Police Network Exposure, Race, and Unjustified Investigatory Stops in Chicago, 2016-2024

• In Event: 30662 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Policing Issues 1

Abstract

This study seeks to investigate how exposure to peers who engage in unjustified investigatory stops of Black and Hispanic individuals affects police officers’ own propensity to engage in similar practices. While previous scholarship has demonstrated the outsize effect on everyday policing practices, such as investigatory stops, on criminal-legal, civic, health and other outcomes, as well as their role in reproducing racial hierarchies, network studies of policing have largely focused on less commonly occurring forms of police behavior and misconduct such as use-of-force, police shootings, and complaints. This study aims to apply social network approaches used in the study of police misconduct to understand unjustified police stops of Black and Hispanic people in Chicago. Drawing on over one million observations of officer-stops combinations from 2016 through 2024, this study uses a binomial logistic regression with fixed effects to estimate the effects of network exposure to peers who engage in unjustified investigatory stops of Black and Hispanic individuals on the nature of officer’s future stops. It finds that accounting for geography, time, police unit, and officer tenure, exposure to such peers strongly and positively increases the likelihood that a stop will be an unjustified one of a Black or Hispanic individual.

Author

• Jessica Robinson, Columbia University