Effects of New York City’s Neighborhood Policing Policy

Abstract

Between 2015 and 2018, New York City adopted “neighborhood policing,” an expansive policy to encourage interactions between police officers and community members. Among other changes, the initiative established hundreds of new “neighborhood-coordination” officers and gave “steady-sector” officers time away from 911 response to dedicate to resident interactions. This study evaluates the initiative’s effects on crime, complaints of police misconduct, racial disparities, and arrests. Using monthly data on New York City’s 76 police precincts between 2006 and 2019, we estimate the policy’s causal effect using high-dimensional time series models. This approach accounts for the policy’s staggered adoption, addresses potential correlation among outcomes and between precincts, and controls for unobserved precinct characteristics. We find neighborhood policing reduced misdemeanor and proactive arrests, especially in higher-poverty precincts outside of Manhattan, though it did not change the racial disparities of such arrests. The policy did not affect crime. It briefly increased complaints against police.