Living under surveillance: Gender, psychological distress, and stop-question-and-frisk policing in New York City
Section snippets
Data
This multilevel study merges individual-level data from one data source with neighborhood-level data from multiple data sources.
Descriptive statistics
Table 1, Table 2 provide an unweighted summary of the final data considered for analysis. On average, there are approximately 22 pedestrian stops per 100 non-institutionalized residents of a neighborhood (Table 2). Well over half of pedestrian stops in NYC involve frisking by a police officer, and 22.2 percent involve the use of some kind of force. While a substantial portion of pedestrian stops can be considered “aggressive”, the proportion of stops that are productive is much lower. Only 6.8
Discussion
This paper provides a starting point to evaluate the relationship between psychological distress and the escalation of pedestrian stops across the 34 UHF neighborhoods of NYC. Underreporting of frisking and use of force by police (Spitzer, 1999) may attenuate the mental health associations of neighborhood-level policing patterns. Yet, we identify an association between escalated police encounters, measured at the neighborhood-level, and higher psychological distress for men, measured at the
Acknowledgments
This work was completed while the first author was a Vice Provost's Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.
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