified applicants has been a defining characteristic of police reforms for decades. Research has explored why individuals become officers, yet it remains an empirical question whether the current US ‘legitimacy crisis’ has influenced citizen decisions to apply to policing. Many cities are reporting hiring and retention issues, yet it is unclear whether this is due to changes in citizen perceptions of police or something else entirely. As an initial test of this question, this paper explores changes in the number of applicants to one large urban police agency, the Dallas Police Department, in the months following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, using autoregressive integrated moving average time-series analysis. The paper determines if there was a differential impact in police applications across racial, ethnic, and gender groups. Findings showed stability in the number of applicants each month from each sub-group since 2010. Implications of these findings are discussed.