Urban Revitalization and the Policing of Racial Territoriality

Abstract

The results from several recent studies suggest that police stop rates are elevated in neighborhoods that are gentrified or undergoing gentrification. However, it remains unclear how these findings fit into the well-documented pattern of racialized proactive policing practices, often interpreted through a racial-threat lens. To further our understanding of how of law enforcement relates to gentrification as a racialized institution, I utilize pedestrian stop data from eight cities to analyze the interconnected relationships between neighborhood-level police stops, temporal changes in racial and ethnic composition, and gentrification processes. Results from negative binomial spatial-durbin models reveal that, controlling for local crime levels and other covariates, police stops are more prevalent in neighborhoods that have experienced decreases in black and Latinx populations and in those surrounding gentrified areas. However, because gentrified and gentrifying neighborhoods have experienced relatively larger losses of these minority residents, this relationship appears to be intertwined with processes of urban revitalization. Based on these results, I argue that the geographic concentration of proactive police stops operates as an instrument of urban social transformation, shaped by racial territoriality – the implicit and explicit claims of whites to urban spaces.