UC Irvine

In November 2014, California enacted Proposition 47 (Prop 47), a drug policy reform measure that re-classified nearly all drug possession crimes as misdemeanors. The current study examines the impact of Prop 47 on drug arrest rates among local municipal police agencies in California. Further, the study utilizes multilevel modeling to analyze how post-Prop 47 drug arrest rates among individual police agencies varied as a function of local community characteristics and organizational legacies of past practice. The results indicate that Prop 47 had little impact on agency-level drug arrest rates outside of a small collection of large, urban cities and cities with large Black populations. Moreover, drug arrest trends in the post-Prop 47 period were largely determined by agencies’ pre-Prop 47 arrest trends, suggesting that path dependency, or organizational inertia, is a key factor for understanding how individual police agencies respond to legal reform.