Ferguson and Beyond: A Theoretical and Empirical Assessment of How Race and Place Matter for Arrest

• In Event: Roundtable: Race, Ethnicity and Crime

Abstract

National debate about the relationship between race and policing was recently sparked by the death of a black teenager at the hands of a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. I interrogate this relationship at one point in the punishment process: arrest. Not only is arrest frequently a source of public disagreement, but it is also theoretically underdeveloped relative to other punishment outcomes. While it is known that minorities are arrested at higher rates than whites, explanations for this pattern are less well-studied. Utilizing 2000 data from the UCR, LEMAS, and decennial Census, I test two explanations for racial differences in city-level arrest rates: police discrimination and minority offending. To test the former, I leverage three distinct theories: group threat, proportions in group life, and cultural distance. Further, informed by a growing literature on the distinctiveness of suburban places relative to their central city counterparts, I test whether the efficacy of each explanation varies by type of place. Results of OLS regression modeling demonstrate mixed support for each discrimination theory, with the size, direction, and significance of effects varying between central cities and suburbs. Future analyses within this project will test the minority offending explanation.

Author

• Lora A. Phillips, The Ohio State University