Running Head: DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME AND POLICE HARASSMENT Working Paper Law and Error: Daylight Saving Time and Police Harassment

In this study we examine decision-making among law enforcement officers, paying particular attention to instances of police officer harassment of suspects. With two large databases – one from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and the other from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) – we examine how the shift to daylight saving time impacts law enforcement officer decisions. Notably, we find that on the Monday after the shift to daylight saving time— which is known to produce a sleep decrement—officers are more prone to exhibit racial bias in their harassment of suspects, suggesting that the officers have less self-regulatory ability to suppress racial biases when sleep deprived. We briefly discuss the implications of our findings for individual decision making and federal and organizational policy. Daylight Saving Time and Police Harassment 3 LAW AND ERROR: DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME AND POLICE HARASSMENT Human decision making is often plagued by errors that manifest themselves in the form of heuristics and biases (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). Although decision making errors in any context are likely to yield inefficiency or suboptimal outcomes (e.g., Stauffer & Buckley, 2005), the context in which decisions are made can have a leveraging effect on the magnitude of the consequences of the decision errors. One highly visible and highly critical context for such biases is law enforcement work. Law enforcement is an especially salient context in which to study biases because law enforcement requires the exercise of a substantial amount of human judgment in contexts that are demanding and fast-paced. Understandably, these factors at times lead to errors, some of which can be attributed to cognitive biases. Indeed, when a police officer errs – for instance, shooting and killing an unarmed individual – accusations of bias often follow (Wines, 2014). Although such dramatic events often garner headlines and dominate public discussion, other police decision-making errors are less dramatic, more numerous, and can occur in run-ofthe-mill settings. Further contributing to the potential impact of such a large number of decisions is that fact that many of these decisions afford decision makers (in this case police officers) substantial discretion. The existence of such discretion gives birth to the possibility that such decisions could be interpreted as the inappropriate exertion of power or authority, even to the extent that these actions could be deemed police harassment. For our purposes we define police harassment as discretionary behavior – such as stops, searches, or arrests – that are not necessary given the facts of the situation, and that result in no subsequent legal action toward the suspect. Examples of this form of harassment could include automobile searches that fail to uncover contraband, arrests that are ultimately not prosecuted for lack of sufficient cause or gravity. Daylight Saving Time and Police Harassment 4 Although the forms of police harassment described herein are certainly less grave than fatal shootings, they can nonetheless incur costs to the individual. For example, being falsely arrested can result in substantial social costs such as humiliation or stigma (Newman, 2006). Thus, not only do the costs of law enforcement decision-making failures result in grave outcomes such as death or maiming, but they can spur police harassment that results in psychological, social, and other personal costs to civilians. The incidence of such decision failures might reasonably be chalked up as an unavoidable and accepted cost of living in an organized society that enjoys social goods such a police protection. Such a characterization of these flaws might be reasonable if the costs were equitably distributed across the population. However, repeated studies suggest this is not the case. For example, a one-year study of metropolitan police officers in the city of Los Angeles found that police officers stopped and unnecessarily searched or frisked a disproportionate number of racial minorities (Ayres & Borowsky, 2008). Meta-analytic results of experimental studies have found corroborating evidence indicating that jurors tend to treat Black defendants more harshly, both in terms of verdicts and punishments, than they do White defendants (Mitchell, Haw, Pfeifer, & Meissner, 2005). What these findings indicate is that researchers have already uncovered some level of racial bias in the American justice system. Researchers suggest that much of these effects can be attributed to individual level biases (Plant & Devine, 2009). However, there is also reason to believe that less examined yet systematic macro-level factors could also contribute to the incidence of police harassment. The reason for this supposition is that, although most people have some level of bias toward others, they are generally able to self-regulate their behavior such that these biases are not evidently manifest in their behavior (Plant & Devine, 2009). However, when individuals’ self-regulatory Daylight Saving Time and Police Harassment 5 abilities become depleted or are otherwise hampered due to a mismatch between self-regulatory demands and the individuals’ current temporal environment (Bodenhausen, 1990), they are less able to suppress their biases, making the biases much more likely to surface (Ghumman & Barnes, 2013). While many intra-individual factors can drive or deplete an individual’s state selfregulatory ability (Baumeister, Vohs, & Tice, 2007), recent studies have uncovered that sleep influences self-control (Barnes, Schaubroeck, Huth, & Ghumman, 2011; Wagner, Barnes, Lim, & Ferris, 2012). This opens the question of what factors influences sleep in a manner that would shape the way that individuals suppress their biases. In many countries across the globe, daylight saving time marks the shift from standard time to daylight saving time with a phase advance, which is the turning ahead of the clocks by one hour. When the clocks shift to daylight saving time, people’s circadian rhythms do not