Organizational Practice and Neighborhood Context of Racial Inequality in Police Use-of-Force

Abstract

Abstract Recent highly-publicized cases of police violence have raised broader discussions around understanding use-of-force as institutional racism. We explore how variation in police practices, including discretionary stops and targeting outdoor spaces, along with racialized understandings of crime and space, help explain use-of-force in neighborhoods. Using stop-and-frisk data from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) in Census tracts (N = 12675) between 2006 and 2012, we conduct a spatial analysis and estimate multilevel negative binomial regression models. We find relationships between use-of-force incidents and police organizational practices, where police use force more often in neighborhoods where they employ greater discretionary stops, and in neighborhoods where police conduct proportionally more indoor stops. Our findings also point to understanding stop-and-frisk as a spatial strategy concentrated largely in neighborhoods of color, where police use force more often in Black and Latinx neighborhoods above and beyond the racial disproportionately of individuals stopped. Police also use force more often in neighborhoods where they perceive more crime, even after accounting for the observed crime rate. We suggest that use-of-force by the NYPD is systematically produced through organizational practices paired with shared racialized understandings of crime and space that vary across neighborhoods.