Chapter 8: Police Violence Across the Racial–Spatial Divide

Purpose – Police violence involving minority citizens is a significant problem in the United States. Efforts to explain the disparate treatment of minorities have often relied on structural-level racial threat hypotheses. However, research framed by this macro-level approach fails to consider meso-level characteristics of spatially specified places within cities. The place hypothesis maintains that police see disadvantaged minority neighborhoods as especially threatening and, therefore, use more violence in them. Reconceptualizing the racial threat model to include meso-level characteristics of place is essential to better explain police violence.

Design/methodology/approach – The argument is investigated using literature drawn from quantitative analyses of structural predictors of police violence and qualitative/quantitative studies of the police subculture and police behavior within disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Findings – Research on the effects of city-level racial segregation on police violence supports the place hypothesis that the incidence of police violence is higher in segregated minority neighborhoods. City-level segregation is, however, only a proxy for the degree of concentrated minority disadvantage existing at the meso-level. Community-level studies suggest that the police do see disadvantaged places as especially threatening and use more violence in them. Plausibly, meso-level neighborhood characteristics of cities may prove to be better predictors of the incidence of police violence than are structural-level characteristics in cross-city comparisons.

Originality/value – This analysis builds on structural-level racial threat theories by demonstrating that meso-level characteristics of cities are central to explaining disparities in the use of police violence. A multilevel approach to studying police violence using this analytic framework is proposed.