Depolicing in historically marginalised communities: a neighbourhood-level analysis

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ABSTRACT The murder of George Floyd prompted widespread calls for reform surrounding how police officers engage with members of historically marginalised communities. The increased scrutiny of police generated in the wake of the incident prompted depolicing – reductions in discretionary proactive policing driven by officers’ risk aversions. At present, despite a robust evidence base that policing is not applied evenly or consistently across diverse spaces – and amidst scrutiny that it is in interactions within specific sociodemographic populations that policing requires the greatest improvement – little research exists that examines depolicing impacts in neighbourhoods predominantly comprised of historically marginalised populations. This study is a quantitative examination of those depolicing impacts – measured in monthly counts of discretionary police stops and using a series of fixed effects negative binomial regression models – across ethnoracially and socioeconomically divergent neighbourhoods. The study, which spanned 50 months across 157 neighbourhoods in the city of Philadelphia, found a 34% post-Floyd reduction in the expected counts of monthly police stops in neighbourhoods which are both predominantly Black and economically disadvantaged, as well as a nearly 52% reduction in predominantly Hispanic neighbourhoods. The novel finding that depolicing impacts in predominantly Black communities were limited only to the most economically disadvantaged such neighbourhoods is discussed.