Racial Threat, Social (Dis)organization, and the Ecology of Police: Towards a Macro-level Understanding of Police Use-of-force in Communities of Color

Abstract

In this paper, we examine use-of-force incidents as neighborhood processes to understand how rates and levels of use-of-force vary across New York City. We suggest that there are two distinct outcomes of force by the police: number of use-of-force incidents and level of force. Applying theories of racial threat, social disorganization, and Klinger’s ecological theory of policing, we conceptualize use-of-force as a neighborhood phenomenon rather than individual events. Our results suggest that rates and levels of force operate in some distinct ways. In particular, while we find that use-of-force is concentrated in Black neighborhoods, and is also more severe in Black neighborhoods, neighborhoods with higher racial and ethnic heterogeneity have decreasing force incidents, but with increasing severity. This may reflect different types of policing, with high rates of low-level police harassment occurring in primarily poorer, Black neighborhoods, and more isolated but severe incidents occurring in middle-income and wealthier mixed neighborhoods.

Keywords:

• Police
• use-of-force
• neighborhoods
• criminological theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The types of force used to calculate the severity-of-force scale and their respective weights are: no force (0), hands (1), frisked/searched (2), handcuffed (3), other (4), suspect against wall (5), pepper sprayed (6), suspect on ground (7), baton (8), and weapon drawn or pointed (9).

2 A data limitation we face is not having access to census-tract level crime data, which is not publicly available (Weisburd et al. 2016).

3 The Stata code used to create egohoods can be viewed online: https://webfiles.uci.edu/hippj/johnhipp/egohoods_documentation.htm. As written, egohoods differ from some traditional spatial lag measures in that they include the focal neighborhood when computing the neighborhood measure. To more closely approximate traditional measures of spatial lag (Sampson, Morenoff, & Earls 1999), we tweaked the code so that the focal neighborhood would not be included when calculating the lag term.

4 As a sensitivity analysis, we re-ran the severity models excluding stops that involved no use-of-force. The coefficients for concentrated disadvantage and perceived high crime remained substantively unchanged, while percent Black, residential instability and racial/ethnic heterogeneity became non-significant. These results have two major implications for the current study: 1) concentrated disadvantage and perceived high crime are robust predictors of severity-of-force, and 2) racial disparities in neighborhood severity-of-force may be overlooked if non-force incidents are excluded from analysis. We chose to keep these ‘no force’ incidents in our dataset because, conceptually, we would like to account for the full variation of interactions between police and people being stopped. Therefore, the variation in force would also include no force at all.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachel Lautenschlager

Rachel Lautenschlager is a doctoral student in sociology concentrating in the areas of criminology and race, ethnicity, and immigration. Her research explores how law enforcement and other components of the criminal justice system vary across neighborhoods, and the ways that this results in differential outcomes across racial and ethnic groups.

Marisa Omori

Marisa Omori is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Miami. Her work focuses on racial inequality in the criminal justice system, and drug policy and use. Specifically, her research includes projects on racial inequality in the arrest and court process, sentencing, and drug use and desistance.