Visualizing Police Exposure by Race,Gender,and Age in New York City

Abstract

This figure depicts the disparities in average police stops in New York City from 2004 to 2012, disaggregated by race, gender, and age. Composed of six bar charts, each graph in the figure provides data for a particular population at the intersection of race and gender, focusing on black, white, and Hispanic men and women. Each graph also has a comparative backdrop of the data on police stops for black males. All graphs take a similar parabolic shape, showing that across each race-gender group, pedestrian stops increase in adolescence and peek in young adulthood, then taper off across the adult life course. However, the heights of these parabolic representations are vastly different. There are clear disparities in police exposure based on race and gender, with black men and women being more likely than their peers to be policed and with black men being policed significantly more than their female counterparts.

During the past decades, cities across the United States have adopted proactive or broken-windows policing strategies (Weisburd and Majmundar 2018). As a consequence of these changes, an increasing number of residents of color are in contact with the criminal justice system (Geller 2018). We take advantage of detailed data on pedestrian stops in New York City together with data from the 2010 decennial census (summary file 1, Table PCT012) to show the rate of police stops across race, gender, and age in New York City between 2004 and 2012 (see Figure 1). The figure reveals inequalities in police exposure in unprecedented detail.

Figure 1.

Average yearly rate of police stops per 1,000 residents in New York City by race, gender, and age, 2004–2012.

Our visualization features six bar charts that provide data on the average yearly rate of police stops disaggregated by both gender and race. The analysis provides a comparison of stops for black, white, and Hispanic men and women. Our vertical axes display the average yearly rate of police stops per 1,000 residents in New York City from 2004 to 2012. The horizontal axes provide an age range from 8 to 65 years old. For comparative visualization and analysis, each graph also includes the average yearly rate of police stops for black men shadowed behind the data for the particular population.

Because this visualization provides data across the lines of race, gender, and age, there are several comparative analyses that can be drawn. Trends can be seen within racial groups, gender groups, and age groups. All charts are parabolic in shape. Across all race-gender intersections, police exposure increases in late adolescence, peeks in early adulthood, and steadily declines as age increases thereafter. Across each race group, police stops on men far outnumber police stops on women. For both men and women, black residents experience the highest rate of pedestrian stops, with whites and Hispanic residents following in that particular order. For example, at age 20, black males are stopped 2.4 times more than their Hispanic counterparts and 5.6 times more than their white counterparts. Black females are stopped 2.2 times more than Hispanic women and 3.5 times more than white women. Police stops on Hispanic men and women are more similar to their white counterparts than their black counterparts, supporting theoretical arguments that lament the particular reality of policing black bodies (Davis et al. 2018).

This figure demonstrates that disparities in exposure to policing are vast, stark, and on the basis of both gender and race. It undoubtedly reveals the disproportionate nature of police stops for black residents, especially black men. Indeed, the stop rate is as high as 976 per 1,000 18-year-old black men.

The disparities in police exposure do not necessarily indicate racial bias or discrimination in policing (Neil and Winship 2019). However, they do reveal an important social problem whose consequences are not well understood. What are the consequences of constant police presence and contact for generations of minority youth (Legewie and Fagan forthcoming)? What are the social costs of law enforcement activity, and how does this activity reproduce and reinforce inequalities?

Supplemental Material

Visualization_Submission_NYC_Policing_Supplementary_Information_FINAL – Supplemental material for Visualizing Police Exposure by Race, Gender and Age in New York City

Supplemental material, Visualization_Submission_NYC_Policing_Supplementary_Information_FINAL for Visualizing Police Exposure by Race, Gender and Age in New York City by Kalisha Dessources Figures and Joscha Legewie in Socius