immediately respond to the change (Kantermann, Juda, Merrow, & Roenneberg, 2007), meaning that people’s sleep-wake cycles no longer match the pacing of the clock. The implication of this is that people are likely to experience a disruption to their sleep, meaning that on average, people get approximately forty minutes less sleep the Sunday to Monday night after the spring change to daylight saving (Barnes & Wagner, 2009). In light of the findings that individuals lack adequate self-regulation to suppress their prejudicial judgments or behaviors when sleep deprived (Ghumman & Barnes, 2013), the clock shift associated with daylight saving time begins to look more insidious than saving, causing us to more closely consider the potentially harmful macrolevel factor. In the sections that follow, we elaborate upon the nature of police harassment and then explore the mechanisms connecting the shift to daylight saving time to these behaviors. We put Daylight Saving Time and Police Harassment 6 forward hypotheses articulating these relationships and test them with two quasi-experiments. We conclude with a discussion of our findings for theory, practice, and public policy. Unnecessary Stops, Searches and Arrests Law enforcement officers have discretion with regard to whom they will stop, whom they will search, and whom they will arrest. In most cases, officers only have legal authority to stop someone who has broken a law or who otherwise presents probable cause of having broken a law. However, stop and frisk laws allow law enforcement particular latitude in who they will stop and search. In fact, if a law enforcement officer has reasonable suspicion that an individual is breaking a law, the officer can stop and search that person and his or her property. This suggests that there is substantial judgment that feeds into law enforcement decision making. Although many of these discretionary searches prove successful at identifying and eliminating contraband, a recent study of police stops and searches found that there was significant racial bias in who was stopped and in who among those stopped was subsequently searched (Ayres & Borowsky, 2008). In addition to the racial bias evident in traffic stops resulting in the search of drivers and their vehicles, bias might also be evident in police officer decisions to arrest people for inconsequential violations of the law. For example, many times a civilian might break a law, such as jaywalking on a quiet street, or playing one’s music too loudly. In such situations, police officers have a wide range of actions in which they could engage to address the violation. One option is for the officer to ignore the violation on the basis of its immaterial nature, whereas another option would be to ask the civilian to correct the behavior and not engage the civilian further. Yet another option is to treat the violation explicitly as allowed by the law, which could include stopping the civilian, formally citing the individual, and even placing the individual Daylight Saving Time and Police Harassment 7 under arrest. Because police officers have the legal authority to carry out any of the above approaches to addressing breaches of the law, their responses to such (and all) situations entails substantial discretion. However, despite the legal force that could attend any of these actions, local norms may dictate a particular course of action in response to a given violation. This suggests that there may be a tension between what is legally defensible and what is socially normative. The normative nature of these arrests is often addressed by the complementary arm of the justice system that includes legal prosecutors. This tension is directly addressed by a legal system that is designed to counterbalance the actions taken by law enforcement, with the aim of enhancing both civil security and justice. Naturally then, occasions should arise wherein the legal system is able to correct faulty decisions or unnecessary arrests made by law enforcement officials. One way to accomplish this is for the prosecutor – who ensures that criminals are tried and, if appropriate, punished – to “exceptionally clear” an individual instead of legally trying them for their crime. This means that the individual, while presumably guilty of committing a crime, is released because the crime was so insignificant as to not merit full prosecution by the legal system. In other words, individuals who are exceptionally cleared for breaking laws have generally made the type of relatively benign violation of the law that generally goes unpunished. In light of these normative behaviors which would typically lead a police officer to forego arrest or formal charges against a civilian who has committed an inconsequential infraction, we consider those instances in which a civilian is arrested, but later exceptionally cleared, as cases of police harassment. This means that, although the suspect appeared to have violated some law, the police officer’s behavior was so far outside the norms of typical law enforcement as to be construed as harassment (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2009). Daylight Saving Time and Police Harassment 8 Daylight Saving Time and Police Harassment Any number of reasons could lead to an outcome in which the prosecution of a suspected offender is declined, and these outcomes could be experienced by anyone, regardless of race. However, related research gives us reason to believe that there may be systematic factors that result in a disproportionate number of black suspects whose cases are exceptionally cleared without prosecution. In other words, there may be reason to believe that black individuals are systematically harassed more than white individuals. Although this outright finding has been suggested by other studies (e.g., Ayres & Borowsky, 2008), we propose that macro-level factors may also play a role in the decision-making processes that lead black citizens to be disproportionately harassed by police. The basis for this expectation is that people may harbor some level of bias in their internal decision making, simply due to their life experiences or upbringing (Dovidio, Kawakami, & Gaertner, 2002). However, people are typically motivated by either internal or external forces to inhibit the