Jeremy Rosenthal and Kyle Therrian were co-authors for the study “Police Discretion and Racial Disparity in Organized Retail Theft Arrests: Evidence from Texas.” The primary author of the research, Michael Braun, an associate professor at the SMU Cox School of Business worked with Mr. Rosenthal and Mr. Therrian to publish the study in the December 2018 issue of the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.
The new study estimates that for a typical Texas police department arresting the same number of blacks and whites for “property theft” of less than $1,500, nearly twice as many blacks than whites were arrested for the more serious offense of “organized retail theft.” The researchers conducted a statistical analysis of arrests for both property theft and organized retail theft from 2012 to 2015. They estimated an association between the arrest charge and the race of the arrestee for 669 Texas police departments and predict that a “typical” department would make about twice as many organized retail theft arrests of blacks than whites, and about 20 percent more of Hispanics than whites, given the same number of property theft arrests.