Replication Data for: Decisionmaking in Street-Level Bureaucracies: Evidence from Residential Burglary Investigations

This paper examines police officers as street-level bureaucrats, focusing on how they exercise their discretion. I use a new, detailed data set of over 2,500 residential burglaries in Tucson, Arizona to investigate to which types of burglaries police devote the most investigative resources. I show that, contrary to conventional wisdom about police behavior, the races and genders of victims do not predict investigative thoroughness. Police instead focus on cases of forced entry, because those cases yield the most evidence to analyze and thus provide police with a greater likelihood of clearing the crime. However, the probability of forced entry differs significantly by type of neighborhood, meaning that officers' seemingly neutral decision to maximize clearance rates in fact has distributional consequences.