(Dis)order in the Court: Examining Neighborhood Disorder Prosecutions in Miami-Dade County

Abstract

This study examines race, space, perceptions of disorder, and nuisance crime prosecution in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Research has examined nuisance policing, yet little attention has been devoted to nuisance crime prosecutions, especially at the neighborhood level. Aggregating data on defendants arrested for nuisance offenses from 2012 to 2015 up to the neighborhood level, we estimate count models for pretrial detention, case acceptance, conviction, and sentencing outcomes in neighborhoods. We find two patterns of nuisance crime prosecution. Drug disorder prosecutions are concentrated in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods with large Black defendant populations, suggesting a more suppressive treatment of these “marginalized” spaces. In contrast, greater enforcement of homelessness and alcohol nuisance crimes in White non-Hispanic neighborhoods suggests disorder prosecutions are also used to impose order and containment in more economically “prime” spaces. These countervailing patterns highlight the spatial contingency of nuisance enforcement, whereby prosecutors differentially enforce nuisance crimes in prime and marginalized spaces.

Keywords:

• Neighborhood disorder
• courts and prosecution
• nuisance crimes
• neighborhoods and criminal justice
• racial disparities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We use “disorder crimes” and “nuisance crimes” interchangeably throughout the paper to represent offenses that denote “disorderly behaviors” according to broken-windows theory outlined by Kelling and Coles (1997). Similarly, we use disorder and order-maintenance policing to describe policies and practices targeting low-level disorder or nuisance crimes (Beckett & Herbert, 2009; Lynch, Omori, Roussell, & Valasik, 2013).

2 While containment and suppression prosecution approaches could apply to any crime, they may be less applicable to more serious crimes because there is generally less discretion in such cases given the more reactive nature of prosecution. On the other hand, these prosecution styles may more readily apply to lower-level offenses, including non-nuisance crimes, because they can be more proactively prosecuted.

3 In addition, about 1% of census tracts were excluded from the analysis since they did not have a nuisance crime arrest during a particular year. Given this small number, excluding them is unlikely to bias our results.

4 Data were obtained from the following website: https://opendata.miamidade.gov/311/311-Service-Requests-Miami-Dade-County/dj6j-qg5t.

5 While the county does have a Black Hispanic population, it represents a small proportion of the county population (2%) and there are few predominately Black Hispanic neighborhoods (U.S. Census, 2010). As such, we combine Hispanic and non-Hispanic Blacks into one group.

6 We exclude spatial lags from VIF calculations because they are highly correlated with focal tract measures by design. While VIFs with the spatial lags included were higher by design (M = 5.7), they are still within a reasonable range.