expression of these biases (Plant & Devine, 2009) either because they disagree with these biases, or because they recognize that such biases are not socially appropriate. One factor that determines the efficacy of these impulse-restraining efforts is the individual’s available stock of self-regulatory resources. Self-regulation deals with the ability to restrain impulses that are preferable or spontaneous or in the short term in favor of decisions that have larger and typically longer-term benefits. Self-regulatory resources are depleted throughout the day as people make these decisions and because everyone makes decisions throughout the day that deplete these resources, it is necessary to restore one’s resources on a daily basis (Baumeister et al., 2007). Due to the regulation-restoring effects of sleep, it follows that the disruption of sleep would be associated with a decrement in an individual’s ability to regulate Daylight Saving Time and Police Harassment 9 behavior, and empirical research has borne out this prediction (e.g., Christian & Ellis, 2011; Davis & Leo, 2012; Lanaj et al., 2014). Although these studies highlight how insufficient sleep can result in impulsive or underregulated behavior, they largely focus on individual behaviors or decisions that impact selfregulation. By contrast, the present study seeks to uncover more insidious forces that not only affect individuals, but that do so at a national level. Policy governing daylight saving time is just such a force. The practice of advancing the clocks in a way that shifts light from morning to night represents a shock to people’s biological rhythms. Because people cannot immediately shift their internal clocks to match the new pacing of the external clock, sleep patterns no longer match the pattern of daily activity, which often results in the truncation of sleep or the disruption of established sleep patterns in a way that leaves individuals less well rested (Czeisler et al., 1999). Estimates of this effect have shown the Americans tend to sleep 40 minutes less on the Sunday to Monday night following the spring shift to daylight saving time (Barnes & Wagner, 2009; Kantermann, Juda, Merrow, & Roenneberg, 2007). Although this amount of sleep deprivation might seem benign, such nominal changes in sleep quantity have been found to dramatically influence individual behavior (Harrison & Horne, 2000). Particularly germane to the present study is a series of results uncovered by Ghumman and Barnes (2013). In a series of studies, these scholars found that even relatively modest variations in sleep had meaningful outcomes related to prejudice. For instance, they found that naturally occurring variation in sleepiness predicted the extent to which subjects would freely describe a Muslim woman pictured in a photograph with stereotypical comments. In a follow up study, they found that when asked to assess the suitability of a job applicant for a managerial position, sleepier subjects found the candidate to be less capable to performing the job, but only Daylight Saving Time and Police Harassment 10 when the candidate was black (there was no effect of subject sleepiness on these assessments when evaluating a white candidate). Further highlighting the importance of sleep in this process, was their final study, which showed that individuals with pre-existing racial biases scored much higher on a measure of modern racism than did biased individuals who were well rested. The explanation for these findings is that, although many historical indicators of prejudice might no longer exist in most societies, many people appear to simply be suppressing their prejudice. Given the relationship between self-regulatory strength and impulsive behavior, we suspect that when people are deprived of sufficient sleep, they are likely to exhibit lower self-regulatory strength, and this vacuum of self-control makes the expression of impulsive prejudicial behavior much more likely. In light of the evidence that inadequate sleep is likely to result in greater prejudicial behavior, and that the national shift to daylight saving time results in a modest amount of sleep loss on the Sunday to Monday night following the phase advance, we expect that prejudicial behaviors will be more likely on the Monday following the shift to daylight saving time. Although this prejudice can take many forms, in the context of law enforcement, we expect that some of this prejudice will be evident in police harassment of individuals who police officers might typically ignore or treat more leniently. On the basis of this theory and research, we propose that the macro-level shift to daylight saving time will have an impact on the incidence of police harassment, especially with regard to black suspects. Hypothesis 1: A greater incidence of police harassment will occur on the Monday after the shift to daylight saving time than on comparison days. Hypothesis 2: Blacks will be more likely to experience police harassment on the Monday after the shift to daylight saving time than on comparison days and White suspects will not experience such an increase in police harassment on this day. Daylight Saving Time and Police Harassment 11 To test our hypotheses we present two studies, each utilizing the daylight saving time quasi-experiment to examine the impact of lost sleep on police harassment. In the first study we draw from a database of traffic stops by police officers in the Los Angeles, California Police Department (LAPD) to examine our first example of police harassment – automobile and personal searches from which no contraband was found – for black as opposed to white drivers. In the second quasi-experiment we draw from a database of arrests across the entire United States, compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which indicates the outcomes of every arrest made by every law enforcement agency across the country for the years 1991 to 2011. With these data we are able to assess the extent of police harassment, operationalized as arrests after which the individuals were exceptionally cleared because prosecutors declined to prosecute the suspects, with emphasis given to the difference in harassment directed toward black as opposed to white suspects, on the Monday following the shift to daylight saving time.