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Olugbenga Ajilore

Senior Economist at the Center for American Progress

Areas of Expertise

  • Policing outcomes
  • Police militarization
  • Peer effects
  • Adolescent behavior
  • Public finance
  • Use of force

 

Key Findings

  • There is a relationship between neighborhood composition and police spending in support of the expenditure spillover theory, which says that increases in one county’s police spending pushes crime out of that county which induces increases in police spending by neighboring counties. MORE
  • Median income and per-capita grants, have significant positive direct effects on police spending. MORE
  • Counties with a greater segregation are more likely to request military equipment. MORE
  • Counties with African American population have an increased probability to acquire military equipment. MORE
  • Race and officer characteristics both play a role in excessive use of force complaints. MORE
  • Male officers are more likely to be the subject use of force complaints. MORE
  • African American males are more likely to report incidents of excessive police force than other types of complaints, with young males more likely than older males to make such reports. MORE

Biography

Olugbenga Ajilore, Senior Economist at the Center for American Progress, is an expert on the impact of ethnic diversity in policing outcomes, race, police militarization, and the use of lethal and non-lethal force.

Ajilore has been a visiting fellow at the Urban Institute in the Justice Policy Center where he focused on the effects of police militarization of local communities. Ajilore received funding from the Spencer foundation to study peer effects from social networks in adolescent behavior and engagement on topics such as obesity and risky sexual behaviors. He has been funded by the Charles Koch Foundation to analyze the rise of police militarization and its effects on the use of force. Ajilore currently serves as president (2018) of the National Economics Association.

His research has been published in numerous publications such as Economics Bulletin, the Atlantic Economic Journal, and the Journal of Regional Analysis and Policy. Ajilore’s work has also been featured in books, such as the Oxford handbook of Economics of Poverty.

Ajilore received his Ph.D. in Economics from Claremont Graduate University and his A.B. in Applied Mathematics and Economics from the University of California at Berkeley.