Do Residency Requirements Improve Police-Civilian Relations?

• In Event: Advances in Law Enforcement Policy Research

Abstract

The 2020 killing of George Floyd reginited national conversations surrounding police brutality, racial bias, and police-community relationships. How can local police departments improve their relationships with the individuals and communities they are sworn to serve? One structural reform that has gained traction at various points over the past few decades is requiring police officers to reside in the cities where they work. The logic behind this reform is a version of the contact hypothesis: police officers that live among those they serve may be more likely to view themselves as part of the community, resulting in lower levels of police-civilian discord. While residency requirements were popular in the 1970s, many cities and states abolished these policies in the 1990s and early 2000s under pressure from police unions. At the same time, other cities like Rochester, New York, are currently experimenting with new proposals to implement (or reinstate) requirements that police officers live in the cities where they work.

How do residency requirements affect police-civilian relations? One of the major barriers to researchers seeking to evaluate this policy is a lack of systematic data on which cities have police residency requirements and how these requirements have changed over time. To fill this gap, we hand collect data on the police residency laws of the 600 largest municipalities in the U.S. over the past three decades. Drawing from local archival sources and surveys with police departments, we paint the most detailed picture to date about the evolution of residency requirements across all 50 states. We then combine these data with outcomes on local police-civilian relations, including fatalities, citizen complaints, and attitudes towards police funding. To address the fact that residency requirements are not randomly assigned across cities, we exploit the fact that some residency requirement changes were mandated by court order at the state level. This study offers one of the first systematic evaluations of whether and how residency requirements improve relationships between police forces and their communities and paves the way for future research on such reform efforts.

Authors

• Srinivas Parinandi, University of Colorado at Boulder

• Julia Payson, New York University