Police Violence and Avoidance Behavior

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 15: Policing, Surveillance, and the Carceral State

Abstract

To date, influential research explores the social, psychological, and even educational effects of exposure to police violence. But these instances of violence must happen somewhere, and what has yet to be studied are the proximity effects of police violence; that is, how does police violence affect social and economic conditions of neighborhoods where police violence occurs? I explore this question using large-scale travel and spending data and a comprehensive, aggregated dataset of instances of aggressive, violent, or even fatal police violence in New York City from 2019-2023. Controlling for neighborhood characteristics found in the U.S. Census and local crime patterns to avoid confounding, I run two models that converge to a single, consistent story. First, difference-in-differences models show that neighborhoods that had an instance of fatal police violence in the month prior saw over a 20% decrease in visits to and spending at activity spaces in the month following. Second, as a robustness check and to address the issue of spatial spillover, spatial regression analyses yield similar, consistent results: substantial reductions in use of and spending at activity spaces for every additional police killing in the neighborhood in the month prior. Given contemporary emphasis on the importance of activity spaces, I argue the findings are indicative of a much larger problem: police violence and avoidance behavior have measurable negative impact on social connectedness, integration, social cohesion, and health and health-related behavior in often already disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Author

• Taylor Alarcon, Columbia University