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The Politics of Police Reform in the States

Michael Sances

State Politics and Policy Quarterly2025https://doi.org/10.1017/spq.2024.35article
AJG 2
Weight
0.37

What the paper says

The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests dramatically increased the salience of police reform, yet the US Congress failed to pass any reforms. In contrast, state governments have passed hundreds of police-related bills since 2020. I summarize the plethora of state reforms passed over this period by grouping them into 18 key areas, including 14 I classify as pro-reform and four I classify as anti-reform. Next, I describe how party control and public opinion relate to state reforms. I find that state party control is a robust predictor of enacting pro-police reform policies, and that reforms are more likely in states with more Democratic and more pro-reform publics. While police reforms are responsive to public opinion, they are also typically incongruent.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1017/spq.2024.35

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@article{michael2025,
  title        = {{The Politics of Police Reform in the States}},
  author       = {Michael Sances},
  journal      = {State Politics and Policy Quarterly},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1017/spq.2024.35},
}

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The Politics of Police Reform in the States

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Evidence weight

0.37

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.16 × 0.4 = 0.06
M · momentum0.53 × 0.15 = 0.08
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.