Neighborhood Segregation and Racial Difference in Police Treatment After Stop: Evidence from New York City

• In Event: Neighborhoods and Policing

Abstract

Previous research on policing found that racial minorities are often disproportionally subject to a range of police treatment, such as stop, frisk, search and arrest. Racial segregation, a factor proposed by theories of the conflict perspective, has been found to be a salient predictor of negative experience with the police. However, earlier studies have overlooked the fact that segregation is a multidimensional factor (i.e., evenness, exposure, concentration, centralization, and clustering), and thus different dimensions of segregation may affect policing in distinctive manners. Therefore, combining the stop-and-frisk data (n=403,338) from the New York City with census tract (n=2,081) and police precinct (n=73) data from diverse sources, we attempt to answer the following research questions: (1) whether and how segregation affects a range of police treatments, i.e. frisk, search, police use of force and arrest? (2) If segregation has influence on policing, which dimension of segregation better explains experiences with the police? (3) Is the relationship between segregation and police treatment moderated by one’s race/ethnicity? Our multilevel analysis suggests that segregation has significant and complicated relationships with police treatments, which differ by dimension and treatment. In addition, the relationships are moderated by race/ethnicity for some segregation dimensions but not all.

Authors

• Yunhan Zhao, University at Albany, SUNY

• Tse-Chuan Yang, University at Albany, SUNY