By Brenden Beck, Housing Matters, July 2020
Misdemeanor-focused policing, including stops and low-level arrests, is a well-documented, traumatic practice that negatively affects employment, family ties, health, school performance, and immigration status. Police target Black and Latinx people at rates disproportionate to their share of the population, and research on the efficacy of low-level policing and stop-and-frisk practices finds these acts of control do not reduce crime and that resulting minor crime reductions are outweighed by the negative costs of police violence and community trauma.
Research links key characteristics of gentrification, including the influx of white, middle-class residents and real estate development, to increases in low-level policing in qualitative research. This quantitative study complements existing qualitative research by analyzing a longitudinal dataset of 2,038 New York City census tracts’ demographics, street stops, low-level arrests, crimes, 311 calls, and property values between 2009 and 2015 to investigate the role of gentrification in the expansion of policing.
This study used neighborhood-level data to capture policing’s relationship with three key components of gentrification: class, race, and property value. For this study, gentrifying activity was an increase in the non-Hispanic[1] white population, the middle-class population of a neighborhood, and/or the increase in real estate value. To capture the complexity of class status, the author constructed an index of class demographics that included four measures: a census tract’s median household income, the proportion of the tract with a bachelor’s degree or higher, the percentage employed as professionals or managers, and the percentage of families not in poverty. To operationalize low-level policing, three measures were isolated: street stops, order-maintenance arrests, and proactive arrests.
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