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

This article examines how organizational practices within the New York City Police Department’s (NYPD) stop-and-frisk program, combined with racialized perceptions of crime and space, contribute to variations in police use-of-force across neighborhoods from 2006 to 2012. Using spatial analysis and multilevel negative binomial regression on stop-and-frisk data aggregated by census tracts, the study finds that use-of-force incidents are more frequent in neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black and Latinx residents, where discretionary stops are more common, and where police conduct more indoor stops (such as vertical patrols in public housing). Police perceptions of high crime in neighborhoods are positively associated with use-of-force, even after controlling for actual crime rates. The findings suggest that use-of-force is systematically produced through NYPD organizational practices and shared racialized understandings of crime and space, which vary geographically and reinforce racial inequalities in policing outcomes.