[Reminder] July 16 (TODAY): Roman Rivera

Presenter: Roman Rivera (Georgetown University)

Title: The Price of Corrupt Justice: Evidence from Progressive Era Chicago

Abstract: This paper investigates the spillover effects of judicial independence on police behavior. Despite the adversarial design of the US justice system, lower court judges and local police often share political ties and economic incentives to extract revenue. I study a pivotal Progressive Era reform, the 1905 Municipal Court Act (MCA) in Chicago, which replaced patronage-selected, fee-paid `police justices’ with professional, salaried, and elected judges. Crucially, this reform broke the political and economic ties between the courts and police without directly targeting the police department. To study the MCA’s effect, I construct a novel dataset from dozens of archival police, court, and expenditure records. The reform observably increased judicial quality and compensation, but had no effect on police composition or compensation. Nevertheless, the reform caused an over 30% decline in arrests, driven almost entirely by low-quality, highly discretionary misdemeanor arrests. Precinct-level data reveal that this drop was concentrated in the redlight district. Empirical evidence and historical accounts indicate this was due in part to ending a police-justice collusion racket , and I estimate the MCA prevented 9,000 extortive arrests and over $1.2 million (in 2025 dollars) in extorted fees annually. Despite this drastic reduction in enforcement, neither property crime nor murder increased. These findings demonstrate that increasing accountability within a single institution can have positive spillover effects and that severing ideological and economic ties within the justice system can significantly improve local state capacity and public safety.