The impact of serious crime, racial threat, and economic inequality on private police size

The use of private police in our society has proliferated in recent years, but explanations of private police size remain underdeveloped. Why does one urban area have more private police than another? Using data drawn from 195 metropolitan areas, our study attempts to identify factors that are associated with private police size. Particular attention is given to disentangling the impact that three theories-public demand, racial threat, and economic inequality-exert on the private police rate. Results from an ordinary-least squares regression analysis show that as the relative size of the Black and Hispanic populations grow larger in a metropolitan area, the size of the private police force also increases controlling for other factors. In addition, we find an inverted U-shaped relationship between economic inequality and the private police rate. The serious crime rate while initially salient fails to show any predictive power in the fully saturated model. Overall, these findings support the view that racial threat and economic inequality are more central to understanding private police size than the serious crime rate.