Living under surveillance: Gender, psychological distress, and stop-question-and-frisk policing in New York City

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.04.024Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Neighborhood policing patterns are associated with poorer psychological health.

  • Men report more nervousness and worthlessness when living in highly surveilled areas.

  • Frisking and use of force by police represent a stronger mental health risk for men.

Abstract

A growing body of research highlights the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, including stop-and-frisk policing tactics. Living in a neighborhood with aggressive policing may affect one's mental health, especially for men who are the primary targets of police stops. We examine whether there is an association between psychological distress and neighborhood-level aggressive policing (i.e., frisking and use of force by police) and whether that association varies by gender. The 2009–2011 New York City (NYC) Stop, Question, and Frisk Database is aggregated to the neighborhood-level (N = 34) and merged with individual data from the 2012 NYC Community Health Survey (N = 8066) via the United Hospital Fund neighborhood of respondents' residence. Weighted multilevel generalized linear models are used to assess main and gendered associations of neighborhood exposures to aggressive police stops on psychological distress (Kessler-6 items). While the neighborhood stop rate exhibits inconsistent associations with psychological distress, neighborhood-level frisk and use of force proportions are linked to higher levels of non-specific psychological distress among men, but not women. Specifically, men exhibit more non-specific psychological distress and more severe feelings of nervousness, effort, and worthlessness in aggressively surveilled neighborhoods than do women. Male residents are affected by the escalation of stop-and-frisk policing in a neighborhood. Living in a context of aggressive policing is an important risk factor for men's mental health.

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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