Social Distance in Spatial Proximity: The Case of Low-Level Policing in Changing Urban Neighborhoods

• In Event: 1451 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 13. Policing and Surveillance in Public and Private Spaces

Abstract

Recently reported examples of racial tensions in changing neighborhoods have brought conflicts around gentrification into broader public awareness. White residents, like “BBQ Becky” and “Permit Patty,” who call the police on their black neighbors for innocuous behaviors, demonstrate how recent increases in class and race residential integration can negatively affect disadvantaged residents by inviting more interactions with local representatives of the state, like the police, through neighbor intervention. Existing literature on neighborhood change focuses on housing prices, displacement of residents, and crime rates. There has been little focus, however, on how neighborhood change affects people’s day-to-day lives. In this paper, I investigate the impact of changes in the racial and socioeconomic make-up of a neighborhood on the low-level policing of local residents. Combining multiple publicly available administrative datasets from the City of New York, I analyze the effect of racial and socioeconomic neighborhood change on patterns of police stops in NYC. I hypothesize that areas with a greater increase in racially and socioeconomically privileged residents over time will be associated with an increase in policing of residents of color, but not of white residents. I find that increases in white population are associated with increases in Black stops per capita but not with increases in Hispanic or White stops. Additionally, changes in median household income are not associated with changes in stop rates. My findings suggest that racial neighborhood change is associated with increased low-level policing, but those increases are concentrated among Black residents. By unpacking the ways in which neighborhood change can have a negative impact on the lived experience of original residents, my findings inform where public policy can provide interventions to prevent neighborhood change from increasing inequality and discrimination.

Author

• Jessica Rose Kalbfeld, New York University