Officer Involved Shootings and Civic Engagement: Evidence from 3 Latino-Majority Cities

• In Event: New Research in Latino Politics: Here and Abroad

Abstract

Officer-involved shootings have become increasingly salient events in American political discourse since the 2014 murder of Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer, Darren Wilson. Although much of the characterization of these events follows a black-white binary, and rightly so given black peoples overrepresentation as officer-involved shooting victims, Latinos make up 32%, 30%, and 48% of officer-involved shooting victims in the available officer-involved shooting data from the three Latino-majority cities of Dallas, Houston, and Los Angeles respectively. Building on previous research analyzing the relationship between policing, civic engagement, and public trust, this paper leverages fine-grained geo-located data on officer-involved shootings, geo-located data on millions of individual 311 service request calls, and census block-level demographic data in the aforementioned cities to assess the racially and ethnically heterogenous effects of officer-involved shootings on civic engagement in the form of service requests to local government. Employing a fine-grained within-city analysis across multiple cities alleviates concerns about external validity and prevents a "worms-eye view" commonly found in other fine-grained work on urban political behavior.

Author

• Marcel Roman, University of California, Los Angeles