Race, Place, and Deadly Use of Force: An Examination of Neighborhood-Level Formal Social Control

• In Event: POLWG Panel 5: Police Use of Force and Aggressivity

Abstract

While statistically rare, police killings are a phenomenon that exudes numerous repercussions toward affected populations, including racial disproportionality in such incidents, the attenuation of procedural justice, and extralegal consequences. Yet, scholars have examined police killings in a relatively limited geographic manner. With few exceptions, much of the knowledge base that examines police killings does so at the city-level or broader, and thus there is reason to suspect that these studies mask salient heterogeneity at more granular units of analysis such as the neighborhood. The current study extends this limited but burgeoning literature centering neighborhood variation in police killings, and in doing so tests relevant theoretical frameworks that have been used by scholars to explain formal social control, including racial threat theory, social disorganization theory, and the community violence hypothesis. Using spatial analysis techniques, I leverage Fatal Encounters, one of the most utilized crowdsourced databases on lethal police violence, and spatially join police killing incidents with the National Neighborhood Crime Study. Preliminary findings suggest that police killings dialogue quite consistently with the expectations of both social disorganization theory and the community violence hypothesis, but run counter to that of racial threat theory. Theoretical and policy implications are also discussed.

Author

• Frank Donohue, University of Maryland, College Park