On page 696 of this issue, Bocar Ba, [UCI assistant professor of economics] et al. (3) analyze officer demographics and police behavior in Chicago and show that Black officers use force less often than white officers. Such advances in quantitative social science on racism in policing (4) should be applauded. … Yet, even as emerging work such as that of Ba et al. begins to identify ways to combat seemingly obvious racism in policing, their findings suggest the need to engage a question that poses an even more fundamental challenge to established thinking in the field: whether and when police can be the right solution to social problems.
 
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