MINORITY THREAT AND POLICE BRUTALITY: DETERMINANTS OF CIVIL RIGHTS CRIMINAL COMPLAINTS IN U.S. MUNICIPALITIES

The conflict theory of law stipulates that strategies of crime control regulate threats to the interests of dominant groups. Aggregate-level research on policing has generally supported this proposition, showing that measures of minority threat are related to legal mechanisms of crime control. Police brutality (i.e., use of excessive physical force) constitutes an extra-legal mechanism of control that has yet to be examined in this theoretical framework. This study extends research in the area theoretically and substantively by testing the hypothesis that the greater the number of threatening acts and people, the greater the number of police brutality civil rights criminal complaints filed with the U.S. Department of Justice. The findings show that measures of the presence of threatening people (percent black, percent Hispanic [in the Southwest], and majority/minority income inequality) were related positively to average annual civil rights criminal complaints.