Police Residency Rules Boost Diversity but Increase Fatal Encounter Risk

Why This Question Matters

Municipal residency requirements—rules that oblige police officers to live in the cities they serve—were common in the 1970s and many were later repealed in the 1990s and 2000s. Julia Payson and Srinivas Parinandi ask a simple but consequential question: do these residency mandates change how police departments perform, especially with respect to racial composition and the likelihood of fatal police–civilian encounters?

What Payson and Parinandi Did

The authors hand-collected original data on police residency laws from nearly 800 of the largest U.S. municipalities over roughly three decades, drawing on an original survey and local archival sources. To estimate causal effects, they use a two-way fixed-effects research design that compares changes within cities over time, isolating the impact of adopting or repealing residency requirements from broader national or period trends.

Key Findings

• Residency requirements modestly increase the racial diversity of municipal police forces.
• Counterintuitively, cities with residency mandates show a higher probability of fatal police–civilian encounters while those rules are in place.
• The pattern suggests that, despite improving representational diversity to some degree, residency rules do not translate into better public-safety outcomes and may have unintended adverse consequences.

Implications for Policy and Scholarship

Payson and Parinandi provide what they describe as the most credible evidence to date on this policy lever: residency mandates appear to do little to improve overall police performance and may even raise the risk of lethal encounters. For policymakers and scholars interested in police reform, the results caution against treating residency requirements as a straightforward solution for accountability or public-safety problems and point to the need for alternative reforms that directly target conduct and community safety.