Where Do Cops Stop? A New Dimension to Explore Spatial Patterns of Police Contacts

Abstract

While police officers must adapt behavior between places to effectively do their jobs, these decisions could result in some communities receiving different levels of exposure to the police. This study explores a new spatial measure of police contacts to observe these differences. We calculate neighborhood-specific Gini coefficients based upon the spatial distribution of 77,752 police-civilian stops at street segments and intersections nested within census tracts in Oakland, California. This coefficient presents a contrast between two divergent distributional patterns—the diffusion of police contacts to more places across neighborhoods and the concentration of contacts at fewer “hot spot” places within neighborhoods. The most consistent environmental explanation for these differences was the race/ethnicity of neighborhood residents, which was associated with the police stopping people across more places. Future research should continue to investigate this finding and examine the mechanisms that explain why spatial exposure to police contacts changes between places.