Residential Segregation as a Predictor of Racial Disparities in Police Behavior

• In Event: New Findings on Race and Policing from the National Justice Database

Abstract

Research on neighborhood context and policing has generally found that neighborhood characteristics, including racial composition and socioeconomic disadvantage, can shape police officers’ behavior (e.g., Klinger et al. 2016; Terrill and Reisig 2003). Drawing on standardized data from the Center for Policing Equity’s National Justice Database (NJD), we extend this line of inquiry to examine residential segregation – measured using dissimilarity, isolation, and other indices – as a predictor of racial disparities in vehicle stops. Using geocoded stop and crime data and multivariate regression analyses, we investigate a series of theoretically-driven hypotheses about the geographic contexts and times of day during which racial segregation is most likely to drive disparities in police behavior. Our NJD-derived dataset spans several local law enforcement agencies and geographic regions, ensuring that the results are not isolated to a single jurisdiction or pattern of residential segregation. The findings have both substantive and methodological implications, shedding light on the relative utility of racial composition, concentrated disadvantage, and segregation indices as tools for understanding the contextual underpinnings of racial disparities in policing behavior.

Authors

• Dean Obermark, The Urban Institute

• Tracey Lloyd, The Urban Institute

• Sino Esthappan, The Urban Institute

• Emily Reimal, The Urban Institute

• Phillip Atiba Goff, Center for Policing Equity