The neighborhood context of aggressive policing

• In Event: WG-PLACE 4: Neighbourhoods, Policing, and Legal Cynicism: Spatial, Institutional, and Life Course Perspectives

Abstract

The period from 2012 to 2016 is widely recognized as the peak of the stop-and-frisk era in Chicago, during which crime politics revolved around confrontational proactive policing strategies. While the widespread use of stop, question, and frisk (SQF) practices may have contributed to reductions in certain types of crime, they may have also led to increases in police use of force and complaints about officer misconduct. This study examines the extent to which the consequences of SQF practices are unevenly distributed across Chicago neighborhoods. Drawing on geocoded data from the Chicago Police Department, the Invisible Institute’s Citizen Police Data Project, and the US Census, we analyze the spatiotemporal dynamics of aggressive policing and crime across Chicago census tracts from 2012 to 2016. We leverage geographic (i.e., latitude and longitude) and temporal (i.e., precise timestamps) information to link administrative records of stop-and-frisk activity (i.e., contact cards) with official police use-of-force records (i.e., tactical response reports) and complaints about excessive force. We address three key research questions: whether social disorganization factors—such as concentrated disadvantage, residential stability, immigrant concentration, and population density—are spatially associated with the concentration of stop-and-frisk activity; to what extent the spatiotemporal fluctuation of SQF activity is associated with changes in violent and property crime rates; and how social disorganization factors moderate the likelihood that a given SQF incident in a given neighborhood involves use of force and/or a misconduct complaint. Using spatial econometric methods and dynamic panel models, this study provides empirical insights into the neighborhood context of aggressive policing practices in Chicago.

Authors

• David Kirk, University of Pennsylvania

• Thiago Oliveira, University of Manchester