Given the use of an individual's arrest history for many economic and social outcomes, policymakers have enacted criminal justice reform measures. This paper examines which officers are making conviction‐less arrests (arrests that result in no charges or where the defendant is found not guilty), and whether these arrests can be reduced with increased oversight. Using the Chicago Police Department's rotational duty calendar to obtain plausibly exogenous variation in the set of officers assigned to work on a particular day, we find that high-misconduct officers are 12% more likely than no-misconduct officers to make arrests that result in no charges and 31% more likely to make arrests with "not guilty" outcomes, with no difference in arrests yielding "guilty" outcomes. We also analyze two events that increased the transparency of police misconduct through public disclosure of complaint records and find that increased oversight reduces conviction-less arrests, but with nuances across misconduct profiles--low-misconduct officers show stronger responses and high-misconduct officers show weaker responses.

We develop an empirical model of the mechanism used to assign police officers to Chicago districts and examine the efficiency and equity of alternative allocations. We document that the current bidding process, which grants priority based on seniority, results in the assignment of more experienced officers to less violent and high-income neighborhoods. Our empirical model combines estimates of heterogeneous officer preferences underlying the bidding process with causal estimates of the effects of officer experience on neighborhood crime. Equalizing officer seniority across districts would reduce violent crime rate by 4.6 percent and significantly decrease inequality in crime, discretionary arrests, and officer use of force across neighborhoods. Moreover, this assignment can be achieved in a revenue-neutral way while resulting in small welfare gains for police officers, implying that it is more equitable and efficient.